At 79, Manoa resident Bob Reierson wasn't ready to retire. But the surviving member of a family automotive business spanning three generations in Hawai'i recently had to leave his office one final time with the shuttering of a company that had been in operation all but three years of Reierson's long life.

The quiet closure of a Goodyear tire sales and service garage on Sheridan Street in Pawa'a marked the end of Motor Supply Ltd., a company set up as a car dealer parts supplier that also introduced Hawai'i consumers to tire recapping and for several decades sold new cars and large appliances.

"It was a good 77 years," said Reierson, whose father, Thomas, started the company in 1931 in Palama.

Motor Supply's end in mid-April in ways was brought on by tragedy in the succession of a family business, competition from a big-box retailer and appreciation in real estate values, though 77 years is a remarkable life span for a small family business in Hawai'i.

"It's sad to see these family firms close, but it's rare for these small businesses to last into the second or third generation," said John Butler, director of the Family Business Center of Hawai'i at the University of Hawai'i Shidler College of Business.

According to a Family Business Review study, about 30 percent of family-owned businesses survive into the second generation, while 12 percent are still viable into the third and only 3 percent are still operating at the fourth-generation level.

Thomas Reierson was born in Minnesota and came to Hawai'i in the 1920s with experience in the tire business on the Mainland.

After managing the truck and bus tire department for American-Hawaiian Motors in Honolulu, he established Motor Supply with the financial backing of three Hawai'i Chevrolet dealers — Palama Auto, Aloha Motors and Servco predecessor Waialua Garage Co. — to supply the dealers with tires and other parts.

Over the next several years, Reierson invested in then-new technology for recapping tires, and opened store branches on the Big Island, Maui and Kaua'i for customers that included passenger vehicle owners and commercial truck fleets.

STORIED HISTORY

After World War II, Motor Supply branched out into car retailing as a Nash dealer that also sold Kelvinator appliances.

Vehicles in the 1950s sold out of Motor Supply's showroom included the described low-priced luxury Nash Rambler Country Club car and the foreign-built Metropolitan by American Motors Corp. that got 40 miles to the gallon. Later, Motor Supply added other makes including Jeep and Pontiac to its line.

A couple of unusual notes in the company's history included being barred from selling tires for a month during World War II for violating rubber rationing rules, and building an architecturally distinct Nash showroom with telephone poles in 1952 because post-war steel prices were high and supplies were low.

Company founder Thomas Reierson died in 1973, and his son, Bob, whose first job in the family business was patching tubes one summer as a teenager, became president.

Bob Reierson led the company through a major realignment in the 1980s when it got out of new car retailing and parts wholesaling in favor of refocusing on tire operations.

Michael Reierson, Bob's son, had joined the company and was key to growing the business during the 1980s and 1990s, but the successor-in-chief died from a heart attack in 1996 at age 37.

The devastating loss led Bob Reierson to sell Motor Supply's O'ahu operations that included the Honolulu shop and a Kapolei facility handling truck tire recapping and sales to a local Goodyear factory representative in 1997. The company's Big Island operation was sold to employees a year later. Other Neighbor Island markets had previously been exited by Motor Supply.

'PURE GENTLEMAN'

Still, Bob Reierson stayed on as president of the O'ahu operations, which continued to feature the Motor Supply name at the Honolulu store.

Nick Cutter of Cutter Automotive said Reierson was a gentleman's businessman — a trait often missing in today's corporate culture. "He was a pure gentleman," Cutter said.

A competitor of Motor Supply at one time, Cutter in the 1980s bought Motor Supply's car dealership business, and several years later came back to Reierson seeking to rent the former Nash dealership property on Kapi'olani Boulevard in the midst of the Japanese real estate investment bubble that was stoking land values.

Cutter said he and Reierson verbally agreed to a fixed rent but on month-to-month lease terms that gave Reierson flexibility to develop or sell the property if needed.

"We were on month-to-month terms for 13 years, and he never raised the rent," Cutter said. "You don't find that very often in business or in life."

BUSINESS WEAKENED

Reierson continued running the Honolulu Motor Supply store, but business weakened in recent years after the owner of the former Motor Supply tire facility in Kapolei sold it for its real estate. That move made the Honolulu store less economical to operate. Also hurting business was the tire service center of Sam's Club, which opened across the street in 2004.

"The cost just became out of line with the revenue stream," Reierson said, adding that property taxes also rose in part because of the purchase of the adjacent superblock developed into Sam's Club and Wal-Mart.

The Reierson family did cash in on the real estate market last year, selling a 1.4-acre parcel at 1391 Kapi'olani Blvd. — home of the former Nash showroom — for $26 million to a South Korean company that plans to build a luxury condominium tower.

At $417 a square foot, the sale was at or near record values set for the area in the early 1990s at the height of the speculative Japanese investment bubble.

Reierson, who retained the land under the Motor Supply tire store and service center on Sheridan, sold that property in April after the shop's owner decided to cease business. According to property records, neighboring laundry business Clean Living Hakuyosha paid $6.1 million for the land.

Reierson said he still had mixed emotions about the shutdown of the last piece of Motor Supply that effectively sent him into retirement. "The tire business is what I grew up in," he said. "It's a little late to take up golf."