Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [42]
Not surprisingly, it was hard for Gabby to find a female mentor in the tire industry. There were almost no women in the business. So she looked elsewhere for a role model and found an older woman, Dorothy Finley, owner of a local beer distributorship in Tucson. Dorothy was an Arizona icon who turned from beer to philanthropy, serving on dozens of nonprofit boards. It was Dorothy who led efforts to stop the closure of Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, saving thousands of jobs. Dorothy became Gabby’s hero and confidante. They were an unlikely match, an octogenarian and a twenty-something, yet they connected with each other effortlessly.
Gabby knew she didn’t want to stay in the tire business forever. Sometimes she felt antsy about that and sometimes she was more patient. She was pretty grateful, though. She recognized early on that she was learning skills in management, advocacy, and marketing that would serve her well up the road, no matter where her next stop would be. Running the tire business, she saw how vital it was to look at details, to harness the power of close observation.
At El Campo, she learned how to read a tire the way she’d eventually read legislation—with an eye toward identifying the weak spots. In a town where temperatures often topped 110 degrees in the summer, hot roads were tough on tires. It was in Arizona where the tires on Ford Explorers—the Ford Firestone ATX and the Wilderness AT—were first found to be deficient. Gabby and her employees saw how the tires repeatedly failed their customers. Eventually, the tires would be recalled nationwide.
In her first year at El Campo, Gabby increased annual sales by $1 million, and stopped the losses. She suspected, however, that such good news could be fleeting. She saw that the tire business was consolidating in the hands of a few national retailers. Family-owned businesses like El Campo would eventually be squeezed out. So once she’d gotten the business out of the hole, she decided that the best hope for preserving the family assets was to find a buyer for the whole operation.
She’d go to conventions of tire dealers, mingling with all the middle-aged men, trying to figure out who might be a good suitor for El Campo. She eventually set up meetings with both Goodyear and Firestone, and in July 1999, agreed to sell El Campo to Goodyear. Wisely, she sold only the business itself and not the properties where the stores were located. She figured that land values were going to keep rising in Tucson, and she was right. Her parents would be forever grateful to Gabby. They’d be able to enjoy retirement without having to worry about their finances.
Gabby also looked after El Campo’s employees. She worked with Goodyear to make sure that her workers got to keep their jobs and retain their seniority. Some had been with the company almost four decades. Even those employees who weren’t sure what to make of Gabby during her tenure were, by the end, very appreciative of her fierce advocacy for them. “You could have just walked away,” more than a few told her, “but you didn’t. Thank you.”
As the sale of El Campo was being finalized, Gabby attended a meeting of the Arizona Women’s Political Caucus. She went mostly out of curiosity. She had no firm plans to become a politician. But as she talked to the women there, she wondered if elected office might be the right next step for her. She’d been a Republican in her early twenties, but she now found herself in the camp with centrist Democrats. She felt more at ease with them, given her support of a woman’s right to choose, and her belief that health care for the poor in Arizona had to be expanded. She’d been saddened, for instance, to learn that poor women