Wes Bob’s Tire Service sits just off the Glenn Highway, across from the Alaska State Fairgrounds – a high-traffic place to run a tire shop, reports the Anchorage Daily News.
Flat tires have yielded nails, screws, tweezers, a railroad spike and tools at Wes Bob’s Tire Service in Palmer.
But Wes Bob’s is really low-end.
Wesley and Theresa Erickson operate from a converted truck trailer that’s tan now, but used to be porta-potty green. Outside there’s no enclosed – as in heated – bay to work on cars. Even the concrete slab and awning are fairly recent.
Inside the trailer is cramped but clean and filled with tires, shelves of stuff and a desk with an old HP computer that’s great for Tetris. A plastic container holds random sharp items removed from tires over the years: Nails, bolts, a wrench, half a tweezer, a fork — everything but the four-wheeler skid plate that didn’t fit in the old juice jug.
"Can’t get any simpler than my garage," says Erickson, a cheerful and straightforward 40-year-old who looks a little like the actor Brian Dennehy, but with a mustache.
Wes Bob’s opened in 1998, charging $32 for winter-tire changeovers. The price now is $36. Theresa Erickson credits the low overhead of their small operation with a big following. Customers come from the Mat-Su, but also from Anchorage and Eagle River, even Copper Center and Delta Junction.
After the first real snow of the season Sunday night, Monday morning was mayhem at the shop. Wes and 14-year-old son, Jordon, ran in and out of the trailer, busy putting on studded tires. Theresa checked the 18 phone messages on their machine.
She answered a visitor’s questions when the phone wasn’t ringing, sometimes shouting over the clanking of the tire machine, the roar of the air compressor and the distinctive high-torque whine of the impact wrench as tires came on and off outside. Below are excerpts from the newspaper’s conversation with Theresa Erickson in which she discusses why they moved to the Valley and what the name of the business means.
Q. So you all work together every day?
A. Pretty much.
Q. How do you divide up the labor?
A. Wes runs the tire machine. I can do it all, I just refuse to. Jordon and I take turns doing things. Jordon’s kicked in more as far as taking tires off (the vehicles) and putting them back on and cleaning them and getting them ready for Wes to do the changeover on them.
Q. Why did you come to Alaska?
A. His uncle lived up here. Wes always loved Alaska, he’d come up here and visited a few times before …
(The phone rings: a customer looking for directions, as well as a set of tires. A drip-oil stove cranks out heat. An old box fan hung from a home-built wood frame whirs next to it. Theresa resumes her story.)
… And so he literally, when our son was about a year and a half old, drug me up here for a family vacation. I wanted to go to California, I had no interest in Alaska. We got up here, it was August, and we tagged along with his uncle and a bunch of friends on their hunting trip off the Denali Highway. … The third day up there in the mud, on four-wheelers, with all these friends in the rain, in the ick, I looked at Wes and I’m like, "Let’s move."
I did not want to go back to Minnesota. It was so beautiful, the whole atmosphere, the way people live up here, the majority of them family-oriented. They take off for hunting and fishing. They run their businesses. Their businesses don’t run them.
Q. So, Wes Bob. Where’d the name come from?
A. It’s just kind of a nickname that he come up with.
Q. Is that his nickname?
A. (She shakes her head) It works. Everybody remembers.
Q. When do you get your rush – the first snow forecast of the season?
A. The past couple of years, we take off Sept. 1 through 15. That’s our hunting season. The 20th, usually that first week we’re back, were booked up two weeks out. Then it just kind of stays that way. It started to taper off a little bit last week but now with the snow, as you can tell, we’ve gotten another surge.
Q. Today is so crazy. Are you running out of tires?
A. The middle of October, it starts to get hard to get tires, certain sizes. The first part of the year, big tire companies put in their orders for what they think they’ll need in all the different sizes for the winter. The manufacturer takes those numbers and makes only that amount of tires. Once those start selling out, they’re gone … this year we’ve gone through way more passenger tires and just a couple of the big truck tires.
Q. What’s the latest you’ve seen someone come in for a winter change?
A. We usually close around the 20th or 25th because our equipment freezes up and it gets too hard to work outside, but we still have people coming in then.
In the spring, studded tires are supposed to be off May 1. Come the middle of June, end of June, there’s still people getting their tires off. … I had one gal that was in, she drove all summer long on studded tires. She said, "I never got stopped, never got a ticket."
Q. Do you guys drive on winter tires?
A. Yeah. I haven’t put my studs on my truck yet, Wes has his on, and I haven’t put ’em on the car yet. … When I’m ready for them, I pull my car up and say, "Hey guess what? You’re working late. We’re doing this one too."
(Wes is back inside the shop. He slams a wheel onto the tire machine, jimmies the tire off the wheel with a fat crowbar, then cleans the rim, first mechanically and then by hand with a steel brush. He dabs soapy water on the tire valve to check for leaks.)
Q. This isn’t exactly a big fancy building with a neon sign. How do you advertise?
A. This is how we started, which I think only works in Alaska. … I did up these fliers that advertised our business … went to Carrs, Walmart, Sears, did the same in Anchorage. Put fliers on windshields. I did that the first year we opened, the first fall, and we haven’t advertised per se since. But our customers advertise for us.
