Stewart Bros. Garage in Jacksonville marks 92 years
By Marcel Pacatte
Stewart Brothers Garage
Those three words all relate to each other, but together, in that order, they tell a story. The order is important because the most important word comes first. To know anything about what happens at the business on North Clay Avenue in Jacksonville — and why it has been happening for 92 years — starts with the Stewart part of the equation.
Other families have had garages and other families have been in business for 92 years or better — the du Ponts, for example, have been mixing chemicals in Delaware for 225 years — and other families even have done things on North Clay right here in Jacksonville, but the Stewarts are a local example of what it takes to sustain a business: hard work, savvy, fearlessness, foresight, integrity, versatility, planning, maybe some luck and definitely a generosity of spirit. All of that, and being good at what they do. And did we mention hard work?
Which brings us to the next word: brothers. You don’t have that one without the first one; they’re too closely intertwined. There are five Stewart brothers in the original generation with the business, four of whom reached adulthood. A few of them banded together to work at what is now the garage but what had its start as a hauling, cartage and trucking business. But the brothers don’t tell the whole story; there were and are sisters and wives, children and cousins.
But the brothers are in the name, so we’ll go there first. Of the four brothers, the brother of all brothers, the one by all accounts who was the one who built up the place and held it together and made it into something, was brother No. 2, Arvil Stewart. He got things rolling and then cut in the others — as well as then cutting in some of the sisters and some of the spouses and then those in the generation below and the one after that — because if this has been anything over all 92 years, it has been a Stewart family operation. And it was Arvil Stewart, all agree, who was the glue. The original glue. Yes, the O.G.
Greg Stewart is the current glue, the official owner of the place along with his wife, Kim Stewart, and in talking about the business corrects himself after saying three generations of Stewarts have been involved: “Really, five generations have been running around the place.” Kim Stewart nods in agreement, and has stories of her own to tell about the years she has been pulling up to the bays and politely toot-tooting her horn for service.
Which brings us to that last word, garage. As key as it is — what they do, fix and service cars and trucks — that last word almost becomes incidental against the other two, because the Stewart brothers sort of backed into the auto and truck service part of things while running the trucking and the hauling business. And who the Stewarts are and what they mean to each other always has been more important than what they do. Just talk to any of them for more than a few minutes and that’s plain to see.
Which is funny, because “what they do” they always have done well, so well that the business part always has taken care of itself.
But don’t make the mistake in thinking that it all just sort of happened. Many shoulders were pressed hard against many wheels. Getting the contract to supply all the coal to the Illinois State Hospital, when the complex was all heated by coal, might have been a fluke. Keeping it, though, only comes from hard work done well.
Getting hired to haul the steel that went into all the bridges on Interstate 57 might have been a fluke and could have happened to any number of companies. Keeping the work, and getting hired to haul the material to build other bridges elsewhere? Hard work done well.
They hauled just about anything. The coal. Wood. Ice.
Running frozen chickens to California and coming back with semi loads of produce? Yes — it that what was needed.
But 92 years doesn’t happen simply by loading trucks and taking those loads somewhere. There was playing hunches, positioning and thinking.
Such as understanding that coal was on its way out as a heat source and then having the foresight to pick up contracts to haul rock salt to spread on icy roads. Something has to go into the trucks and be taken somewhere it’s needed. Some of all of this may have been luck at the start, but when Greg Stewart and his uncle, Jack Stewart, talk about the photo of Jack as a toddler in Arvil’s arms brandishing a check that was for $20,000 or maybe it was for $25,000, a payment for a job done well, that goes beyond luck.
And then Greg and Jack talk about the size of Arvil’s hands, hands that were made by hard work, and the awe and pride they have for those hands and the work that shaped them is evident. This was a man who made things, who made things happen, and the legacy continues on North Clay to this day.
But we’re too many words into this to not have mentioned Sonny Stewart, the glue who slid in between Arvil and Greg.
And for that, we go to Sonny’s obituary. He died three years ago at 87, and Kim and Greg Stewart seem a bit surprised that it has been that long, even though they measure every day without him.
Here is what we need to know about Greg’s dad: “Sonny was employed by Stewart Brothers Trucking, where he was able to work side by side with father, Arvil, for many years. Prior to becoming an owner of the family business, Sonny learned the ins and outs of the trucking industry at a young age. He simultaneously owned/operated Phillip Morris Liquor in Jacksonville with wife, Jean. After his trucking career, he shifted gears to Stewart Brothers Auto Repair, where he oversaw every detail until his passing. Though there are many, the brightest spot of Sonny’s legacy will be the multi-generational family business he leaves in the well-trained hands of his only son, as well as the hand-picked staff who will continue to operate the business from day to day.”
Sonny. Arvil. Greg. “Jackie” — although only family, and only those who knew Jack when he was young, can get away with calling him that. All Stewarts, all who at one time or another have toiled and sweat to make the place go, to make it something.
Jack Stewart tells the story about one of the longtime employees — a name Greg Stewart instantly recognizes, almost whistling over not having heard the name in such a long time — and how Arvil told the man, upon hiring him, to be at work at 5 the next morning and how the man showed up at 5 a.m. and found Arvil already hard at work, already having sweat through two shirts.
They both know the story, and they know what it means to them, to the family, to the business.
Greg talks about people having stopped by the garage in more recent years to introduce themselves and talk about having worked, years and decades earlier, for Arvil, or for Sonny, and what an education it was.
A lot of people have come and gone over the years but the ones who hung around and who come back are the ones who rose to the challenge of being expected to work hard.
And that includes Jack, who, Greg warned, had been running around the place his whole life. “I told you he’d have some stories,” Greg said at one point.
One Jack-related story involved him when he was about 5 or 6 and his keen interest in watching the inside part of weighing loads on the scales. One hesitates to say Jack was in the way, but he definitely was edging in to see how it all came together. One day Arvil told Jack that if Jack was going to be around the scales that Arvil was going to put Jack to work, and that’s how Jack learned to fill out the tickets after loads were weighed.
Same with how he started driving: Jack Stewart rode along because he wanted to see, and soon enough he was spelling a weary driver and, soon after, running loads on his own. This was back before truckers needed commercial licenses, but someone in the family did take him for his chauffeur’s license, which truck drivers did need.
Jack said he feels that having been around the shop — the Stewarts, though, all call it the office, which it also is — from an early age explains him: “That’s the reason I have the personality I do. I was raised by a bunch of truck drivers.”
His grandfather, Arvil, was tough, and not afraid to put in a hard day’s work — Greg remembered the lesson that when a customer brought in his truck when something went wrong that that truck was that man’s business and means of making money and so you worked to fix it swiftly, and fix it once, so the man could get back on the road and back to earning his living: “If this truck’s not working, he’s not making money.”
Greg, about that, noted: “We didn’t quit at 5.”
A small lesson, perhaps, but just one example of what has kept the place going for 92 years, and a philosophy customers noticed and appreciated.
Another lesson, one that doesn’t have anything to do with getting under the hood of a vehicle, involves a box that Greg Stewart found one day, filled with stacks and stacks of receipts. “What are these?”
Receipts for coal for people with children who didn’t have money to pay at the time they needed the coal, which heated their homes. They got the coal, and their children were warm, and they were told to come back when they had the money and could afford to pay for it. Some probably did, but there’s that box. “He wasn’t going to let them go cold,” Greg said.
A lesson for Greg in how to be a human as you run your business.
You also learned that as a Stewart you played as hard as you worked. Arvil Stewart was featured in a story about the 83-year-old great-grandfather who pitched all five games over two weekends in the 1985 Jacksonville Church League tournament, which his team won. He went 6 for 10 in the tournament: “That was my hottest streak all year,” he said. He said he planned to play as long as his arm and eyes held out.
And then there is a memory from Jack Stewart from when he was young enough to stand on the front seat of a pickup, leaning against the back of the seat. He stood between — but didn’t come between — Sonny and Jean when they went on dates before they married, a union that lasted almost 69 years and ended with their deaths in 2023 just six weeks apart.
“Everybody liked Sonny,” Jack Stewart remembered. Greg, agreeing, added, “He was a little more rambunctious than grandpa.”
But he was good with customers, which is a good trait to have, and one he shares with the current manager of the garage, Pat Stephens, who has been with the Stewarts for a dozen or so years. Stephens, Greg said, is a perfect combination of old school and new school. Sonny was more old school than new, but there’s something to that.
Greg said, “Sonny probably forgot more than I’ll ever learn.”
But one thing no Stewart will forget is the thing that keeps coming up when you talk to them, the thing that everything runs back toward, the thing that matters most, the thing that all of them said explicitly at different points in different contexts about different Stewarts: “It’s about family.”
Kim, who married in, talks about that.
There’s room. And it’s a privilege none of them take lightly. “Sonny would do anything for you,” she said, although she said he also might give you some lighthearted trouble while doing it.
But she knew that if she suspected something was amiss under the hood that all she had to do was glide up and toot the horn and Sonny or someone would be out to see what she needed.
You don’t lean on the horn. Just a toot.
For that lesson we turn to the teller, Jack, speaking of Arvil, who once demonstrated how to dominate when it came to wielding a wrench when changing big semi tires: “It’s not how hard you hit it, it’s where you hit it.”
