Jeff Lewis is a co-owner of Old Car City USA, the classic car junkyard in White that bills itself as the largest in the world. He's also a Cass High grad, a former 16-year member of the Georgia House of Representatives, and a member of the Georgia Department of Transportation board since 2011. He sat down with Logan as Cartersville Living's October feature. (For the record: no relation, at least not yet. Jeff's middle son is named Parker Lewis, which happens to be the exact name Logan has picked out for a future kid.)
From auto parts to an outdoor museum
The Lewis family has been on that land since 1931, when Jeff's grandfather built a general store across from what's now the junkyard. Jeff's dad, Dean Lewis, started a normal auto-salvage yard there in the late '60s and early '70s, and Jeff worked it from age 12 to 16. "Nothing motivated me to go to college more than working in that junkyard in the summertime," he said. In the mid-to-late '80s, Dean narrowed his focus to classic cars from the early '70s and older, selling rare parts to buyers from all over the country. When he and his crew got too old to pull parts, he started selling whole cars to restorers instead. Today the property holds about 4,500 old cars on 40 acres, with seven miles of trails running through them.
The $20 bill that started it all
Around 2011 or 2012, a visitor asked to walk the yard with his camera. He came back blown away and told Dean he ought to charge people for that. Dean agreed and said he'd start with him, and the man paid with a $20 bill. Then in the fall of 2014, Auto Trader shot the new 2015 Corvette surrounded by Old Car City's rusted classics for the contrast. When the photos hit AOL's front page, the family's "nickel and dime" website got more than 30,000 hits in a few hours and crashed. Photographers have been paying to get in ever since, from as far away as Venezuela, Cuba, and even North Korea. Guinness unofficially confirmed it as the world's largest classic car junkyard. It's only unofficial because the family didn't want to pay the roughly $10,000 fee to make it official.
Selena Gomez, Paul Rudd, and 6,000 coffee cups
News and entertainment crews from just about every developed country have filmed there, Germany most of all and the UK close behind, and international media showed up again during the Super Bowl and this summer's World Cup matches. One year the family worked backward from ticket sales and estimated about 7,500 visitors, all without spending money on marketing. During one movie shoot, the production invited Dean to lunch with stars Selena Gomez and Paul Rudd. He didn't know who Selena Gomez was and said no, because he needed to stay and watch the store. Dean just turned 89 and is still there most days. He's also a folk artist: he draws on old barn wood and on the styrofoam cups he drinks his coffee from. Around 6,000 of those cups are on display in his gallery, and two of his pieces once won first place in a folk art contest.
The $1,500 station wagon that sold for $105,000
Jeff's best story is about a friend from Colorado who wanted to buy a long 1972 or '73 Oldsmobile station wagon off the lot, to fix up for surfers in California. Dean told Jeff his bottom line was $1,500. The friend opened at $15,000. Keeping a straight face, Jeff faked a phone call to his dad and asked if that was the best he could do, and the friend went up to $20,000. Jeff then had to duck behind a tree and call Dean for real to get him ready to accept it. "That's way too much money," Dean told him. The friend put about $10,000 into the wagon and sold it to a buddy in San Diego for $65,000, and that buddy sold it on for $105,000. "That's why you take $20,000 when somebody offers it," Jeff told his dad. "Because everybody along the way made money."
16 years in the Georgia House
Jeff traces his interest in politics to age 11, when he watched the 1976 Carter–Ford debates and couldn't figure out why he liked them so much. After Cass High, where he played football, ran track, did drama and student government, he went to Jacksonville State and the University of Alabama. He went back to Jacksonville State for his last semester and met his wife, Kim; they've been married more than 35 years and have three sons. Back home, he grew his dad's outdoor advertising business, and in 1992, before he and Kim had been married four years, he ran for the State House and won. For 16 years he juggled the billboard business, side ventures, the legislature, and three young sons, the last five of those years in House leadership. "I left the State House the same way I entered the State House: voter's choice," he said of losing his seat in 2008. His advice for coping with constituents who confront you at dinner: "You're delighting someone and you're disappointing someone. That's all you're doing."
The DOT board and keeping Bartow small
In 2010, Governor Sonny Perdue and a state senator started recruiting Jeff for the Georgia DOT board. He was reluctant at first because the DOT regulates billboards, his own industry, so he steps aside on those votes just as he did in the legislature. The board is the only elected board among Georgia's state agencies, but legislators choose its members, not the public. Jeff's seat is elected by the roughly 30 legislators of the 11th Congressional District, and his first race in 2011 went through several tied rounds of secret ballots before he won. He calls it the "wholesale side" of politics: hiring the commissioner and setting policy and budgets. On how Cartersville can grow and still feel small, his answer is community. He and Kim deliberately eat only at locally owned restaurants (with an occasional exception for Chick-fil-A), and he gives credit to the chamber, local governments, schools, and churches for keeping people connected.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This recap only scratches the surface. Jeff also shares how teenagers found each other cruising the Plaza Shopping Center before cell phones, why he describes Old Car City as "the before" to the Savoy Automobile Museum's "after," and his habit of asking servers to bring him whatever they'd want for their last meal, which once got him rabbit in Florence. The rapid-fire round covers Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and a festival lineup of U2, The Killers, and, to Logan's surprise, Lady Gaga. Old Car City is open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (4 is a hard close). Admission is $30, and they take cards now. Catch the full episode below.
Listen to Episode #525
Catch the full conversation with Jeff Lewis on Your Morning Drive, wherever you listen.
