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Dale Canterbury has run D & A Auto Repair since 1990. He’s well-known for his honesty and nonstop work ethic. ‘I make a good living, which is good enough for me. I don’t have to rob people and that’s why they come back,’ he said.

At 9 a.m. sharp, Dale Canterbury lit a cigarette and pulled up the overhead door on the D & A Auto Repair shop. He leaned against his grease-covered desk, with the names of part stores and customer phone numbers scribbled in ink on the calendar, and watched the early morning haze of Lake Avenue traffic.

His shop partner Jesse Owens called and said he’d be a little late today. Dee Kunzler, a retired body man, and the shop’s unofficial sage, just pulled up in his pickup.

The blue and white D & A Auto Repair sign says the shop is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Only the 9 a.m. part is right. The 5 p.m. and Monday through Friday is negotiable.

“Well, I work at least 40 hours, half a day on Saturday and I might spend half the night doing something else,” said Mr. Canterbury. “If everything goes right I may be here all day.”

From nine in the morning to whenever the overhead door closes, a microcosm of humanity drives, walks or gets towed in. And business is good.

“When I first went into business, I spent money advertising, get 10 percent off and all that, and the first couple of months I didn’t do nothing,” Mr. Canterbury said. “Do a good job for ’em, they go tell this one, tell that one, and I don’t have to worry about advertising, they just come in the door.”

In a time where most car repair shops charge by the hour and mechanics work in areas off limits to the customers, D & A sticks out like a Model T Ford on the Kansas Speedway.

It’s a place where old men swap stories about fast cars, big motors and mechanics who can rebuild engines in half a day. Where men, covered in the gear grease and oil of an honest day’s work, seem born to carry red rags in their hip pockets, wrenches in their hands and their heads under the hoods of cars. Where pinup auto parts calendars, inspection certificates and gaskets hang on walls and where a young boy can still get a valve stem put in his bike tire.

“This is what I’ve done since I was 13,” Mr. Canterbury, now 53, said. “Back then it was easier.”

That’s if easy means using a drainage ditch as a pit to drop a transmission. Or if easy means using a house lamp for a trouble light when you’re working at night.

“When we got done we didn’t have a light in the house. We had to go buy more lights,” Mr. Canterbury said.

He and Jesse Owens have been friends since grade school in DeKalb. Their families were friends. The Owens and the Canterbury boys all ran together and worked on old cars together.

“Because we didn’t like to walk,” Mr. Owens said matter of factly.

Mr. Owens’ older brother Art was the “A” in D & A. He and Mr. Canterbury opened the shop in 1990.

Art died two years ago. But his spirit still lives from old stories told in the shop and grainy photos on the wall.

“That’s when he used to live down south of town here,” Mr. Canterbury said, pointing to a fading photo of Art behind the wheel of a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere.

“He’d been good back in the day when they was moonshining, running the hills,” he added. “A gravel road wasn’t nothing to him, he’d run around on them 90 miles an hour, lights off in the dark and be loaded.”

Soft spoken and reticent, Mr. Owens doesn’t fit the garage mechanic stereotype. A former nuclear power plant safety inspector, he thinks Earth, Wind and Fire is the greatest band ever and his brother Art, the greatest car man he’s ever seen.

“Art was a Ford man,” Mr. Owens said in his slow Midwestern drawl. “He could take an engine apart and put it back together, half a day.”

Shortly after Art died, Jesse took his older brother’s place in the shop.

“But I’ve been working on cars ever since I can remember,” he said.

Mr. Kunzler is known as the shop’s sage or encyclopedia. Mr. Canterbury and Mr. Owens both say he knows everything from engines to hot rods to politics.

“He’s our Google,” Mr. Owens said. “If he don’t know it, he’ll get it for you.”

“Dee’s our shop foreman,” Mr. Canterbury added. “He’s sort of the South Side town crier, politician, whatever. He actually helps me out with different things around here.”

Mr. Kunzler, now 70 and retired from the packing house, building hot rods and doing body work, stops by most mornings to “see what’s going on.” He saves his afternoon for his front porch.

“Just take it easy watching the birds and the kids,” he said.

Mr. Kunzler said he’s built a little bit of everything in his day. Fast things built to run on dirt tracks and midnight highways. He remembers them all in a language only true hot rodding men can understand.

“A 31 Model A Roadster pickup with a Corvette engine in it, two four barrels on it, had two 63 Plymouths, one with a 383 in it, the othern’ had a 440. I had a Plymouth Belvedere in ’68, it was a ’63 and I put a 383 in it with big heads and stuff on it,” he said. “Those ’68 Road Runners all would come look at me like they could beat me.”

He lived to race. He raced down DeKalb Highway, 59 Highway, any place with blacktop and a stretch of straightaway to see what you got under the hood and in your gut.

“We’d get right in front of Hawkin’s (gas station) and they’d flag us off with a little grease rag and we was on the road,” he said.

Mr. Kunzler isn’t too keen on NASCAR. None of that circle track stuff for him, he said.

“I always liked to line ’em up straight and see what they really have. That’s where you find out what you’re made of,” he laughed.

And so it goes all day long at D & A. Car talk, politics, smoking cigarettes and grease-covered hands.

Mr. Canterbury, bouncing from car hood to car hood like a grease-covered pinball, working out one automotive problem after another. The filtered nub of a cigarette, sitting like a smoldering ember in a brownish gray straw of beard, is just as much a part of his uniform as the ever-present bandanna on his head.

Mr. Owens working beside him. And Mr. Kunzler watching them both. Between the three, they move about 40 cars and trucks through a week. It’s a good business as long as you treat people right, Mr. Canterbury said.

“I got some tell me I’m too cheap and that might be, but I’m making a good living without robbing people,” he said. “Somebody always needs something fixed.”

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.