My First BMW
My first experience
My first experience with BMWs was in 1973. I had special ordered a 1973 Triumph TR 6 roadster. It was bright red with black leather and a black top. I thought I was Mario Andretti zooming around in my TR 6! It would fly, I thought, until one afternoon on a nice curvy road outside of Athens. I was at my limit taking this sharp curve as fast as I could when a boxy little 2 door sedan passed me on the OUTSIDE of the curve and practically disappeared from me. Totally bewildered about what happened, I chased the car down until I caught it at a red light. It was a BMW 2002?! I knew that if a car could run and handle the way it did when it embarrassed me in that curve, that I had to have one. My TR 6 hit the For Sale section of the paper the next week! I found a real nice 1972 BMW 2002 a week or so later. It was Malaga (a hue of burgundy) with tan leather and I was hooked. I drove the heck out of that car for about 2 years and it never missed a beat. When I decided to sell it and get a new one, I advertised it in the Atlanta Journal for sale section and a couple from South Carolina called and met me and bought my 2002 in the DARK one night and paid MORE than I had paid for it! (I thought then "that there might be a future for me in BMW sales"). I went on to have a 1975 2002, a 1976 2002, a 1978 530i, and a 1979 528i over the years.
So I joined Athens BMW
In 1983 a friend mentioned that Mr. Phil Hughes was going to build a BMW dealership in Athens. Well, I started calling him about a job with BMW, and after a few months, he hired me before he had even built the dealership! We opened in April 1984 and I have been here ever since. My experiences over these last 31 years of driving BMW's and the last 20 years at Athens BMW have been fantastic and I would not be in the car business at all unless it was with BMW!