No Newbies! Taghon’s Garage has been community’s lifeline for decades

By Christina Campbell
Sun staff writer
The movie Night on Earth has a poignant scene between a high-powered casting agent and her young, female taxi driver. The casting agent says she has a part the cab driver would be perfect for. Wouldn’t she like to be a movie star? The young woman agrees it’s a great offer, but no thanks–what she really wants to be is a mechanic.

Mike Taghon talks with the same unabashed enthusiasm about the forty-four years he spent stretched under chassis in his garage. In The Garage. If the intersection where M-22 meets M-72 is the heart of Empire, then Taghon’s Garage is a prime artery. Into this Empire institution limp vehicles with broken belts and torn tires, and they emerge road-ready for another trip to the Dunes or to Traverse. Vehicles are pumped through with a speed and efficiency that belies the garage’s small size and crowded quarters. The garage’s three repair stalls are full year-round. The mechanics work over 50 hours a week. In a rural community without mass transit (do BATA buses count?), citizens and visitors don’t suffer disabled vehicles lightly. “Some people panic,” says Mike. “You’d think someone had died in the family.” Indeed, for the mechanically uninclined among us, being without our wheels is akin to house arrest. And you may have five shelves of DVDs at home, but no movie star is gonna step off the screen and fix your car.
But just because it has wheels, doesn’t mean Taghon’s will take it on. In the beginning, they did try to do it all, repairing everything from motorcycles to lawnmowers to bicycles to chainsaws to garbage trucks. But that diversification did not survive the prosaic problems of state certifications, equipment supply, and space. Nowadays Taghon’s mechanics service only cars and trucks under one ton. But there’s always a bit of wise wiggle room: “Once in a while,” says Mike Taghon, “We will do a schoolbus.”
Flexibility, and the ability to not just roll with the punches but to learn from them, have been part of the business from the beginning. The building that would become Taghon’s Garage was actually born on the other side of town.The garage office and one adjacent repair stall originally stood near the end of Empire’s Main Street, about where the alley between Deering’s Grocery Store and Tiffany’s Ice Cream and Cookies is now. In 1935, the building was torn down and reassembled block by block in its current location. Ten years later, owner Alfred Verno sold the facility to Fred Taghon. In 1950, Fred installed the garage’s first hoist. The next year, he added two new repair stalls. If you spend any length of time in the Empire area, sooner or later you car must end up in one of those stalls. Or on the back of the Taghon’s tow truck.
What with the fingerprints of Taghon’s mechanics speckling the insides of automobiles all over Leelanau and points further, you’d never guess that Taghon’s is The Garage That Almost Wasn’t. One winter when Fred Taghon was cleaning up his new business, a box of dirty old rags spontaneously combusted. The building caught fire. Firetrucks arrived, but their hoses were frozen. The hoses must have thawed quickly enough, because the garage survived and was repaired. Today it still looks pretty much the same as it did back then, even down to the charred boards in the attic.
In 1958, Fred opened Taghon’s Gas Station across the street and left the garage in the hands of his son. Mike Taghon had attended the Empire school across the street. He’d grown up running across to his dad’s garage at recess and lunch hours. He was no newbie. But the beginning wasn’t easy. He was the shop’s one and only mechanic and manager. Mike worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week. When he told his dad that he was thinking of closing on Sundays to spend time with his family, Fred warned him, “You’ll never make it.” But he did make it, with both the Taghon family and the Taghon garage intact. In 1960 he was able to hire another mechanic. Jack is still repairing cars at Taghon’s today. Both he and Mike have seen some changes. Cars have gotten smaller, and the garage has installed new hoists to accommodate them. Vehicles no longer just need tune-ups; now they “have driveability problems.” And every year Taghon’s spends thousands of dollars on new computer equipment for working with electronic engines.
But the wrecker service is timeless. It’s not unusual for Taghon’s to bring the tow truck out to Holland or Grand Rapids. Wherever and whenever there are roads, people need to be towed off of them. There was the man whose twenty-foot sailboat fell off its trailer onto the road. Taghon’s wrecker hauled the trailer into Traverse. For the boat itself, they had to call in a crane. Another poor boater needed rescuing after he backed his boat into Lake Michigan–and his car as well, right up to the roof. One snowy day, Mike Taghon got a wrecker call he thought would be pretty easy–after all, the stranded motorist said his car was stuck right by the side of the road. When Mike arrived with the wrecker, he saw that the car was indeed right by the road. But it was also upside-down. Then there was the engineer who walked into the garage one winter and bought the biggest tires they had. The guy had a cabin in the woods, and he wanted tires large enough so that if he cranked his truck up to 50 mph, he could speed to his cabin over the surface of the snowdrifts. He said adamantly that the laws of physics would support him. The laws may have, but the snow didn’t. An hour later, Mike was there with the wrecker.
One relieved customer actually wrote a letter to the editor of the Leelanau Enterprise last winter, praising Mike for coming out to tow his car. The letter, entitled “Taghon goes beyond the call of duty,” was a redundancy to anyone who is familiar with — and possibly takes for granted — the Taghon’s commitment to quality, personal sevice. Even Mike Taghon himself says, “It’s just what you do when you have a wrecker.” It’s only frustrating, he says, “when you’re just about to step out for dinner with your wife and you’ve gotta go on a wrecker call.”
In 2002, after 44 years of canceling dinners so other people could be on time for theirs, Mike Taghon retired. “I did it for a lot of years because I enjoyed doing it for a lot of years,” he says. “I never worked any place in my life except at that garage.”
Mike’s son Dennis is the new owner of Taghon’s Garage. Dennis has been one of the mechanics since he graduated in 1978. And like his dad, he’s been hanging around the garage “since he could crawl.” He’s no newbie, either. But Mike still helps him with the wrecker now and then.
Mechanics Wayne Taghon, John Grabowski, and Jack Dempsey, and Ajay Zirkel and office manager Annie Porter help Dennis carry on the Taghon’s torch. Or rather, the torquewrench?