SOUTH ROYALTON โ When Royal Auto Parts opened in 1983, David Whitney wasn’t planning to be involved in its day-to-day operations.
He’d been working as a mechanic at what was then called the Corner Mobil and is now the Corner Stop Mini Mart, a gas station and convenience store. His boss, James Blakeman, asked Whitney if he wanted to be a partner in a new auto parts store.
At the time, the nearest parts store was in Bethel, and there were plenty of independent mechanics, farmers and do-it-yourselfers right in Royalton who needed parts. Herb Crawford’s Autoland, a Chrysler dealership, was still up and running where the town offices are now.
Being part owner of a business was heady stuff for a mechanic in his early 20s who mostly just wanted to keep turning wrenches.
“I didn’t ever think I could afford to be a partner, but he made it happen for me,” Whitney said of Blakeman.
The two of them partnered with Richard Sweeney and Royal Auto Parts opened in the fall of 1983 on Chelsea Street, in the former Brock’s Atlantic filling station, where the driveway to Vermont Law and Graduate School is today.
“We all went and got loans and got the business started,” Whitney said.
Little did Whitney know at the time that Royal Auto would become his life’s work. Eventually joined by his life partner, Eunice Gavin, and aided by his mother, Marion Whitney, he ran Royal Auto until it closed on Thursday.
Whitney would like to have kept the store open longer. It was done in by larger corporate forces that made it impossible to continue, he said. Its closing leaves a hole in the area’s automotive and mechanical landscape.
“I’m really sad about it, because I’ve been going, not since it opened, but for a long, long time,” Tunbridge farmer Gary Mullen said in a phone interview.
He would go to Royal Auto for basic supplies for oil changes and other routine maintenance, but also to tap Whitney’s knowledge and experience. Whitney was able to source a tire for Mullen’s manure spreader last month, for example.
Mullen has had to go to tractor dealerships and other places for parts, and at every parts counter there’s a go-to person, he said. For almost anything with wheels and a motor, Whitney has been that person.
“Dave was one of those people, he always made it work,” Mullen said.
What’s more, he counts Whitney and Gavin as friends, people he enjoys visiting with and talking to.
The store is a kind of community outpost, primarily because Whitney is community-minded, a lifelong South Royalton resident.
When Royal Auto opened, the partners hired a manager, Steve Pratt, of Bethel, to run it.
“He was an excellent manager,” Whitney said.
But after three or four years, Pratt had the opportunity to buy a parts shop in Montpelier, which he ran as S&L Auto Supply (S&L for Steve and Lisa, Pratt’s wife). Whitney ended up spending more time at Royal Auto, “temporarily,” he said.
“As the years progressed, we tried to get managers to run the store, and it didn’t work out,” Whitney said. “So guess who came back, and that’s kind of the way it went.”
In 1997, Robert McShinsky, the owner of the original location, had an offer to purchase the property from the law school that Royal Auto could not match. Blakeman and Sweeney didn’t want to purchase a building, so Whitney searched for the future home of the business himself.
After looking around town with his father, Paul Whitney, he settled on the location of a carpet store, Marty’s Home Decorating, on Alexander Place, a short dead-end street in South Royalton.
Behind the parts counter is a framed montage of photographs from the renovation. Family and friends helped insulate the building and set up the store. When it came time to move, local mechanics and townspeople came by with their trucks and helped shift the fixtures and inventory to the new location.
“We had the whole town, basically, helping us,” Gavin said.
It operated there since July 4, 1997. Gavin had been working at a local bank, but a year after the move, she went to work at the parts store.
For much of that time, Royal Auto was a busy place. There are shop bays on the back where Whitney would install tires, and the concentration of shops and farms in the area were enough to keep the business going, though profit margins were never huge.
“In the day, this business provided income for three or four households,” Gavin said.
The store also delivered parts to shops and other accounts. Timeliness is essential to the auto parts business. Often, when a mechanic calls a parts store in the morning, he wants to be able to get a part by the afternoon, and an afternoon call usually results in a delivery first thing the next morning.
For many years, Royal Auto met this standard. It was supplied by Sanel, a Concord, N.H.-based chain that operated around 30 stores, but also supplied 10 to 15 independents such as Royal Auto. With warehouses in Concord and Burlington, parts were never far away.
“They weren’t huge, by any means, but they had some good warehouses and they took care of their customers,” Whitney said. “They were excellent,” he added. “They had a little bit of everything” and “people you could talk to.”
But as parts suppliers consolidated, and moved online, Sanel wasn’t big enough to continue and it joined with NAPA, a national parts supplier. Under the NAPA deal, Sanel would no longer supply independent shops.
That was in May 2018, giving Whitney until August to find a new supplier.
“That’s what really put the hurt on us,” he said.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Gavin said.
They signed on with Auto Plus, which supplied parts from a warehouse in Avon, Mass., southwest of Boston. The greater distance made it harder to get parts in a timely way.
Then in January 2023, Auto Plus, owned by billionaire investor and businessman Carl Icahn, filed for bankruptcy. It was purchased by Factory Motor Parts, which closed the Avon warehouse. Parts to Royal Auto now would come from Branford, Conn., but would pass through a warehouse in Newington, N.H., on the way to South Royalton, which added a day to the delivery time.
Royal Auto also sourced parts from a company with a location in Albany, N.Y., which helped deal with some of the delays. But that company recently decided to curtail its delivery routes because of the cost of fuel, and Royal Auto was cut off.
“That’s when we decided that without the two companies we wouldn’t be able to survive,” Whitney said. While Royal Auto still has a base of customers, “we lost a lot of business because of not being about to supply specialty shops in a timely fashion,” he said.
A larger chain can pull parts from multiple nearby stores to get a shop what it needs, Whitney said. There’s an O’Reilly Auto Parts in Bethel, and a NAPA and a Federated in Randolph, and Lebanon, with multiple chains, is 20 minutes away.
Auto parts sales also have moved online, with big outlets like RockAuto and a myriad of specialty sites that sell parts for specific brands, such as Quadratec for Jeeps and FCP Euro for European cars. Private sales through eBay also draw buyers away from brick-and-mortar shops.
Though dark clouds had been gathering, the decision to close came about quickly, and started to reach customers in early April. Only in the past couple of weeks has the shop posted a notice on the door.
“This was an extremely difficult decision because we value and appreciate our long-term relationships,” the notice’s closing paragraph says. “I want to extend my deepest appreciation for your trust and partnership over the past 43 years. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the people of this community.”
Longtime customers are coming to terms with losing both a cherished resource and a place to visit the friends who own it.
Parts were often cheaper at Royal Auto, and thanks to Whitney’s expertise, they’d order the right part 99% of the time, said Kyle Blakeman, who owns Blakeman’s Towing and Recovery out of a shop on Route 110 in Tunbridge.
“The knowledge is the biggest thing to me,” Blakeman said.
And the customer service. “If I need something on a weekend, (or) blew a hydraulic line on a Saturday” after the shop closed, “Dave went and made me a hydraulic line.”
He recalled a time when Whitney met him at the parts store at 3 a.m., when parts deliveries would come in, so Blakeman could get a brake caliper to put on his truck for a trip that day.
“There’s been so many instances like that,” Blakeman said.
Whitney and Gavin would sometimes leave a part out so he could pick it up after hours, Mullen said.
He was afraid it would sound like a cliche, but Gavin and Whitney also are “pillars of the community,” said Mullen, who’s a Tunbridge Selectboard member himself. Gavin sat on the School Board, and Whitney was a longtime fire captain and chief.
“I don’t know what they’re going to be doing, but they’re definitely going to be missed at the parts store,” he said.
Whitney, 65, and Gavin, 67, said they plan to liquidate the parts inventory, and then get jobs. They’ve both had health issues in recent years, but kept the doors open.
Whitney said he isn’t sure what he’ll do with the property. They also own an apartment building next door.
This week, as customers came in to pick up orders, they also talked over the closing with a sense of grim but amiable resignation.
“It’s been a family affair, and people have been good to us,” Gavin said.
“I’ll miss the customers the most,” Whitney said. “We’ve made a lot of friends over the years.”
