"It's hard that we had to close," Orville said. "Ken lost his wife a year and half ago, and at that particular time I had a staph infection after having my second (back) surgery, and I was fighting it for four months. It made it real hard to try to keep the business open."
Two more back surgeries for Orville and Kenny's own health woes made the decision to close an inevitable one.
"It's a chapter of our life that we're closing, and we hated to have to close down," Orville said. "But physically we're not able to do it, so it's time to give it up."
Orville, 67, and Kenny, 77, took over the business in 1956 after their father passed away. While their father was alive he had a salvage yard and repair business. The two decided to scrap the salvage yard and concentrate on doing auto repair work. With auto salvage no longer being part of the business, the brothers changed the name from OK Auto Salvage to Swaney's Auto Service in
1959.
"Dad originally had just a salvage business and repair," Orville said. "Then when my brother moved back from North Carolina, and he was in automatic transmissions so we started on automatic transmissions and general repair.
About 10 or 15 years ago we stopped doing any other type of work and just did automatic transmissions until we closed down."
Growing up, both Orville and Kenny along with their brother William worked for their father.
By the time each turned 12, they were working in their father's garage every night after school and on Saturday's.
After all the years, Orville has some fond memories.
"I remember one time when someone broke down he had a whole load of apples on his truck, but he never had any money to pay for the job and the apples were starting to turn on him," Orville recalled. "My dad said he'd just repair it and the guy said, `Well, I'll take the apples and dump them down beside your house.' He unloaded a load beside the house and mother went out and canned them and sold apples and gave apples away for quite a while."
Orville remembers another time when Kenny drove the wrecker out to pull a person's vehicle out of a ditch.
"He had a hard time getting the person out of the ditch and tow him out, and it was going to run the guy five dollars. The guy said, `I won't pay ya. It never took ya that long to do it so I'm not going to pay you that,"' Orville said. "Ken just hooked back on to it, backed up and set it back down in the ditch and drove on home."
Orville said the same guy came back over later, and complained about what Kenny had done.
"The guy come over and started to holler about it to dad and dad said, `Well, if he goes and takes you out this time it's going to cost ya $10, because he's already taken you out once.' The guy said he didn't know if he wanted to do that or not. Dad said, `Well, that's how it's going to be, because he did it fair the first time.' The guy said, `Well, I need the vehicle so we better go get it out.' That was one of the incidents that was kind of a highlight."
Potato plight
A lowlight for Orville involved an incident similar to the apple one.
"Another time a person had a big load of potatoes on there. He unloaded the potatoes right there beside the house, and if you ever had anything that stunk worse than a potato starting to rot I don't know what it is," Orville said. "We'd .take and sort through the potatoes and wash them off. We got rid of a lot of potatoes, but we had potatoes three times a day for a while."
Tribune photo
The tables were empty Friday
morning, but will be filled to thebrim Saturday for the auction at Swaney's Auto, 1815 S.
Santa Fe.
When Kenny returned from North Carolina, he and Orville frequented auctions picking up a rather unique variety of things -- an old eye machine from Johnson Hospital, meat slicers and coffee grinders from grocery stores and some old safes without combinations to name a few.
"There are a big variety of things we used to pick up at auctions when we shouldn't have been," Orville joked. "If it was unusual or if you saw something you might want you just pick it up. That's what Ken did. If he saw something he liked the looks of, he'd just go ahead and buy it. There is a big variety of different things."
On Saturday, those items along with transmission and auto equipment, and many more miscellaneous items from the shop itself will be on the auction block..
Seeing those items sold will be difficult for Orville. "You've seen it for so many years, it's going to be hard. Ken isn't going to be there. His health isn't going to allow him to be there," Orville said. "I'm going to be down to help get some of the stuff moved out to start out with and be there most of the time probably."
The auction is set to begin to begin at 10:30 a.m., at the former location of Swaney's Auto, 1815 South Santa Fe.