After 40 years of business in Mahomet, Bill Cook ready to retire (kind of)
*Editor’s Note: During a conversation with Bill this afternoon, he asked me to report that he is grateful for all the support and opportunity provided in Mahomet over his career. He said, “Thank you.”
By FRED KRONER
Some people relocate a business and do so by moving across town.
Bill Cook did that once.
He had an auto repair shop on Main Street, in Mahomet, in the early 1980s (across from the fire station), but eventually took his work to a location on South Division Street.
Cook’s next move will be much further away.
He and his wife, Nancy, plan to head to Florida.
The owner of Cook Collision Repair has been a fixture in Mahomet for 40 years. He plans to cut back on his workload, but not enter into a full retirement.
“It’s a passage of time in your life,” Cook said. “You realize you only have so much time, and what are you going to do with it.
“I want to make the most of it and not waste it. I want to spend it on quality projects.”
A 1972 Mahomet-Seymour graduate, and a Navy veteran, Cook literally had to be told to stop working in his younger years.
“When I first started, the police came in and said, ‘You have to knock off at 10. The neighbors can’t sleep,’” Cook related.
“I was mad at first, but maybe life was out of kilter. I can’t believe now I would do that. I was so goal-driven.
“I didn’t take many vacations, many one every eight or 10 years.”
Cook’s decision to close his auto body shop in January and sell to Clay Ellis, from Mansfield, wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment move.
“I put it on the market (on Craig’s List) a year-and-a-half or two years ago,” Cook said. “I was waiting to get an offer.”
With two brothers and a sister, plus family friends, who live in Florida, that seemed like a natural destination.
“I wanted to get closer to family,” Cook said.
The timing for a move seemed right.
“The whole face of the auto body industry has changed dramatically,” Cook said. “We used to have five people working and we were doing five jobs a day sometimes.
“Now there are eight to 10 super shops (in the area) and insurance companies started shipping everything to Champaign. We used to be so busy, people had to park at Patton’s (now Kirchner’s) Lumber Yard because there was nowhere to park.”
The transition was gradual, Cook said, and as it evolved, he got rid of his frame machine.
In recent years, he estimated that about three-fourths of his business involved fixing bumpers, grills, fenders, hoods and mirrors.
The repairs would be made, he said, “sometimes in one day; most times in two days.”
Not all vehicles were created equally.
“The European ones, it took 20 minutes to figure out where all the stuff is,” Cook said. “The Chrysler mini vans, you can take the bumper off and have it back on in 15 minutes.”
It was a line of work which he found rewarding.
“It’s a challenge as opposed to some place where you’re stacking boxes or something boring,” Cook said. “I enjoyed doing the bumpers.
“There was one that was completely ripped in half. I put it back together, painted it and the people loved it.”
Cook’s education in the business came from on-the-job training.
“I was a car nut and loved hot rods,” he said. “I didn’t know much about auto body work when I started.”
Following his stint in the Navy, Cook worked at Clifford-Jacobs Forging and helped Terry Reece with drywall jobs.
As they went to various job sites, Cook said, “I’d see wrecked cars all over and say, ‘There’s work there.’”
He worked with Bob Maxwell at McGrath’s Auto Body for several years before venturing out independently.
“Being in it full-blown is different,” Cook said. “I still had a limited amount of experience.”
Cook’s hobbies have included fix-it jobs. As he eases into a reduced workload, he still has sufficient projects to keep busy.
“I have 40 peddle cars to work on,” he said.
He also has 10 cars that he owns – most from the 1950s and 1960s which will require several trucks to eventually ship to Florida – that are in need of repair.
“Now that I have time, what I do is restore stuff,” Cook said.
He has been working on a 1935 Chevrolet sedan for Bud Parkhill.
“It’s starting to look good,” Cook said.
Finding a property and then setting up a shop in Florida will be the toughest part of what is in Cook’s future.
“With the projects I have, there’s five to 10 years (of work),” Cook said.
Remember, he doesn’t keep the hours he did in the past. In fact, Cook is intrigued by the schedule followed by Benjamin Franklin, who had dedicated four-hour work chunks in his day with a two-hour mid-day break.
“It won’t be a constant six to eight hours,” Cook said. “I’m trying to get structure in my life.
“When you do a bloc of four hours, mostly uninterrupted, you can get a lot done.”
Once he and his wife get re-established in Florida, it will be back to the grind rather than living the life of leisure.
“God didn’t create us to be 50 or 60 and have it be time to get a nice couch and watch Facebook,” Cook said.
