Decatur mechanic services thousands of cars
DECATUR, Ill. — With twinkling blue eyes and a smile as bright as a chrome grille, Nick Vanderlaan is supreme at the art of delivering devastating news.
The ever-upbeat mechanic who runs Nick’s Automotive in Decatur might be telling you your engine is dead with no sure and certain hope of a resurrection, but he does it gently with a firm belief that honesty is the best policy. And it’s hard to snarl at a man who has a pet chow-border collie mix dog named Ruby Tuesday in his office with a business card describing her as “vice president in charge of PR.”
“He’s a very good guy, very honest, up front, he doesn’t try to jerk you around,” says longtime customer Judy Dunham, a security officer at the Clinton Power Station who lives in Maroa. She’s driving a Saturn now after Vanderlaan had to break it to her that the tired engine in her Chevy Malibu was facing an imminent meltdown.
“There was always that slim hope but, well, I kind of knew it,” adds Dunham, 47. “And I knew I could trust what he told me.”
Maybe that’s why Dunham and thousands of others keep driving back to Vanderlaan’s shop on East Locust Street. A meticulous keeper of records, he’s counted his customer visits, every one, and has now reached the astonishing total of 109,166 vehicles serviced one or multiple times since he first opened his business in March 1973.
“And when you consider there are about 85,000 vehicles in Decatur and Macon County, I could have serviced every one, many more than once,” Vanderlaan says.
“I’ve got families where I’ve taken care of cars for Grandpa and Grandma, Mom and Dad and their kids and the great-grandkids. I’ve got customers aged from 92 to 17.
A lot of the people I deal with every day are like personal friends.”
He’s got 11 employees and has known he wanted to be a mechanic since the seventh grade, when a teacher asked the class to jot their life ambitions on a sheet of paper.
Writing frantically, the young and smiling Vanderlaan, whose dad had been a mechanic, listed his ambitions down to the qualifications he wanted to earn and the range of services he wanted to offer. Now with all those certifications achieved and running a shop offering everything from mechanical to body repairs, including complete vehicle restorations, the 71-year-old Vanderlaan can cross off everything on the list except the last line, “retirement.”
“One of these days, I’m going to have to face reality and think about doing that,” he says wistfully, breaking off conversation to tell a strapped customer her radiator was cooked and he could give her a good deal on a used replacement part.
“But I like repairing cars, and I like dealing with people,” he adds, returning to the question of when it will be time to select “drive” and punch it toward the sunset.
“And I’m still enjoying myself.”