When I was just out of college, I bought a Volkswagen. I got prices here in town at Hickel Motors and in Tuscaloosa at Bear Bryant Volkswagen. The Tuscaloosa dealership offered $500 more trade-in, so I bought the car there.

Several months later I encountered the owner of the local VW dealership, A.D. Hickel, on the Country Club golf course. I’m not sure why I was there; I didn’t play golf.

“Did you ever get that Volkswagen?” Hickel asked, full well knowing I had. This is a small town.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

I told him where and why.

“That’s a long way to go to get it serviced,” my future father-in-law growled as he drove away in his golf cart.

A while back my grandson texted me to say he was going to write a paper on a family member for an English assignment. I suggested he write about his great-grandfather, who he never knew.

Thanks in part to hard work and exceptional business acumen shaped by real-world experience, A.D. Hickel, Jr., a bona fide member of “The Greatest Generation,” achieved the American Dream.

His story merits retelling.

A.D. was born in Darling, Mississippi, in 1917, the son of the proprietor of a dry goods store. Several years later his father, A.D. Hickel Sr., moved the family to Macon where he sold real estate with W.F. Conner.

As it did for many Americans, the Great Depression hit the family hard.

A.D. Sr. moved his family of five to Memphis where he sold hot tamales, Hickel Eats Tamales, until his life ran off the rails, and he abandoned his family.

A.D. Jr. was 13 at the time. Eventually he would drop out of high school to take a job loading crackers into boxcars to help support his mother and sisters.

When World War II broke out, A.D. quit his job, hunted and fished for a month, then enlisted in the U.S. Marines.

He would be in the first wave of troops on Guadalcanal, the first major land offensive by the Allies in the Pacific.

He spent most of his four months there firing a 20mm anti-aircraft gun. He returned to the States with a case of malaria and, thanks to the anti-aircraft gun, a lifeless right arm doctors said he would never use again.

With the same determination he exhibited later in life when he went cold turkey on his three-packs-a-day cigarette habit, A.D. began squeezing a rubber ball. He strengthened the muscles in his injured arm enough to be able to use it again.

Back in Memphis he married, fathered three children and took a job selling Monroe calculators, then cars.

In 1962 when a Volkswagen dealership in a small Mississippi town became available (Herman Dalke, Charlie Dalke’s father, owned the Columbus dealership), he scraped together all his savings and borrowed every penny he could from relatives, including $200 from his 12-year-old daughter to buy it.

Within a year he had repaid the loans plus interest.

Afterward a brother-in-law, one of the family members who loaned him money, said that loan provided the best return of any investment he’d ever made.

In the America of the late 1950s, early 1960s, muscle cars were the rage. The youth of the late 60s, the Woodstock Generation, loved the Beetle and the VW van. The little bug-shaped cars and the vans that resembled a loaf of bread flew off the lot.

Hickel Motors flourished.

A.D. was not happy when Volkswagen introduced the Rabbit and Jetta.

While drinking coffee with a car dealer friend, Willie Menotti, one morning, he groused about it, saying if someone came along and offered him the right price, he would sell the dealership.

By day’s end, Menotti was the local VW dealer.

After 12 years in the pressure cooker of owning and running a business, A.D. was retired at 58.

For the next quarter of a century, he would do what he did as a kid in Memphis that month before enlisting in the Marine Corps. He would fish and hunt.

His ability to catch large crappie was legendary.

“He was a pioneer,” said Sam Bardwell, himself an accomplished crappie fisherman. “He fished with a jig while the rest of us fed the fish with live bait.”

Intensely protective of his fishing holes, I only know of A.D. taking someone crappie fishing twice: his daughter Beth and our brother-in-law, Johnny Musso.

“I used to tell him he didn’t have any friends,” Sam said. “He was always fishing alone.”

Johnny inadvertently broke a piece on A.D.’s boat, a transgression the old fisherman didn’t let Johnny forget.

Years later on a Thanksgiving at the Musso farm, A.D. took it upon himself to keep the hearth of the free-standing fireplace swept. At some point he caught the hearth broom on fire.

After that we heard no more about the broken fishing boat.

He had rules he devised while running the business, a memorable one concerned the loaning of tools.

“Look,” A.D. would say (this is not an exact quote), “chances are if I loan you this tool one of us is going to end up mad. If you don’t return it, I’m going to be mad at you. If I don’t loan it, you’re going to be mad at me. I’d rather you be mad at me than me mad at you.”

Ollice “O.T.” Moore went to work at Hickel Motors when he was 19.

“He was a good man. I learned a whole lot working for him,” said Ollice. “He was shrewd, all business, but when you got him away from the business, he was just A.D.”

Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.