Acadiana People: Tool truck keeps Herndon close to the auto shop

 Acadiana People: Tool truck keeps Herndon close to the auto shop Time travel doesn’t really exist.
Except maybe for men of baby
boomer age.
Step into a barbershop, and
suddenly you can feel the
barber’s hand holding your
head. You feel the electric
clippers on the back of your
neck as you try to sit still long
enough for a back-to-school
haircut.
Wander down the sporting goods aisle at the big box store, and you’re
transported to a riverbank on a still, muggy night. Your hands are caked with
chicken blood and stink bait when a catfish takes your treble hook and yanks it
hard.
Or you can climb the steps into Craig Herndon’s tool truck. It’s crammed full of
wrenches, sockets and all kinds of tools. Now you’re back in the day of the
muscle car — GTOs, Chargers, ‘Stangs and ‘Cudas — when you knew how fast
your ride could do the quarter, but maybe you couldn’t say how many miles to the
gallon it could get.
Herndon, a Matco tool franchise owner, covers the sales territory from Surrey
Street in Lafayette all the way to Franklin. It keeps him close to auto mechanics
and repair, where he’s spent most of his life.
“I’ve been into anything automotive,” Herndon said. “It kind of guided my path
where I was going.”
Now 53 and living in New Iberia, Herndon was raised in St. Mary Parish. When
the time came to drive, his first hot rod was “a ’69 Chevy pickup that was hopped
up with all the goodies in it,” Herndon said. “No fancy paint job, just a good power
train.”
When a vehicle broke down at the Herndon household, they didn’t take it to the
shop. They fixed it.
“My daddy would fix everything, too. I never put anything in a shop,” Hendon
said. “I remember one time I burned a transmission up. I didn’t know how to
rebuild it. I serviced and it didn’t work, so I had it rebuilt. But then I put it back in
myself.”
He appeared likely to follow his father into the heating, refrigeration and plumbing
business.
“I was kind of headed that way, but he passed away when I was in high school,”
Herndon said. “I started down that path after high school, but I didn’t like attics.”
Herndon drove trucks for a while, both for the local energy industry and as a
long-haul driver. He liked seeing the country, but he was married by then, and he
didn’t want to leave wife Robin alone so much.
So he went into business with a fellow mechanic in a shop, sold out and went to
work for an independent mechanic for five years.
Then a new direction presented itself. Herndon became an instructor of auto
repair at the Louisiana Technical College campus in Morgan City. He liked that
work, too.
But “with the technical college, there’s a lot of politics,” Herndon said. “You’re
dealing with the system. You’re dealing with the director of the facility. You’ve got
to make sure your student population is big enough to justify the program.
There’s always a black cloud over year head.”
So Herndon hooked up with Matco, which not only stocks and delivers tools but
finances them, too.
“They’ll make it affordable for the mechanic,” he said. “We sell tools, but what we
really sell is the convenience and the service. If you give them good service,
even if it’s a premium price, they’re willing to pay the price.”
Fifteen years later, Herndon said he still has some of the customers he had when
he first began his route.
“You know their families’ names, their kids’ names. You know their dogs’ names.
I call it my social hour.”
Shade-tree mechanics are rarer now than they were in the 1960s or 1970s. The
cars are more complex, more computerized.
“You know that oil light on the dashboard?” Herndon said. “You’ve got to have an
electronic scan tool, some of them even, if it’s just a brake job. If you don’t have
the scan tool, the light doesn’t go off.”
Herndon keeps up on new tools for the new technologies, reading publications
and attending tool shows. From the most part, he resists the temptation to make
suggestions to his mechanic customers as they do their work.
“Probably for the first few years, I wanted to tell them, ‘You know what you
should do?’ Because I did teach it. But it’s been so long now. ... For a while, it
was a challenge not to put my 2 cents in. Every now and again, I still do.”