It’s easy to become nostalgic about life in a small town like Penn Yan, and it’s also pretty easy to get dreamy-eyed when recalling your first car.
Those are just two of the reasons some folks in the Penn Yan area might check out the auction at the former home of McCredy Chevrolet on Elm Street this week.
The Chevrolet and Oldsmobile dealership closed its doors recently when General Motors terminated the local franchise along with over 1,000 others nationwide.
The empty showroom, parking lot, shop and parts counter will remind some of the local impact the dealership has had, but others might also recall the impact the Penn Yan business had on auto dealerships in a broader area. Still others will fondly recall a small town businessman who loved making deals and who just adored the day-to-day encounters with a variety of customers.
While the name over the bowtie emblem for the past 20 years has been McCredy, no one knows more about the local impact or the history of the Chevrolet dealership than Edwin Worden, who took over ownership of Jolley Chevrolet from his father-in-law and continued to build the dealership until his retirement. He still owns the real estate, which is up for sale.
Worden says he’d like to see some kind of auto dealership take over the buildings.
“It’s too bad that it’s leaving.” he said recently, later adding, “I wish I was 20 years younger so I could jump in and get something done.”
Worden was still in high school 75 years ago when Robert Jolley moved his business from a location on Seneca Street to Elm Street (See Pages Past on Page B1). Jolley came to Penn Yan from Geneva in 1923 to start the local business with E.G. Hopkins. In 1935 Jolley, who had bought out Hopkins’s interest, moved to Elm Street with plans for a “modern super-service station with overhead doors giving easy access to autos for their every need.”
After attending Colgate University on a football scholarship and serving as a bomber pilot during World War II, Worden returned to Penn Yan and joined the family business after marrying Suzanne (“the best thing that ever happened to me”) Jolley.
He soon became successful, and he loved the work. “I used to sell more cars than (dealers in) Geneva and Canandaigua, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was a different time then,” Worden recalled.
Perhaps the biggest contribution Worden and Jolley Chevrolet made to auto dealers around the state, and perhaps the country, came from an opportunity brought to him by Art Wolcott, who was just beginning his own business, Seneca Foods.
Wolcott told Worden he needed cars for some of his workforce, but he couldn’t afford to buy them. He wanted to find a way to lease some vehicles. Worden says they went to the banks and they went to General Motors and the response was basically, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So I went into it myself,” he says simply.
“It worked out well. It was good for them and good for me. When both people are satisfied, you’ve got a good deal,” he explains.
After that initial lease agreement, it didn’t take long for another local company to approach Worden for an agreement. Bob Hinson, owner of the rapidly growing Penn Yan Express, wanted to craft a deal too. That company ended up leasing between 25 and 30 cars at a time.
It was profitable for Worden, but it was also fun, he says.
Before long, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile zone representatives were knocking on his door, showing interest in the program he had created. He trained other corporate people and dealers in the lease program.
“It was good for me. A small town dealer who wanted to do more volume,” he says, adding, It was good to be the first at something. Nobody knew how to lease out cars so you could make money.”
Another innovation that Worden started at Jolley Chevrolet was large volume parts business. “No dealership wanted to deal with parts and service,” he says, explaining that to be successful, it was important to be comfortable with change. “If you couldn’t change with it, you were in trouble,” he says.
Making deals and taking care of customers weren’t the only things that kept Worden busy. In the 1950s, Jolley Chevrolet and other Chevrolet dealerships were involved in soap box derby competitions. Chevrolet furnished the axles and wheels and the boys built their cars to the height and cockpit specifications. Worden loaded 10 to 12 of the derby cars on the company’s stake stuck and drove them to Rochester, where the boys competed. On the way home, they stopped at Roseland. “They’d have a great time,” he said.
No doubt some of those boys returned to Jolley Chevrolet in the 1960s to buy a Camero, Cutlass, 442, Nova, or El Camino. But it was more than about making the deal. It was about being a different class of businessman. “The interesting part about the business is the people that you wouldn’t otherwise know,” he explains, adding later, “A small town person who runs a business is a different class of guy.”
