PRINT ADS

The death of George Caffrey last month prompted West Salem resident Bob Selbrede to send The Coulee News an old picture of Caffrey taken in the Pischke Motors showroom, back when that business was still downtown on Leonard Street

“I think publishing this picture would be a fitting gesture for a West Salem person who spent so many years keeping its citizen’s automobiles working properly,” Selbrede said.

Caffrey began working as a mechanic at Pischke in 1963. He retired 32 years later in October 1995. “George was one of those guys who could fix just about anything — it didn’t matter what it was,” said Rahn Pischke, current owner of Pischke Motors.

Tom Curtis, a technician at Pischke, worked with Caffrey from 1991 until his retirement and also has high praise for his mechanical ingenuity. “He was extremely knowledgeable — the biggest thing was he used common sense and he would improvise if he could see a way to make something better.”

Despite Caffrey’s stern appearance in the photo, that is not how Pischke remembers him “He was a great guy, always jovial,” Pischke said. “He worked side by side with Russ Molling for years and years. He taught me how to drive when I was 14.”

Caffrey took Curtis under his wing when he first began working at Pischke in the early ’90s. “George was a patient man who taught me a lot. Even if I asked a stupid question, he’d always take the time to explain things to me,” he said.

That patience, however, did not always extend toward rock music. “He’d let it go for a while, then he’d say ‘Turn that stuff off!’ I’ll never forget one morning when it must have gotten to him because he calmly walked over to the radio, cut the electrical cord and then went back to work without saying a word,” Curtis said.

Ken Meyers, a salesman at Pischke, worked with Caffrey for 30 years and retired about the same time. He, too, witnessed Caffrey’s gift for mechanical improvisation

“At the garage he just fixed cars, but he could fix just about anything,” Meyers said. “I remember one time he converted a car trailer into a trailer that Bill Pischke could tow along behind his golf cart. It was really kind of ingenious.”

Curtis recalled an old 1949 GMC truck parked out back of the shop. “We called it the ‘Blue Ox’ and didn’t use it anymore, but every once in a while I’d go out and take a look at it. You could see all the different things he’d done to improvise and improve when repairs were made,” Curtis said.

An Army veteran who served from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, Caffrey liked to tell the story of how he and a buddy borrowed a jeep to go off the base one day. One of them, most likely Caffrey, discovered that, if they rubbed motor oil on the metallic parts, it gave the jeep an eyecatching sheen. So, before leaving the base, they applied motor oil to the whole jeep. It looked great, but it was a little too eyecatching because an officer noticed and commandeered the jeep for himself.

After Caffrey’s wife, Dee, died in 2003, he continued to stop in once a week or so to visit at Pischke. A true mechanic until the very end, Caffrey would rather fix something than buy something new, even if the cost was minimal.

Curtis recalled what might have been one of Caffrey’s last repairs. “George came in about a month before he died. His belt buckle was broken and he asked me if I could solder it for him. He was just thrilled afterwards that he didn’t have to buy a new belt.

“Later, at his funeral, I noticed he was wearing the same belt. I mentioned the story to his daughters and they shook their heads and said they knew all about it and couldn’t believe he hadn’t just bought a new one. ‘He couldn’t stop talking about it — he was so proud of that!’ they said.”