“More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement.” ---Wendell Berry

In June of 2020, I woke up from a dream crying. In this dream I went back in time to Branson’s Auto where I changed tires every summer during my teenage years accomplishing two simple things every car owner needs: new tires and an oil change. My dad had 2-4 guys working in the tire-bay to accomplish an oil change and 4 new tires. The dream was communal, where banter and loud classic rock was the norm, and a clear understanding of each person’s role in getting the job done. My dream ended as I washed my filthy hands and arms covered in grease and dirt with heavy-duty GOJO soap.

I never thought I'd have a joy-filled dream about my teenager years of changing tires for 8 hours a day.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about difficult childhoods. Whether it is JD Vance’s memoir about the drug addiction of his mother or Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated” about her father’s strange-psychotic-off-the gird leadership, clearly there are many people today who have had to survive childhood rather than experience or enjoy it. I admire both of these authors (especially since they are fellow Millennials) but I want to clearly point out an enjoyable part of my childhood. The traumatic parts of childhood can be shocking and get our attention. Yet, I want to acknowledge in the next 2 blog entries the parts of my childhood that were a gift to me. I do not care if it sounds like I am drunk off nostalgia, I am writing about this because it was a true experience along with the fact that working at my family’s business was required between the ages of 15 until I was 19 years old.

This blog entry is going to be about what it looked like to work in the tire bay at my dad’s shop. Service after a customer walks in and asks to get 4 tires and an oil change. To get a visual of this process, you can watch this 13 minute uncut Youtube video that I took with my digital camera in 2007 of us changing the tires on a new BMW Roadster:

In the video above, I am a grown man. I took this video when I was 23 years old. I have no pictures of working at my dad's shop between 1999 and 2003 when I worked there as a teenager. However, I do have lots of memories of my experience as a tire guy. Below in the 9 steps that follow I want to unpack why I found this job so formative and enjoyable to the point I viscerally miss doing it. No doubt I love my job teaching at the community college. But there is something essential missing in teaching English that I can’t put my finger on.

1.) Work Order: My dad sends a written work order with the size of tires down to the tire-bay. My dad’s work orders were always in all caps and with one exclamation point.

2.) Lift The Car With the Electric Lift: Have you ever changed a flat tire? Jacking the car up is the hardest part of changing a flat tire. Trying to figure out where on the bottom of a car you would position the car so that it wouldn’t rock off of your tiny jack onto the ground. Thankfully, in an auto shop, this isn’t really something you have to worry about since we had an hydraulic lift that made it uncomplicated and safe to lift up.

3.) Find the Tires in my Dad’s Semi-organized Warehouse: I was in charge of keeping inventory straight and organized in my dad’s small warehouse. My dad made a career of buying tires from wholesale marketers and then reselling them at a slightly higher price.

My dad was too busy to teach me how to organize the inventory of the warehouse. At 15 years old, I was intimidated by disorder of the warehouse, and there were a lot of 14 inch tires that were leaning on each other, about to fall over. Since they were leaning on each other, they were out of order and you always wanted to have sets of 4 together. Customers rarely ever bought just one tire, they regularly bought sets of 2 or 4 tires. We needed to group them together, same brand, same size. If tires were stacked poorly they would also fall over in the middle of the night like dominoes and set off the burglar alarm. The police call my dad in the middle of the night and he’d have to drive 20 minutes to turn off the burglar alarm because of poorly stacked tires.

My dad also hired my friend from high school John Lohr to be a tire guy. One day John and I needed to reorganize a section of the inventory so that they would not fall. So my friend John and I stood there trying to figure out how to reorganize the tires so that they would not fall. John said, “What if we roll all of them outside, then restack them inside so they don’t fall?” In my mind this would take an eternity. I wanted to find another short-cut. Anything other than that. Despite my stubbornness, I let him win this argument, and we rolled about 70 tires outside, then restacked them inside. His idea required twice the work.

I realized I was wrong. John’s idea worked. And the inventory of tires looked straight, with the large tires at the bottom and the smaller ones at the top. At that point at 15---------I started to open up to the idea if you want to do a job well, sometimes there are no shortcuts to take, you have to accept the decision that doing the job right will be painful, harder and take more time. Over 20 years later I think about our inventory of tires and how if you want to do a job right, it will likely take more time.

4.) Remove the Tires from the Car: A fully inflated tire is heavy. Back in 2002, I noticed rims/wheels were slightly getting bigger going from 15 and 16 inch wheels to 17 to 18 inch rims. The bigger the rims, the better your car looked. Even in small town North Carolina, my friends at high school were getting bigger rims on their cars and trucks like they heard on the local rap station 102.1 Jamz “20 Inches, Nothing less” and “Bling Bling” from rappers like the Big Tymers and Master P. People would special order big rims for their cars and my dad would put them on. As the rims got bigger, they also got heavier, making the tires get wider and awkward to carry.

If you were going to be a tire guy, you better be ready to get physical and filthy. Old tires had been on the road for maybe 2 years so they were covered in dirt, which covered your shirt with streaks of black marks and put blackness under the tips of your fingernails. I would recommend anyone who take tires off a car weight at least 170 pounds. At 18 years old I was in the best shape of my life, which is partially because of how physically demanding this job was. You can squat and do it, or you can sit on your butt and put the tire on the car after the lugs have been removed.

5.) Dismount the tire off of the Wheel: Once you let all of the air out of the tire, you then had to “break down” the old tire so that the rubber would unseal from the wheel. This would make it possible to take it off the rim. If you look at the video you can see Timmy and I both doing this at the 4:19 mark on the Youtube video above.

6.) Mount the new Tire onto the Wheel: Of all of the steps, this one required some experience. Most everything else could be learned in about 2 weeks time or less. It was about physical endurance. But to put a new tire onto the wheel required some skill, especially for car tires. Truck tires were heavy, but it was hard to mess them up because the sidewalls were so large. But the car tires were harder, because the sidewalls were narrow and it was even possible to tear the rubber sidewall, which sometimes meant $100 tire that we lost. And that ruined the whole experience. Even after I had been working at Branson’s for about 2 years, it wasn’t until I was probably 17 or 18 till I felt comfortable putting tires with narrow sidewalls on a rim. I was always afraid I’d tear the sidewall.

After the tire sealed onto the wheel, it took typically about 3-4 minutes for the tire to fill up with air. At this point, there was a lot of casual conversation and jokes about whatever. Anytime I doubted my work, Fred always checked my work. One guy in particular, Fred Mitchell , used to tell stories about how he believed aliens created the world and they were watching over us as Ozzy Osbourne played in the background. Fred would light a cigarette every hour and he’d rock back and forth with the music playing from one foot to the other and do his Fred dance. He had a flat-top, a developing beer belly and a few small tattoos on his arms. Fred’s elaborate stories about the creation of the world or the time that he hung out with Lynard Skyard with women in a hot tub in Nashville were stories I did not believe, but I found them entertaining for getting through the day. If you look at the Youtube video at the 5:10 point you’ll see him trying to make people laugh.

At least 50% of the time, there was also one person laying on a creeper changing the oil on the car, their voice often coming from underneath the car as Fred told stories. For 4 people to be diligently working on a car in the summertime was the norm. To change 4 tires on a car, could be done with 2 people, but to have 4 people working pushed us to work as a team and the interdependence was satisfying in some strange way. Sure, working alone can have its own advantages, but working as a team was a shared experience. If I slacked off or was slow doing something, it would be brought to my attention.

7.) Expect Criticism and Have Thick Skin: I must say that I don’t think it was until I worked at Branson’s Auto for a full summer that I had gained the tire guy’s respect. I was known as the boss’s son. And when I started working at 15 years old, I knew I was being watched from a young age when coming to work. Some of the guys treated me with respect. Some of the guys made comments that I was lazy. Some of the guys were only 18 or 19, a few years older than me. But I had to endure the cut-downs and any questions whether I could handle the job. They knew that I didn’t know how to change tires. That wasn’t the question. What they wanted to know was whether I would show up on time, consistently work hard for 8 hours a day and not look for short-cuts. It was less about competence and skill and more about being consistent.

I once mentioned to my aunt that I had to endure comments as the “boss’s son” to which she responded “Why didn’t you tell Paw Paw (my grandfather) that the guys were picking on you?” Rule #1 was that I never ever would expect my dad or my grandfather come in and punish the employees for questioning my work ethic. This would have been immediately counter-productive that I wanted to show them I was not a lazy person. Working in the midst of men who were all between the ages of 18 to 45 certainly pushed me to see if I could match their work ethic.

8.) Adopt the Work Ethic of Grown Men: I was an academically lazy high school student. I could blame this on my parents. They could have pushed me harder. Perhaps instead of making me work at the auto shop, they could have required me to come home at 3:30pm to focus on my studies for 3-4 hours a night so that I could have earned my way up into an AP English. Perhaps it is my parents’ fault for not pushing me hard enough to do well in school and my mom could have said “Nathan you are making B’s and C’s. You are going to come home and study harder so that you can get into the AP classes.” My parents could have said “Nathan if you don’t push yourself to do more extracurricular activities, you won’t have much to put on your college application.”

Instead----my mom would say to me “Nathan, you need to be at the shop after school.” Working was uncomfortable, I didn’t want to do it but after a while I knew that it was part of my familial responsibly to be a part of the family business. Many high school students were competing with one another to make an excellent score on the SAT or the ACT. Their standard was one another, in hopes of getting a scholarship to the best state school. For me, the standard I was pushing myself towards was to work as hard as Timmy Lowe, who was the most consistent tire guy that ever worked at my dad’s shop. I once told Timmy that I got my degree in literature. He told me, with a smile on his face “I got my degree in work hard.” Of course, he would say this with a smile on his face. I had to develop an adult-level work ethic while working at the shop.

When I decided to be an English major at UNCW, I remember going into classes and realizing that the other students in my classes were more well-read than I was. I realized that I was slightly less prepared for studying literature than many of the students around me. During discussions in upper-level literature classes, there was always 1-2 students who seemed like they had read 25% of the Western Canon of literature before they even stepped foot on the college campus. As a sophomore and junior in college my way of coping with that imposter syndrome was voraciously reading in college to catch up to my fellow English majors. I felt like I was behind, but it was my own fault for playing hours of video games after school. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine that I had not worked hard in the classroom.

We might ask questions like “What will prepare young people for adulthood?” we shouldn’t always assume that pushing high school students into entry-level positions is a sub-par choice. Rather, we need to know that pushing high school students into retail positions may be as important as pushing them into AP classes. Looking back, I’m sure I would likely have been a more accomplished professor or perhaps a faster editor. In fact, what I long for more than anything as a blogger now is my ability to edit faster and with more ease. One thing is for sure, it is not my parents’ fault that I am not as efficient writer as I am today. I gained a certain level of grit and social skills working at the auto-shop that have strongly influenced my own happiness as an adult. I oppose the oversimplified Millennial blame-shifting towards my parents’ choices for things that I failed to accomplish.

9.) Put The Four New Tires Back on the Car: This step was the most physically demanding because it required someone to squat, lift up a tire onto the 5 studs and then put the 5 lug-nuts onto the car. Most people likely have done this with a spare tire. But just know that the spare tire on any car is ½ the size of most large tires. A fully inflated tire with the rim is heavy and it is quite the workout.

Fears arose in this final step, that I might forget to leave a lug-nut loose or perhaps the car would sudden fall of the jack and onto my leg. “Physically demanding” didn’t really phase me at 17 years old, since I had no fear of injuring my back. My fears were “Am I doing this right?” as every 17 year old asks 20 times when doing anything, a fear of screwing things up. But by the end of it, I would squat down like a catcher in baseball, with all 5 lugs on the studs “righty tighty, lefty loosey” and hit each lug nut with the air gun in a star rotation and then again, just to make sure, and it became a rhythm in a way that I began to challenge myself to see how fast I could do it all. It sunk deeply into my brain as a habit, in a way that felt satisfying.

Sometimes You Don't Realized You Had a Good Childhood Until You are in Your Thirties

There were many, many moments in my teenage years where I absolutely loved working at Branson's. But underneath it all, I believed I was destined for "something greater."

My career daydreams at that age were did not believe deep satisfaction could be found at Branson's Auto. At 17 years old-----I believed that working at my dad’s auto shop was below me. I pondered to myself "Why would I spend my whole life working at an auto-shop? I will do a job that is easier, more upwardly mobile and something that would be in an air-conditioned office." It is embarrassing to say this, but those were the daydreams of the guy in the Structure shirt below.

Sometimes you don't realize you had a good childhood until you are older and more sober-minded. I was delusional and wrong about a lot of things at 17. I sincerely thank Elliott and Patti Branson for requiring me to work at the family business; otherwise I would have stayed at home and played Madden 2001 for 4 hours per day. I thank God that I snapped out of this mindset that I believed I was better than physical labor.

But perhaps the deeper problem was that I needed to keep my eyes wide open to how much I was enjoying getting absolutely filthy at work on a daily basis. My job as a tire guy was the lowest rung on the ladder at below the guys who worked on engines, changed brakes, diagnosed electrical work along with other positions. Yet despite being low on the ladder, the daily direct experience of being tire guy is something I deeply miss now, especially in its non-theoretical, working with my hands, visible results of seeing 4 new tires on a car.

Today I work as an English professor at a community college. I achieved my teenage goal of getting an office job. Yet in the post-COVID American society of Zoom and the constant reminders of the advantages of remote work, the trend towards the virtual can make work feel like a dull video game. Anytime administration presents a report about how more students post-COVID are signing up for online classes rather than face to face classes, I now strangely find myself daydreaming about stacking tries because it is something I can do with my whole body rather than just with my brain. I am glad I got a taste of manual labor when I was teenager. It is hardwired into my brain so much that I still dream about it.

What About Your Childhood? I am interested in hearing from you. (1) Did you have a good childhood? How so? (2) If you had to identify one good experience in your childhood that you would like to share about, what would it be? (3) Is it possible to have a good childhood but then also be a discontent kid? Why or why not? I am in the middle of blogging about this process. Hearing about your experiences may spark some ideas for my own writing process. If you'd like to answer the questions above about your childhood, leave them in the comment section or send me an email at Nathancharlesbranson@gmail.com