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MADISON — It’s one thing to discover your life’s work at 13.

It’s quite another to still be at it when you’re 88.

That’s the case with Raymond Wilson, who owns Raymond’s Cars, a used-car lot in Madison. He’ll be 88 in two weeks.
“I started fooling with cars when I was a boy,” Wilson says.

Back then, the Madison native would ride his bicycle four miles to an older brother’s service station. There, he watched his sibling, Hampton Wilson, do everything from fill gas tanks to repair engines.

When his brother had to run errands, Wilson manned the station, mostly pumping gas into the farm trucks that rumbled by.

But in the late 1930s, when a sleek Airflow Chrysler pulled into the station, it was Wilson’s chance to get some grease on his hands. Two well-dressed travelers explained to him that something in the automobile wasn’t running right.

What happened next could have been a Gomer or Goober moment. Wilson took a listen and knew the trouble was in the carburetor.

“I had that carburetor tore all to pieces and I was blowing it out,” remembers Wilson. His brother came back to see the parts spread on a newspaper. He couldn’t watch as Wilson reassembled it.

But once he did, the car ran like a charm.

“I charged them $3, and from then on, I was a mechanic,” Wilson says.

He worked a stint in a grocery store that sold gas, but he spent most of his time in the parking lot tinkering with cars that people brought by.

In the 1950s, he started buying cars, working on them a bit and then reselling them.

“I figured out you could make a lot more selling them than you could working on them,” Wilson says.

In 1956, he went into the used-car business, where there was still plenty of tinkering to be done, especially since he repaired everything he sold.

Since the mid-1970s, Wilson has run his business from an old two-bay service station on Academy Street. He had the pumps taken out, filled the lot with cars and put up his sign.

Now, that sign is missing a few letters, but customers have no trouble finding him.

Wilson goes to car auctions twice a week, carefully selecting what goes on his lot. The lot is open Monday through Saturday, unless he takes a notion to play golf. That happens pretty regularly. But he doesn’t worry about missing a customer.

“If they want a car, they’ll come back,” he says.

At other times, he’s on the lot selling, and you’ll find him still raising hoods and analyzing a motor better than most computers.

“He has a lot of widow ladies who depend on him to keep their cars running, too. They bring him pies and cakes,” says Bill Vaughn, who has worked with Wilson since 1997. He’s 81.

The economy has slowed things down a bit.

Wilson is down to one bay, where he washes cars and tinkers with them when they need it. In the other bay, there’s a circle of well-worn chairs — recliners, mostly — some rescued from curbs.

That’s for his friends, although Wilson refers to them as “the loafers.”

Sometimes there are six or seven, but there’s been as many as 10. A few have passed on. Their individual photos hang on a wall in the office.

In the past decade, the loafers have become as much a part of the car-lot culture as the grease stains on the floor, the tools on the workbench, the small 8-ounce bottles of pop and the Nab crackers.

The youngest is 77. Wilson is the oldest.

Most have been customers. Donny Montgomery has bought 20 cars from Wilson. Bill Joyce came into the fold when he bought a truck.

Some are family, like Wilson’s brothers-in-law Grady Shelton and Floyd Martin. The others might as well be — Wilson says he’d do anything for them.

Loafing just came about naturally when Wilson’s friends retired and he didn’t. They looked for somewhere to go, and Wilson’s shop became the place.

There’s always something to talk about.

Between them, there are war veterans, cancer survivors, even a pro baseball player — Montgomery played for the Cleveland Indians in the 1950s.

When it’s too hot or too cold to hang out in the garage bay, they squeeze into the small office.

“If a customer comes in, we’ve been known to carry them into the restroom because there’s no room in the office,” Vaughn says.

The loafers usually show up mid-morning and stay until 2 p.m. Sometime in that span, they head to P&M Restaurant, a local truck stop that’s been around almost as long as Wilson has been selling cars.

Then, it’s back to the lot for more loafing.

Wilson doesn’t seem to mind the work.

He doesn’t take any medicine. In fact, he doesn’t even need glasses.

Plus, longevity runs in his family.

His mother lived to be 103½.

“When I was in my 50s, I thought about retiring a lot,” Wilson says. But then he got to be 65 and he just wasn’t ready.

At 88, he still isn’t.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com.