Rod Winchester and his late wife Doreen started Rod’s Mobil on Route 5 in Putney Center in 1967, the same year their son Greg was born. Known in the area for honest customer service and skilled technicians, they made a name for themselves there on busy Rte 5. Greg started working in the garage starting somewhere around six years of age. After graduating from BUHS, Greg continued working in his father’ garage and towing service. He later married his wife Julie - who always has one huge smile - and they had three children: Larissa, 31; Lyndsey, 29, Garrett, 26. It’s the two daughters who will take over the garage and its upwards to fourteen employees. After many years working part-time at the garage and training to become a registered nurse, Garrett now works at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital as an RN in what many regard as a woman’s role. Not Garrett.
Larissa, a mother of four, is in training with her parents to take over her mother Julie’s role as the money manager looking after bookkeeping, billing and the towing business with its four tow-trucks. Lyndsey, mother of two, is training to take over her father’s role – “the Car Aspect” she calls it - running the automotive repair business and its twelve mechanics.
Lyndsey wanted to be a mechanic by the age of ten. “I’ve always been a tomboy. When I was in the 6th grade in 2005, I went to Career Day at school dressed like my Dad, a mechanic. But in her senior year at BUHS, another side of her surfaced: she won The Brattleboro Queen’s Pageant: “I was Queen for a year! I had to perform in the competition with the other girls. My performance was playing the piano since I had taken piano lessons from age six.
“I also shifted my education as a senior at The Career Center, when I leaned toward business education with a long-term goal of working in some part of the business at the garage.” After BUHS she earned a four-year degree in business from Johnson and Wales University in Providence, RI. “Since the age of ten, I knew I wanted to take over the garage when the time was right, and I knew I had to have an understanding of how to run a business, and at that age I also knew I wanted to be a mechanic - that changed in the ninth grade when I kept seeing how dirty my dad’s mechanics’ hands were.”
At the core of her and her sister’s drive was their grandmother, Rod’s wife, Doreen. “Starting when we were two, we had to attend the school she set up for us grandkids in her garage in Brattleboro. I had to wear a navy-blue dress and a clean white collared shirt every day for school. I was reading by the age of three. We kids were always disciplined individuals. And being one of my family, I didn’t know how not to work.” Everyone in the family was part of the Grace Evangelical Church in Spofford, NH “from childhood”.
“After graduating from college in 2016, I worked for Enterprise Car Rental on Putney Road, managing the business for the last three of the four years I worked there. And then four years ago the phone rang one day just after Covid surfaced. It was my Mom. ‘Could you come back to work at the garage?’ I had been waiting for that call my whole life.”
So what is it like working as a young woman in what is seen by most as a man’s occupation? Her answer: “That’s when I began to hear, “But you’re a girl.” And she told me this story. “A customer drove in one day right after I started working fulltime and it was clear he was having trouble with his car. I went out before he even came into the office and I asked him to tell me about the problem with his car. He started to tell me when my brother Garrett came out to see if he could help. The man said, ‘Oh good. A mechanic. The man told Garrett what the problem was and Garrett responded, “I have no idea what the problem is. Talk to her.”
“I throw people off. Women love that this 5’2” 30 year old bubbly, talkative blond knows so much about cars and can diagnose the problem -and often provide the solution. But men have taken a lot longer to come around. They listen but I can tell they don’t want to, but even that is changing, slowly.”
“And diagnosing car problems, which I do more and more, is the trickiest. My Dad has taught me a LOT about that. A customer asked me last year to drive in her car with her to see if I could diagnose a problem sound. She drove; it was clear to me right off the front right wheel bearing was the problem. We drove back to the garage and the mechanic, after checking things out, told the woman, “It’s your front right wheel bearing.”
“And my Dad is gaining confidence in me too. He and my Mom went away on a vacation – in fact to see Dana Temple’s twin brother who runs a garage in Maine – and when they got back the garage was just humming along. I know sounds cars make. I’m definitely living a full life.”
Larissa was born in 1992 in Brattleboro and now lives in Putney with her family. “Doreen, our grandmother, home schooled us kids from age two through 3rd grade and then we went to the Christian Heritage School for grades 4 and 5, then Cornerstone School for 6th grade. Then our Mom got a CDL license so she could drive a bunch of us Putney kids to our high school experience at the Grace K-High School in Bennington, though Larissa went to BUHS. I got a very good education there and when I went to BUHS for my senior year, I graduated half a year early. I started working at the garage, got married and by age 29 I had three sons and a daughter. I LOVE kids. And all of us spend our time, even as babies, at the garage.” They all sleep just fine, right through the blare of an air hammer.”
“I started working here when I was six vacuuming cars recently repaired, helping clean this, do that… I learned to drive when I was 12. But then the tragic fire happened October 9, 2021, just THREE WEEKS after I started working here fulltime. That’s when our whole family was floored by the love and support from our community. The Putney people raised $20,000 to help us recover! So many beautiful things happened as we rebuilt but we had to lay off eleven of the fourteen employees for three months. That was very hard. I lived on unemployment for three months and by that time I was a single Mom but my babies saved my life. I love being a Mom and looking after kids.
“By February 2022 the garage was rebuilt, mostly. The compressor was up and running, guys working on cars – metal on metal started up again. Cars starting, air guns blaring, sawing metal, horns beeping for inspections, lots of swearing, and my daughter, age one, slept through it all in the new waiting room.” Larissa is now the Towing Manager for their four tow trucks and drivers (two trucks out all day every day) as well as learning the ropes with her Mom to look after the books and billing and cashing out.
And then I asked how customers see you as a woman in a man’s world of mechanics? “I’m working with billing and bookkeeping and that seems to be accepted. But customers, above all, see all of us at work here laughing and having fun. One even said, “You need a show on TV!”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.