“It’s what happens when you do what your sister wants you to, like going dancing.” That’s probably how the business really started, back then in 1946 after the war there in Chicago. Jerry Buonauro meets his wife Violet at a dance out their on the floor of the ballroom. They get married and he would do a variety of jobs, end up at Esquire Magazine driving truck to the post-office, and just happen to clean his brother-in-law Carl Tripoli’s black ‘46 Chevy for him. It was 1952. “When Carl brought the car into the shop, some of the fellows wanted the same thing for their cars.” That’s how Jerry began his detailing business, doing it on the side.
Skip ahead a few years to 1978 after the couple has lived in California, when Jerry and Violet move to Alabama. Lawrence Moseley’s brother Orville was doing the mail and asked Jerry if he was looking for work. Before you knew it, Jerry was pumping gas at Curtis Fent’s service station up on U.S. Highway I-10. Curtis’ wife had a brown Pontiac Grand Prix, so Jerry just detailed the vehicle in his spare time. That’s when Curtis asks Jerry whether he would like to do some detailing in his garage between filling tanks on the pumps. The idea was that they would split the fee of $30 at the time. “I didn’t pump anymore gas because of the detailing business coming in.”
A year later, however, the station was sold and the Buonauros were back to California where they had emigrated from Chicago. “I didn’t do any cars there.” But in another year, the couple was back in Alabama, finding a trailer home on U.S. 90. The gas station arrangement was back on, but business was too good for the new garage owner who soon wanted out of the arrangement.
But when Jerry left the gas station in 1983, detailing customers began asking where he had gone. They literally followed him to his house, and customers have been bringing 300 to 400 cars a year to Jerry. The numbers of cars grew from the beginning and Violet came out one day and started vacuuming a car. From then on, this detailing business has been the work of the Buonauro Duo. Although they started out with newspaper ads and signs, they first had to eliminate the ads because too many customers were coming in. (That’s a testimonial to what newspaper ads will do, I guess.) Word-of-mouth advertisement was also very good.
People came in to have their cars detailed before returning them from lease or they came in before they planned to sell a car. The detailing would save a lessee bucks, and dollars would be added to a properly detailed car going on the market. It was not unusual to hear something like, “It looks like it just came out of the showroom garage.” No wonder business was so good that the Buonauros had to pull their signs down as well after they stopped those newspaper ads!
