As I look back on the 50 years, it sounds like a long time, but it really went by like a flash. There’s a few people that helped propel my business back then and I wanted to give them a shout out one at a time. Robert K Smith was one of the earliest influences in my business. Tom McMullen, owner of Truckin’ Magazine introduced me to RK at the Long Beach car show and RK ended up doing a story about Golden State that helped to put us on the map. But it doesn’t stop there. He kept having great ideas he said, ”Why don’t you put a truck show on man” so I did! I knew how beautiful Ogden Utah was from my rodeo days and I chose that as the first location of the Chevy GMC Truckin’ National sponsored by Truck and Magazine. In the early years there were over 700 trucks on the show field at Ogden.
His next big idea was “Why don’t you open a store in LA man”, he saw that people drove every Saturday to Santa Barbara from LA to buy parts from me. I said ”Who will run it?” he said "My wife Cathy will!” And so the LA store was born. Cathy ended up working for me for about the next 15 years running the store in LA.
When I look back on these memories, it’s the people that I came in contact that make the memories Golden. Thank you. RK Smith for all you’ve done and your great teriyaki.
