Car Talk

On hard work and doughnuts, this relic of a garage keeps on running

THE MAN IS A PHOTON: Puckish and spry, he never stops moving: You can still see in 70-year-old Pat Abe the teenage drag racer, the fourth-grader who once worked in his father's grocery, the first-outta-the-gate grandson of Japanese immigrants.

Heading from his car-packed lot into a gray smudge of an office, he's accosted by an old guy in a baseball cap: "Hey! How much I owe you?" the guy says, jumpy and bespectacled.

"Hi, Samuel," says Abe (pronounce that AH-bay).

Samuel grapples with Abe in a playful wrestle as rough as his English. He's here to pick up his Jeep, which for 10 years he's entrusted to Abe's Seventh Avenue Service, on the southeast corner of Seventh and Jackson Street in Seattle's Chinatown International District neighborhood.

Abe hands him a box. Inside, the Jeep's old fuel filter, replaced by a new one.

"If not the right one, I come back and chew out your butt, guaranteed," Samuel says, hovering over Abe's shoulder as he punches an adding machine.

"OK," Abe says with a pointed finger, "you had one flat tire, the front right. We fixed it for you. Better we fix it here than you have to do it at home."

"Better you do it, or else I be in trouble."

"Your brakes should be good for two more years."

"I don't drive crazy. I use soft stop... . Wow! Are you sure that's the right amount?"

"Wait, I'm still punching."

"Hope it's not over a thousand."

The total: $248. Samuel writes a check. "I hope it bounce," he says as he exits. "Don't call me, I call you."

But he wouldn't take his car anywhere else, and Seventh Avenue Service, which Abe has run since 1973, is a model of lasting success in an industry that has kicked little garages like his to the curb. It's a social hub built around keen customer service, an old-fashioned work ethic and a passion for cars that Abe shares with son David, his sidekick since the 1980s. But Abe says he'll be forced to close if the landowner ever makes good on a long-rumored plan to sell, shutting the doors on a crumbling landmark that in one form or another has filled local automotive needs for 65 years.

Nestled in the cutting-edge shadows of Amazon.com to one side and Vulcan to the other, it seems to thrive on battery power, a relic free of modern technology save for Abe's cell phone, which he now wields more often than a wrench. "You're likely to dismiss it as a deserted, rusted shack if you drive by," writes 15-year customer Daniel Spils, a musician, on his Web site. "It's part of that old Seattle," he says, "but that old Seattle that didn't die."

It's part repair room, part used-car operation, part community center. Stop in, have a doughnut (Abe insists) and see a mix of regulars ranging from life-long pals like retired Boeing mechanic Kay Takeuchi to Abe's father, Mits, who at 90 still drives in from his Skyway home to meet Pat for lunch. "He has real loyal customers, strong community support," says Pennzoil driver Mike Irvin, who's pumped motor oil here for 18 years. "You don't see too many non-Asians in here."

Inside, he devours a glazed twist before heading out to connect big oil drums to decades-old tanks behind the garage. "Shops like this one," Irvin says, "are a dying breed."

Real-estate broker Ted Choi, another old-time regular, says Abe first earned local respect by living up to his father's honor. "That's the most important thing there is, especially in the Asian community," he says. "You're your father's son. Everybody knows you down in Chinatown."

HIS LOT IS A WARD of ailing vehicles — Hondas, Mazdas, Fords, Toyotas. Dashboards bear white sheets of paper with handwritten notes, like automotive hospital bracelets. On a gray Buick Riviera: "Doesn't feel the same. Rattle in front." On a white Chevy Silverado: "Check for oil leak." On a red GMC pickup: "Loses power (especially going up hills). Idle is low, too."

Inside the ashen, pillbox office, crowded shelves teem with fuses and headlamps, fluids and lubricants, brake-release cables and something called "Dr. Tranny Assemblee Goo." Waist-high battery stacks line the windows; there's barely room to move.

The office and dual auto bays fill barely 900 square feet. Along an outside wall that leads to the adjoining garage, ramshackle birdhouses perch like Cuban apartments; the structure is nearly a century old, its ceiling buttressed with massive timber.

Abe's never advertised, relying on word of mouth. Here's Elisa Del Rosario with her Plymouth van, referred by co-workers at Asian Counseling & Referral Services, a nearby social-service agency. Attorney David Hawkins, born and raised in the Central Area, was a 10-year customer before taking a job in Anacortes. His first car was a '64 Rambler. "Once, the muffler fell off and started dragging," he says, "and I just kept driving 'cause I knew I could go down and see Pat and he'd take care of it for me. Not a lot of people would work on that car, but Pat didn't have a problem... . You'd just drop it off and never had any worries — you just knew you were in a good place."

Yes, Abe is here to help — and oh, do they need his help sometimes. Badly maintained automobiles are an affront to his soul. People come in with flat tires or spent water pumps, and he'll do routine checkups and — wha — what the heck? Look at this motor! There's no oil in here! You were lucky, he tells them — no, you were blessed. You better go to church this Sunday and thank the Lord that you came in when you did, because if you'd run this car any longer you'd be spending money on a new engine instead.

One woman brought in a huge SUV she was leasing. "She hadn't changed the oil in two years," he gripes. It took his guys two days to get the sludge out — bloop, bloop. Then she said she planned to buy it and — "I says, don't you dare buy this car. I says, trade it in, get something else, but don't buy that car — you ruined it. She says, 'But it runs good.' I said, 'It runs good now.' I was shocked."

HE IS HIS FATHER'S son, the eldest son of Mitsuji Abe, who took over the Seattle grocery business begun by his father, Chotaro, a peasant farmer's son.

The Dearborn Cash Grocery & Meat Market is gone now, but it lives on in reproduced black-and-whites from the 1930s — the Folger's Coffee salesman in a suit, all grins at a promotional event; Pat as a puny sixth-grader, eclipsed by the shelves he stocked and straightened. A can of baby food went for 9 cents then, cookies two for a nickel.

For Mits, resting in a recliner under a woven blanket, one photo brings memories back in waves — he disappears into the chair in the Skyway home he bought in 1967, hard blinks and long pauses as he talks. The photo shows the store from outside, intersection of Dearborn and Eighth Avenue, shiny black car parked in front. Big, painted letters read: Hotel Palmer.

Chotaro arrived in 1908; forever the proud entrepreneur, he ran groceries and hotels, never working for anyone else. In the mid-1930s, he bought the three-story Palmer and opened the grocery on the ground floor.

Then, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Mits recalls men mobbed on that corner, threatening to tear the place down until patrol cars shooed them away. Not much later, a guy spit in his face outside a local department store.

When President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, notices graced telephone poles: Japanese were being herded into internment camps. Within days, they were to gather up a few things and get rid of anything else they owned. Among their customers was a Polish family who offered to run the hotel while they were gone, so the Abes sold what merchandise they could, loaded up on plywood at a lumber yard, boarded up the store and hoped for the best.

Around the country, the internment completely disrupted coastal Nihonmachi, or Japantowns, imprisoning more than 100,000 people. In segregated South Seattle, where the community numbered 7,000-plus, former University of Washington professor S. Frank Miyamoto says it was mostly first-generation immigrants (Issei) in their early 50s who ran businesses — markets, cleaners, nearly 200 hotels.

By war's end, Miyamoto says, most were too old to re-establish themselves; meanwhile, many Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans, elected to abandon their fathers' enterprises for other ventures.

The Abes were among the lucky when they returned: "Would you know," Mits says with a wonder surpassing any lingering bitterness, "after the war, we came back and these Polish people just gave us back the hotel. They rented a house close by and were back as our customers."

Afterward, Chotaro managed the Palmer and turned over the grocery to Mits and his brother, who ran it until the early '60s, when the area was condemned to make way for Interstate 5 construction.

The photos are all that's left.

Here's what Pat says when he sees the same picture: "Look at that. That's a '38 Chevrolet."

MITS TOOK THE GROCERY to Skyway, but when he asked his son to assist with a planned expansion, he wasn't surprised when Pat turned him down. Pat had come of age at a time when cars had gone from modes of transportation to means of adventure. "Ever since he was a kid he used to tinker with cars," Mits says. "So when he said, 'Dad, I don't want to go into the grocery business, I want to open up a garage,' I loaned him the money. That's how he got started."

The first time he'd touched the guts of a car, Abe was 13, among a group of Garfield High boys who'd buy broken-down beaters for $25 and make them run again. "We used to fix up old Fords and Chevrolets," says childhood pal Tomio Moriguchi, now CEO of Uwajimaya. "We were just tearing things apart, wondering what made 'em tick."

In high school, Abe says, he was clueless about sex. "The guys would say, 'Pat — you drive your car to school today? You mind if me and my girlfriend have lunch in your car?' I'd say, 'Sure, just keep it clean. I don't want it to smell like food.' Before the end of the year guys were coming to me and saying, 'Pat, it's your fault she got pregnant.' I thought you had to be married before you could get pregnant."

He's known Phyllis, his wife of 50 years, since junior high; in high school, he took her for rides. "We never thought of kissing," he says. "We just liked to drive."

Abe hung out at Craft Auto, at 14th and Jackson, which Jack Habu — whom Abe credits for making him get serious about auto-repair work — opened in 1948. It later became Automotive Brake & Service, which Abe ran for several years with Habu's son, even as he continued working at the grocery.

But street racing was his passion, and his '52 Ford had everything you could put in a motor, down to the aluminum flywheel and Lincoln Zephyr valve springs. He raced everywhere — Shelton, Bremerton, the tunnels on Interstate 90. He was 21 when he vanquished the trash-talking son of a used-car dealer on I-90 before hitting a jag and flipping over. "That was the last time I raced on the streets," he says.

(Son David, too, caught the bug, and it's landed him in trouble: In 2001, he was convicted of eluding a Renton police officer. "I'm good now," he says.)

Auto garages had begun peppering Jackson Street in the early 1920s. The southeast corner first breathed life as Jackson Service Station in 1932, then sat empty for several years before re-emerging in the early '40s as China Super Service and then Oppenheimer Gas Station.

Seventh Avenue Service opened on the site just after the war, and Abe leaped at the chance to buy it in 1973. Reminders of the shop's past remain, including an ancient, Model-T-reminiscent horn affixed outside, which former owners used to beckon workers in the garage across Jackson, once part of the main operation. It's a far cry from most modern garages, which have become bright, clean, high-class salons for $20,000 computerized machines.

Norm Chapman, applied technology dean at South Puget Sound Community College, says many smaller independents couldn't keep up with the expensive tools and training required to service new high-tech cars. But David Abe thinks it's simpler than that: "They didn't fix the cars right," he says, and by right he doesn't mean correctly; he just means the passion wasn't there. "They didn't love 'em. To me, these cars are puzzles. That's all a car is — just a bunch of sensors and wires. You just keep searching."

WATCH CLOSELY NOW, or you'll miss it — the only time you'll ever see Abe's engine idle. It's 7 a.m. at Remo Borracchini's, the Italian market on Rainier Avenue, where he picks up his daily batch of doughnuts.

Inside, a few elderly locals are enjoying their morning coffee. "Hi, Pat," they say as he pounces through the swinging door, right on schedule. He grabs his doughnuts at the pastry counter, then comes over and sits — sits! — for a cup of coffee with Joe Pine, a 74-year-old former chef who bought his '93 Pontiac from Abe; 10 minutes drip, drip, drip by, and Abe sees the clock: Time to go, and off he runs again.

Lunch is a ritual with Abe, the Sunday drive in his workday, and he's happy to order for all — almond chicken, ginger beef, asparagus with black bean sauce. Who does Pat take to lunch? Actually, who doesn't Pat take to lunch? Along with David and a pair of beefy mechanics, today's entourage to Tai Tung, a block away from the shop, includes his dad and a trio of longtime pals and customers — Takeuchi, ex-police officer Steve Anderson and childhood classmate Larry McCray. "My wife used to come down for lunch," Abe says when asked how it all started. "Then the crowd got bigger. So when I retire, they're gonna all starve."

Tai Tung is just one stop on his circuit, which includes just about anything within walking distance. "He's got a regular routine going," says Anderson, burly and white-haired. "He gives every Chinese place in town a little bit of his money. Or a little bit of our money, I don't know."

Afterward, they pack up bounteous leftovers for the mechanics back at the shop, where Abe is among the less than 9 percent of self-employed people who are older than 65. His attitude toward work has mirrored his father's, who worked daily to run the grocery until he sold it in 1978. "He doesn't know what a vacation is," Mits says of his son.

At least, Uwajimaya's Moriguchi says, Pat started closing up on Saturdays. "He and Kay (Takeuchi) go down to Oregon looking for car parts. That's their big weekend."

Even after 60 years, Abe's still fascinated by things automotive. He'll dismantle a spent filter and yank out its swirly interior to show you how densely filthy it is; he'll preach the virtues of antifreeze and marvel at the mileage you can put on a car now; he can't wait to see the 2006 Chevy Corvette, which, he says, "is gonna be the bomb."

Another neglected car pulls into the lot and — for Godsakes, is he the only one who can hear that poor engine crying for more oil?

Over the past decade he's left more of the labor to David and his four mechanics, diagnosing problems and checking in periodically to make sure things are done right. That doesn't mean he never gets involved: You can see him get fired up about a customer's passenger-side dent; he takes heavy-duty gloves, a mallet and a pair of huge screwdrivers, and five minutes later, it's unnoticeable.

"I'm only 70 years old," he says, and while he feels he could go on another 10 years, he'll be OK if he has to shut down. "Everything comes to an end," he says. "There's that saying: 'We were born to die.' That's how life is. I was ready to retire five years ago. But I didn't have anything else to do."

The clock hits 5, and Abe signals it's time; blue-uniformed mechanics roll leftover cars indoors and garage doors close like eyelids. "OK, let's go home, guys," David says, and like so many have before, another workday comes to an end.

Marc Ramirez is a Seattle Times staff writer. Tom Reese is a Times staff photographer.