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GREENSBORO — Like many small car dealerships across America, City Motors is a family business.

Leonard Cranford opened the dealership almost 40 years ago. His son, Mike, followed — his workplace since high school.

They weathered gas crises, corporate turmoil, recessions. They sold cars — Ramblers, then Pacers and Gremlins, then Jeeps and Mazdas — by catering to local customers and forging close friendships.

At City Motors, you could rely on the Cranfords’ reputation and down-home style.

Today, the dealership that sits on a prime piece of Westover Terrace is little more than used-vehicle sales and service. Earlier this month, the Cranfords parted ways with their main business partner.

Chrysler didn’t want them anymore.

It wasn’t personal, the company said; in its bankruptcy proceedings over the past several weeks, it shed 789 dealerships, saying it had too many people selling too few cars and trucks.

None of what’s happened these last few months has surprised the Cranfords. In a way, it has confirmed what they’ve felt was coming all along.

What has happened to City Motors is happening across the country as the auto industry undergoes a reformation that will see fewer makes, models and dealerships.

The story of City Motors — of all the cast-off dealerships — is a story of what’s getting left behind as the auto industry gets remodeled.

“I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve called and said, 'We buy (cars) from City Motors, we don’t buy them from Chrysler,’ ” said Mike Cranford, the dealership’s general manager. “I think they’ll lose a ton of business through this.”

Ramblers, Gremlins, Jeeps

Leonard Cranford bought City Rambler in 1962, the small fringe-brand dealer at Elm and Bellemeade streets in downtown Greensboro.

Cranford had worked in the auto business since the 1950s, and he wanted to own an independent business.

Cranford, 80, still comes to work every day in the building he designed. He wears a tie and suit long after his sons turned City Motors into a casual workplace.

Cranford kept the growing dealership downtown for more than five years while he bought, developed and built on its current Westover Terrace site.

He opened the doors of the new City Motors on Labor Day, 1969.

Not long afterward, he added Jeep to the mix of cars. Soon American Motors, which made his primary product, would buy Jeep.

Business was strong. The company sold dozens of cars a day, becoming one of the manufacturer’s top dealerships.

City Motors sold a growing line of American Motors cars, including the Pacer and Gremlin.

Mike Cranford, 53, began working for the company while a student at Grimsley High School.

He joined full time after graduation in 1975, around the time that the dealer picked up the Mazda brand.

The Hollins family is typical of the generations that have stuck with City Motors.

The late Robert E. Hollins of Stoneville began the family tradition of buying from City Motors in the 1960s.

Just a few years later, his son, Robert T. Hollins of High Point began buying cars from City Motors as his father did.

“I’ve bought at least eight cars from them,” Hollins said. “They’re not like a regular dealer. They’re more friends than they are dealers.

“Last time that I had my wife’s van up there, Mike just threw me the keys to his own vehicle. 'Use this and we’ll get it fixed.’ That’s the way they operate.”

By the 1970s, City Motors was at its peak with around 65 employees and sales of more than 100 new and used Jeeps and Mazdas a month.

“It was fun,” said Mike Cranford. “What kind of business can you think of that has shorter hours, more pay, more fun?”

Fellow workers were made to feel special.

“This has been a family. Our second family, I guess,” said Gay McCann, 66, the dealership’s bookkeeper and receptionist, who has worked there for nearly 47 years.

Even now, the bond is so strong that she finds it easy to share personal concerns with Leonard Cranford.

“It’s not just the job,” she said. “You can go talk to them and whatever they can do to help they will. My husband’s in the hospital. Mr. Cranford asks me how he is every day. He’s concerned.”

Time to get out

Over the years, the Cranfords watched their business cycle change, mostly for the good. But their partnership with Chrysler, once it took over Jeep from American Motors, was never built to last.

“When it was just Jeep it was good and when it was American Motors it was good. It definitely took a step back with Chrysler,” Mike Cranford said.

Chrysler had developed a dispersed network of many small dealers. But about five years ago it slammed that strategy into reverse. It began pressuring those small dealers to consolidate and sell all three of Chrysler’s brands — Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep — from big stores.

The Cranfords felt their one-brand Jeep strategy, in addition to Mazda, worked fine for them.

Chrysler offered to help them set up another dealership outside Greensboro in exchange for City Motors Jeep.

“The bottom line was, we were Greensboro people,” Mike Cranford said. “We don’t want to go to another town maybe 50 miles away to run another dealership. We’re pretty content with what we’ve got.”

Mike Cranford sensed a growing unfairness that rewarded more cooperative dealerships. By last year, the Cranfords felt it was time to part ways with Chrysler.

They began negotiating to sell the Jeep franchise to Asbury Automotive Group, owners of Crown Chrysler Dodge.

Chrysler volunteered to contribute $600,000 to the agreed price of $2.1 million to help Asbury close the deal, Cranford said.

In October, however, a few weeks before closing, the deal fell through, without explanation.

Asbury’s treasurer, Ryan Marsh, said the company routinely looks at companies to acquire, but he declined to say whether City Motors Jeep was one of those.

With that deal dead, the Cranfords decided to focus on Jeep, so they chose to offload the Mazda brand.

Negotiations to sell Mazda to Flow Automotive went smoothly — the deal closed earlier this spring — but Mike Cranford could see the Chrysler situation weakening.

The automaker pushed harder for dealerships to buy cars. In that, Chrysler wasn’t alone. The burgeoning recession and financial crisis that crippled credit markets for months has decimated auto sales. Although no one was buying, factories kept rolling out the models.

“I can remember for months on end their saying, 'This is going to be the last time we’re going to ask you to buy

cars,’ ” Cranford said. “And I think this is kind of what led to their demise. Dealers just don’t have anywhere to park them. They were producing them with no demand.”

Cranford got a bad feeling about it all and began to dramatically slow his purchases.

Although he had little to sell, he also hasn’t stuck himself with inventory he can’t unload as a result of Chrysler’s bankruptcy and losing the Jeep dealership.

In the end, Cranford believed it was more than coincidence that Asbury and Chrysler pulled out just months before Chrysler sought a government bailout and declared bankruptcy.

Through those bankruptcy proceedings, Chrysler has essentially taken back the Jeep franchise from Cranford at no cost and can give it free to any dealer it chooses, he said.

He expects Crown to get that franchise. Asbury said it has had discussions with Chrysler about taking over Greensboro’s Jeep franchise, but nothing has been decided, Marsh said.

Worried about the future

The Cranfords know their land is valuable — dozens of developers have been in touch already. But the Cranfords are worried about their employees’ futures as well, Mike Cranford said.

He is trying to see if there’s any way to run City Motors as a used car and service operation. But without new cars, it will be very difficult, he said.

The tragedy, he said, is the end of a type of business that is rooted in hometown attitudes.

The Cranfords ran their dealership to please the people of Greensboro, not Detroit. And it worked for nearly 40 years.

It worked so well that Robert Hollins drops by City Motors to say hello to people there even when he doesn’t have any business to do.

Now a third-generation of the family — his 40-year-old son, Brian, — is a customer.

And for Leonard Cranford, who celebrates his 81st birthday soon, the nation is diminished for what happened.

“That is just not right — what they have done — to go in and take something from a man that he has built up,” he said. “I’m through with the car business.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com