Westerville Automotive’s longevity pushed by satisfaction

Zach Shipley, an auto technician at Westerville Automotive, 31 E. Main St., completes a brake job March 29.

Editor’s Note: This is the 12th in a sequence about iconic Westerville businesses that are featured month-to-month.

Westerville Automotive, 31 E. Most important St., has been servicing customers’ cars for 25 several years.

Ken Maginn, manager, mentioned the enterprise focuses on the group, as perfectly as customer gratification.

“We have several right here who arrived from dealership positions (seeking) more local community-based, compact-company-dependent (concentration) to acquire treatment of the buyers and have the loyalty of clients,” he reported. “What we check out to do is be a portion of the neighborhood. That is what sets us apart. We actually try to draw business enterprise from in Westerville. We have a whole lot of prospects exterior Westerville, but we like currently being element of the neighborhood remaining a smaller organization.”

Maginn, who has been with Westerville Automotive for 20 years, claimed owner Richard Aumann bought the spot at 5591 Westerville Street a handful of many years prior to the Uptown area that was opened in 1997.

“This constructing we have photos when it was in fact an automotive dealership way back again in the early 1900s,” he claimed. “I have a photograph of a Hudson dealership in 1915, I think. It just says ‘Westerville Vehicle Sales.’ In the ’40s and ’50s, it was a dealership Vern Bailey owned.”

This was the first new-car dealership in Westerville, built and owned by Henry Karg, a Westerville builder, according to Don Foster, a local historian who's retired from Otterbein University. Ken Maginn, manager of Westerville Automotive, said the building in the photo represents "the bones" of the current business.

He mentioned a fire at the setting up in the 1930s. In 2017, it underwent a important façade rework, featuring a retro seem.

Maginn explained Scott McClure, who has been with the firm given that the mid-1980s, is the standard supervisor of the two places, including that McClure is a common on Vehicle Smarts Radio on Saturday mornings on 610 WTVN with host Dan “Boots” Longenette.

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