The Hilliard-Merrion partnership began on a snowy afternoon of the second Friday in January of 1959, at the counter in the parts and service department of Valley Ford at the corner of Lower Westfteld and Holyoke Streets in Holyoke. Hilliard had come to pick up his black '56 two-door Victoria hardtop, having left it that morning to be serviced.
"The two of us already sort of knew each other some," Merrion said later to curious people who'd seen them in action. Hilliard used his car a lot, which brought him often to the counter at the window in the service department where Merrion sat on his four-legged metal stool, the grey steel shelves of boxed small parts behind him. "You couldn't say that we were buddies. We'd never had a beer. But we weren't total strangers when I first went to work for Dan."
Hilliard had bought his car from Merrion's father. Pat Merrion had worked for twelve years as a salesman for John Casey, the last seven as sales manager, until his first stroke killed him as he would have wished but not so early at the age of forty-nine in February of the previous year, his oldest son's first year at UMass. Patrick Merrion's father, Seamus, had died at seventy-three in 1940, suffering his third and fatal stroke two years after his first. Pat, starting a new job at the Springfield Armory with a young wife and a new baby, Ambrose, at home, had also had to help his mother take care of Seamus. From that he had learned something he passed on to Ambrose. "If you're determined to die of a stroke, do your best to die of the first one.
Make it easier on your poor family."
John Casey did what he could to help out Pat's family, and it was a lot. Remembering, Merrion said to Casey's widow at his wake: "It was different in those days. People took care of each other. Their code was different. You looked out for your family and friends. They were all you had in the world. The same way you were all that they had."
The younger boy, Chris, was ten when his father dropped dead. His mother, Polly, hadn't held a job since she stopped being a sales clerk at the Forbes amp;. Wallace department store in Springfield to get married in a hurry in 1939. Casey had doubled the vacation pay Pat had accumulated; that was half of the $1,800 Bill Reed charged Polly for Pat's three-thousand-dollar funeral. "Pat was always a favorite of mine," Reed told her. "If Ford made hearses and flower-cars, mine'd be Fords I bought from Pat." Casey had expedited payment of the five-thousand-dollar group life-insurance policy Valley carried on each of its employees, close to two years' salary for a sales manager in those days. Mindful that base pay had represented less than half of Pat Merrion's average earnings and dead men earn few commissions and that a widow with a child at home could depend on less than $1,000 in Social Security benefits, Casey had also created the job for Amby as assistant service manager: twenty hours a week at $3.50 an hour.
"All I could work and stay in school at the same time, like my mother wanted. And health insurance for the three of us, too -we were very grateful for that," Merrion said to Casey's widow in the fall of 1990.
"Your husband was a good man, Jo, a fine man. Everyone who knew him thought the world of John. He cared about what happened to the people who worked for him. He treated us as friends, not employees, and we've all lost one tonight."
In those days the normal service interval between oil changes and lube jobs was every fifteen hundred miles. Hilliard was a careful owner.
Mernon saw him frequently. "This car's gotta outlive the payments.
Oil's a lot cheaper'n new rings and valves," Hilliard would say, every three weeks or so, writing a check for twenty-eight dollars and change for Marfak chassis lubrication, a new Motorcraft oil filter, and six quarts of crankcase oil as Amby stamped another service order PAID and punched the register.
"They'd love you in Texas," Merrion said that winter day, having seen a Transcript column about the coming election that low-rated Hilliard's chances. "You oughta go down there and run. If they only knew who you are, how much oil we got you buying from them, you wouldn't have to bother with alderman here they'd make you the governor."
"Hey, what can I tell you?" Hilliard said. "The political bug is expensive. You run for office, you're out every night in your car. You gotta be; people expect it. Depend on a car like that, go through two sets of tires a year, you gotta take care of the thing. You better; otherwise some dark night you get stranded. Hafta walk home in the rain."
"How's that thing look, anyway?" Merrion said, ringing up the payment and lifting the change tray out of the register to put the check in the empty drawer underneath it. It had been a quiet day, the weather keeping the customers away.
