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"It was one November, I guess," back in the late 1940s, the 81-year-old Dennis recalled Friday, after taking time off to celebrate his 60th anniversary at the same Pep Boys auto parts store at 716 Broadway in downtown Fresno.
"I was sweeping out the storeroom, and here come these three guys," he said. "I said, 'You can't come through here, this is off-limits to customers,' but they just walked up and came on through."
While the faces of Pep Boys founders Emanuel (Manny) Rosenfeld, Maurice (Moe) L. Strauss, and W. Graham (Jack) Jackson are recognized from storefronts across the country, it's Dennis' smiling face that is the mainstay at the store has worked at since it opened in 1948.
"I've been hanging out at this store since '52, '53," said store manager Elmer Kliewer Jr. His father, who also worked there, brought him to the store as a toddler.
"I used to play on the ladders" in the stock room, "and Harold used to tell me, 'Go on, get down from there!' So I've known Harold all my life."
Dennis isn't the oldest continuous Pep Boys employee, said Bill Waters, the company's area director. "But he is one of the top two or three."
Several Pep Boys executives called Friday to congratulate Dennis on his anniversary.
Things have changed since Dennis started at Pep Boys, when he used tacks to attach straw-woven and cloth seat covers to wooden-framed car seats.
"Where the scooters are now, that was all bicycles," he said, pointing to the front window display area of the store. Pep Boys used to sell lots of bicycles -- more than 400 every December, Kliewer said -- before the Philadelphia-based chain phased them out in the mid-'80s.
Other things have stayed more or less the same, like the car-lowering kits Dennis used to sell in the 1950s and still sells today.
"That's an old tradition," he said.
But as times have changed, Dennis has kept the same attitude and the same smile that has made him a favorite of customers for six decades.
"Every day's a good day," he said. "And the next one is going to be better."
The reporter can be reached at jeffstjohn@fresnobee.com or (559)441-6637.
To see more of The Fresno Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.fresnobee.com Copyright (c) 2008, The Fresno Bee, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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