Our father, Lowry Molloy (1911-1998), grew up on the family farm about 2 miles Southwest of Hollis with no electricity or running water. He was part of the first class to graduate from Westview High School. He attended Cordell Christian College the only year it operated, and married our Mother, Rosella Oleta Burk in 1931.
Dad was a self-taught mechanic and a good salesman. To earn some extra money during the Great Depression, he often worked at night at a cotton gin in Hollis for 20¢ an hour. He also worked on tractors, farm machinery, and automobiles in his spare time, and quickly gained a reputation as a capable, honest mechanic. A few years before the start of World War II, he was hired as a mechanic by L. E. Stinson, who owned and operated Hollis Farm Supply, the International Harvester dealer and sold Farmall tractors and International pickups and trucks. In those days, Hollis Farm Supply was located in the former Kraft Cheese Plant building, which would later become the REA (Rural Electrification Association), across the alley North from M. B. Dixon’s auto parts store and garage. Mr. Stinson soon recognized Dad’s abilities, and he was promoted to shop foreman, service manager, and eventually became the general manager.
Early in 1941, our family moved to Snyder, OK and Dad began selling advertising for the Oklahoma Times Publishing Company. 6 weeks later, we moved to Carnegie, Oklahoma, where Dad was hired to manage Truitt Hardware, which was also an International Harvester dealer. Truitt Hardware also operated a propane business, and Dad earned a little extra money by driving a propane truck to Oklahoma City at night to bring back propane. Truitt Hardware also sold and serviced Electrolux gas refrigerators, which were very popular for people without electricity.
Shortly after World War II started, we moved back to Hollis, where Dad went to work for Mr. Stinson again. Since the war effort required automobile and farm implement manufacturers to retool their factories to build planes and tanks and military vehicles, there were no longer new civilian cars, trucks, tractors and farm machinery available. Dad realized that if farmers couldn’t replace their trucks and tractors, they had to keep the prewar equipment running. This required a dependable supply of repair parts. Some dealers regarded the parts department as a necessary nuisance. They expected the sales department to generate enough profit to pay their overhead, but suddenly the parts and service departments had to become the backbone of the business. Dad always considered the parts department to be the potential primary profit-maker. He came to that conclusion during the Great Depression, because when the economy is bad, people must still buy repair parts to keep their equipment working.
When we moved back to Hollis, Mr. Stinson was just completing construction of a new white frame building on Jones Street – a half-block East of City Hall. Before long, even without new equipment to sell, the parts business soon outgrew the space in the new building on Jones Street, so the parts department moved across the alley to a much larger brick building on the North Side of Broadway, between Oscar Bryant’s service station and the Ward Brothers’ Bakery. The service department then took over the entire frame building on Jones Street.
Some of the scarcest parts were ball and roller bearings. When bearings wear out, machines are useless, but with new bearings, the machine can last for many years. When Dad couldn’t get bearings from International Harvester (IH), he would use the bearing part number instead of the IH part number and go directly to the bearing manufacturer (such as Timken, New Departure, etc.) which supplied the bearings to IH, and locate other sources which still had those bearings or their equivalent in stock, since the same bearings were often used in other types of equipment. He did whatever was needed to get parts and keep the farmers’ equipment operating. Before long, Dad would often receive calls from other International Harvester dealers who heard that he had parts which no one else seemed able to find.
In 1944, Dad and a silent partner purchased the John Deere dealership in Hollis from Joe Smith. This business was in an excellent location Southeast of Kirby Corner, and across East Broadway from Paul Metcalf’s Grocery. At the time, the original building had just a handful of parts bins and a very small parts inventory. Mr. Smith had operated the business with just one mechanic and one parts man.
All this was long before the days of computers, of course, but Dad initiated a parts card perpetual inventory system, with every part number in stock listed on a separate 5x8-inch card, with spaces for a date and the balance of parts on hand. There were tens of thousands of those cards carefully filed beneath the parts counter. Our Mother went to work in the parts department, and she also soon became an expert on John Deere parts. Each card had the physical location of the part on hand, such as G-311, along with its price. After looking up the part number in a John Deere parts catalog, it was simply a matter of pulling up the particular card for that part number, and then going to the parts bin to retrieve the item. As we recall, it was Mother’s idea to place some parts, such as special bolts, screws, springs and other small hardware in glass jars which screwed into lids fastened to wooden rails along the sides of the parts bins. Each jar had a number painted on it and entered on the card.
When they were not waiting on customers, those who worked in the parts room were busy posting sales tickets to the inventory cards. Any part numbers which were reaching the minimum stock level were listed on a stock order form to replenish the stock. Instead of relying on an annual inventory, the cards allowed a continuous inventory to monitor the stock.
Mother liked to tell about one man who came in to pick up some parts. His tractor was in a shop in Gould or Vinson or somewhere for an overhaul, and he was sent to pick up the parts. He was buying a cylinder block, pistons, crankshaft bearings, and other things like the gaskets for a John Deere model A. Mother sent someone out to the warehouse to bring in the block and two pistons, and while she gathered up the other parts, she picked up two sets of piston rings, which were packaged in waxed paper envelopes. The customer asked her what was in those envelopes, and she told him, "Piston rings". He said, "I don’t know whether I need those or not." Mother assured him that if they were putting in a new block and pistons, he needed new piston rings, too.
Mother never actually disassembled a tractor, but she knew exactly what was inside, and we have no doubt that she could have overhauled a tractor. It took a little while, but gradually, the customers all realized that Mother was at least as well qualified as any man.
It wasn’t long before Dad had built up the parts business and filled the original building to overflowing. When World War II ended, and new farm equipment was available again, Dad expanded the business by buying the service station on the corner, tearing it down, and building a chain link fence around the lot. Dad always said he wanted a fence that was "horse-high, hog-low, and bull-strong." He had rigged up a tractor with a crane on it to handle heavy equipment (we nicknamed it the "spider catcher"), and we used the winch on that tractor to pull that fence tight and fastened it to 8-foot high steel posts. He also kept Blant McGee busy building new, custom-designed parts bins, and cabinets with wide, shallow drawers for gaskets.
Soon after that, Dad bought two old railroad boxcars and moved them behind the store, and eventually covered the space between them with a roof and made all of that into a warehouse. The building which had been Joe Smith’s warehouse was nearly doubled in size and made into a shop. Later, Dad acquired a building with another warehouse on it across the street North, then fenced and graveled the lot behind it. A few years later, he bought another lot near the East edge of Hollis, fenced and graveled it, and used it for overflow – mostly for used equipment.
After International Harvester announced they would stop manufacturing parts for the old Farmall Regular, F-12, F-14, F-20 and F-30 tractors, when Dad had an opportunity to take one of those old tractors as a trade-in, we would steam-clean it and disassemble it for parts – especially transmission cases, engine blocks and other castings. Some of those parts were useful, because normally a casting never wears out, but they can break. When serviceable castings are cleaned up and painted, they are often as good as new. Dad had some old Farmall parts catalogs and price lists, and he sold the used parts for half the price of the original parts.
When the store outgrew the building, he built another building on the East side, right next to the Motley Gin office, and opened up the wall between the two buildings to expand the parts room into that building. Dad briefly became a Kaiser/Frazer automobile dealer, then later a Nash dealer for a while, but his heart was always in the farm implement business.
All of this happened before there were dial telephones in Hollis. The phone number at the Southwest Farm Store was 114, and our phone number at home was 86.
Dad was active in the Kiwanis Club and the Chamber of Commerce, and served one term as a Hollis City Councilman. He was always active in serving His Lord, serving the Hollis Church of Christ for many years as a deacon, church treasurer, song leader and Bible teacher. He also served on the founding board of directors for a Christian College which began at Bartlesville, OK and later moved to Oklahoma City. That school later became Oklahoma Christian University. Dad was also on the founding board of directors for Westview Boys Home.
We fondly remember many of the people who worked with and for Dad through the years: William and Wiley Horton, J. R. Horton, Robert Browder, C. H. Brown, Van Gordon, Coz Richardson, James Estall, Ted Earls, Harry Reynolds, Horace Plumlee, and Jackie Amburn. Jackie Amburn eventually married C. H. Brown’s daughter, Janie, and many years later Jackie bought the property which had once been the Southwest Farm Store. He now operates Amburn Auto Service at that location and still uses those parts bins.
Following the death of his silent partner, Dad sold the Southwest Farm Store in 1958, and he and Mother moved to Lubbock, Texas, where he managed a propane carburetor manufacturing plant for several years. The inventor of that particular carburetor had an excellent idea for a new type of propane carburetor, but he needed someone to solve some nagging quality control problems and obtain U. L. (Underwriters Laboratory) certification. Dad was able to solve all of the production problems, and for several years, he traveled over much of the United States selling and servicing propane carburetion systems. During that same time, Dad was also serving as an elder and treasurer of the Southside Church of Christ in Lubbock.
About 1960, Mother was stricken with cancer and Dad opened a wholesale tire warehouse in Lubbock so that he could be nearby. After Mother died in 1963, Dad remarried the former Dorothy Vineyard and established an automobile garage in Slide, South of Lubbock. Later, he sold out the garage and they moved to Clovis, NM. He traveled all over West Texas and New Mexico for many years selling truck bumpers and tool boxes to pickup dealers.
Dad finally retired in Clovis, NM about 1979, and continued to be active in church work, teaching Bible classes and preaching occasionally. When his second wife, Dorothy, died in 1995, he remarried for the third time in 1996 to the former Wilda Wilson, and soon moved back to Lubbock, where he died on April 6, 1998. Wilda died in October, 2005.
After three heart attacks, cardiac artery bypass surgery three times, and three cardiac arrests, Ken Molloy received a heart transplant two weeks after his father died. Nelda was with our Dad when he died, and then traveled to California to be with Ken following his heart transplant. Nelda lived in Plano, Texas with Jack Thompson, her husband of 52 years, until her death on December 10, 2006. Ken Molloy has been retired from the United States Air Force since 1978 and now lives in Hayward, California with his wife, Pat, where they recently celebrated their 53rd anniversary.
