By FRED KRONER
Life has a way of dictating changes that not all of us are willing to implement in our lives.
Darrell Ruch understands.
Nearly a year ago – on May 4, 2019 – the Mahomet resident suffered a heart attack.
“Out of the blue,” he said.
After a week in the hospital, he left, accompanied by a recommendation from his doctor.
“He told me I should retire,” said Ruch, who has been a fixture in the community with several ventures, including Mahomet Community Tire and Lube for 37 years.
That was a call Ruch wasn’t ready to make.
“I decided to work for a while,” he said, “but I couldn’t keep up with it.”
At the end of February, Mahomet Community Tire and Lube closed for the day, and closed for good.
“It was not real stressful, but there is stress any time you’re running a business,” Ruch said.
Nearly a month into retirement, Ruch acknowledges that the change was a positive.
“It was probably a good decision,” he said. “I do feel better after I did it.”
That’s not to say that he is ready to recline in a rocking chair and watch the world go by.
“If I get my health more under control, I’d like to do something,” Ruch said.
There’s one endeavor, however, which Ruch hasn’t left behind.
He is the president of the Champaign Sportsmen’s Club, located on Lake of the Woods Road.
“In the winter, there’s not a lot to do,” Ruch said, “but in the summer, we have a lot of campers and it gets pretty busy.
“I have a lot of good people to help me.”
The 71-year-old Ruch has been a member since 1966. It was natural for him to join.
“My mom and dad were members, and I have a lot of friends out there,” said Ruch, who is now in his 25th year serving as the organization’s president.
“I didn’t figure I’d last that long,” he said. “You have to make a lot of decisions, and tick people off sometimes.”
He has been up for re-election every two years. He wasn’t going to seek another term last November, but when he changed his mind, Ruch knew the outcome in advance.
“Nobody ran against me,” he said.
Ruch is not an absentee president.
“I have a camper and I take it out there in April and leave it all summer,” he said. “I’ll probably spend more time there now. That’s why I didn’t go looking for a job.
“I have cable, water and sewage.”
He is right at home in his camper and even in the community, though he was born in Monticello, graduated from high school in Champaign and went to Decatur for one of his first full-time jobs, after leaving a position as supervisor for a convenience store.
“I miss the customers,” he said. “I had good relationships with a lot of them over the years.
“I enjoyed talking to the customers. I’ve seen their kids grow up.”
Mahomet Community Tire and Lube not only had committed customers, but also dedicated employees.
“My mechanic (James Ferdinand) was there 15 years,” Ruch said. “Another employee (Adam Lindstrom) was there about 10 years. My help stayed for quite a few years.
“I treated them fair and never had a large turnover.”
Ruch’s first Mahomet business was the Sunoco gas station, on North Lombard Street, which he bought from Hubert and Peggy Prahl in 1972.
“It was a good operation, and I had it for about 25 years,” Ruch said.
State regulations led to his departure from selling fuel.
“The EPA got so bad, the small operator couldn’t stay in,” Ruch said. “You had to reline the tanks every five years and you had to have a pump-monitoring station.”
With the help of Myron Isaacs, a building was built on West Oak Street, and Mahomet Community Tire and Lube became the first tenant in 1993.
“We did everything,” Ruch said. “Oil changes were the most common.”
When mechanical work was needed, some cars were tougher to fix than others.
“Cadillacs had a North Star motor and the starter was inside the engine,” Ruch said. “You had to take the engine apart to replace the starter.”
In other cars, Ruch estimated that to change a starter “took about 20 minutes.”
For the Cadillacs, he said, it was closer to “six to eight hours.”
For a period of time, Ruch owned the former Bumper to Bumper Auto Parts store, in Eastwood Plaza, and changed it to a NAPA.
It wasn’t unusual for him to have multiple jobs at the same time during his 48 years of working in Mahomet. Ruch was a sergeant with the police department and worked weekends, he said, “for about 10 years (from 1980-89).
“That was when we had three full-time and three part-time officers. I’d work until 3 a.m., but was on call until 8 a.m. There were just six of us, but we kept things under control.”
He worked under former chiefs Bob Sweiter and Chuck Casagrande.
Ruch has a link to a current Mahomet officer.
“When I patrolled, we had a ride-along program,” Ruch said. “Dave Parsons rode along a lot when he was in high school.”
One of Ruch’s memories as a businessman is about an incident that claimed the life of an employee, when his business was still located on North Lombard, near the interstate, in the 1980s.
Robert Bull Plume was murdered in a robbery in December, 1988, while working the overnight shift at Mahomet Community Tire and Marathon.
“He wasn’t scheduled to work,” Ruch said. “He was filling in.
“Jamie (LeBaugh) and I ate birthday cake with him earlier in the evening.”
The shooting took place at about 12:20 a.m. on Dec. 5, 1988. No arrests were ever made, but the prime suspect killed himself. He was the suspect in two other murders in a 38-hour span.
“Thirty-three dollars is what was taken,” Ruch said.
As he entered retirement, Ruch had the chance to move to Texas and live with his son, Brad Taylor, who owned the Community Tire building, but he elected to remain in Mahomet.
“My sister (Sara Moody) is in a Rantoul nursing home, and I help take care of her,” Ruch said.
And that means the Champaign Sportsmen’s Club doesn’t need to seek a new President anytime soon.
