Topic: It's painful to watch passing parade of change

[Bezor]

http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/30/MNIK14D26N.DTL&type=business&tsp=1 



It's painful to watch passing parade of change

When times start to get tough, you begin to notice that some of the businesses and people you thought would always be around are starting to fade away.

Two old companies made big changes this month. One is a new car dealer on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco for nearly 60 years. The other is a ship company that has been operated out of either San Francisco or Oakland since the Gold Rush.

Everyone who grew up in the Bay Area or lived here for a while has heard of Ellis Brooks Motors, mostly through an advertising jingle that seemed to be on radio and television day and night:

See Ellis Brooks today

For your Chevrolet

Corner of Bush and Van Ness!

He's got a deal for you

Oh what a deal for you

A Chevy deal that you will like the best!

The music was upbeat - it sounded just like "See the USA in Your Chevrolet" and the singer sounded just like Dinah Shore. In fact, the voice was a Dinah sound-alike, a local girl named Rose Marie Brunell, and the peppy band music came from some of the boys who used to play in the Cirque Room in the Fairmont Hotel.

Ellis Brooks Sr. was among the first car dealers advertising on local TV. Many of the ads featured Brooks himself, sitting alongside five big cans of coffee.

His widow, Marie Brooks, remembers Ellis looking right into the camera. "He'd say, "I'll give you 5 pounds of Hills Brothers Coffee absolutely free if you can make a better deal than at Ellis Brooks!"

Ellis Brooks and his Chevrolets were part of the fabric of the Bay Area life, background music to life in the city, like foghorns, or sirens, or all-news radio.

Ellis Brooks, which now sells other General Motors cars as well as Chevrolets, is quitting the new-car business in the middle of December. Now the business will sell only used cars.

It's a complicated story, involving an underfunded pension fund, an argument with the union, a difficult business climate in San Francisco, the decline of the old Van Ness Auto Row, and on and on. But all business retrenchments and cutbacks are complicated.

The bottom line, says Marie Brooks, is that people on the West Coast, and particularly in the Bay Area, prefer foreign cars. When Ellis Brooks stops selling new cars, there will be only one other dealer selling American cars in San Francisco: San Francisco Ford Lincoln Mercury on Van Ness Avenue. "Once there were 34 car dealers in San Francisco," she said. Forty, 50 years ago, Ellis Brooks sold 3,000 cars a year; more recently it was 300 to 500. This year, sales were down 60 percent.

Marie got in the car business in 1946 working in the office of a Hudson dealer. "You know those Hudsons, particularly the '48 model, were 10 years ahead of their time," she said.

Hudson cars, even the speedy Hudson Hornet, are barely remembered, but who would have thought San Francisco would be without a Chevrolet dealership?

Chevys were the kind of car the guy across the street drove. Your Uncle Jack had a Chevy and so did your high school girlfriend's father. Chronicle company cars were always Chevys, big, white, serviceable cars, a bit boxy looking. The older ones were beat up looking, but reliable, like the photographers and reporters who drove them.

Ellis Brooks has been a family business. Marie took over in 1963 when Ellis Sr. became ill and died. Marie Brooks is the president and John Brooks, the founder's grandson, is general manager.

Marie said the company couldn't go on the way it was going. "It's a big change," she said. "Many longtime employees will be out of a job. It hurts. But it had to happen."