Published March 18, 2023
By Joe Newkirk
A skilled auto mechanic with 20 years of experience, George Hemmings left his West
Virginia home in 1920 to work for the American Gear Company in Chicago. When the
company decided to move to Jackson, Michigan, three years later, Hemmings made one of
the most important decisions of his life: Starting his own auto parts store in Quincy. In an
interview with Hemmings Motor News, his son, Ernest, reflected: “My father figured out the
fact that every fair-sized city between Chicago and Paducah, Kentucky, had an auto parts
store, one supplying components for a wide range of auto models, and decided to open one
in Quincy.”
Hemmings adapted a storefront at 1036 Hampshire Street for “Standard Auto Parts” and
used the upper story as a residence for himself and his wife, Ida May. His new business
carried replacement items for Model T and Model A cars, along with Rusco Brake Lining and
gear sets designed to increase automotive speed and power. Hemmings’ store—the first one
of its kind for this region—drew business from a 75-mile radius of Quincy, and soon he hired a
traveling salesman and a mechanic for the machine shop. Standard Auto Parts promised 24-
hour delivery on parts not in stock and “liberal discounts” to customers.
In 1928 Behrensmeyer and Haftner Architects redesigned his store to better serve its
growing clientele. The January 22, 1928, Quincy Herald-Whig reported: “This new building is
a testimonial to both the advantages of Quincy as a center of automotive industry and to the
foresight of G.E. Hemmings, who left Chicago five years ago to start an untried adventure in
Quincy.” In response to increasing accidents caused by cars often manufactured with parts
with planned obsolescence and drivers still navigating roads made mostly for horses,
Hemmings launched a safety campaign. One of his ads for Rusco Brake Lining posed this
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question: “Do you know you may be called upon any day to demonstrate to the police that
your brakes are in good working order and will stop our car within a certain number of feet?”
Over the next two decades, men—and an increasing number of women—eager to drive
and maintain their cars in good working order patronized Hemmings’ store. Other auto parts
dealers also began business in Quincy, as the city shifted from animal, bicycle, and
pedestrian traffic to using what most historians consider the 20 th century’s most revolutionary
invention.
George and Ida May Hemmings’ only child, a son named Ernest, was born in Quincy on
August 7, 1926, and attended local public schools before graduating from Quincy High School
in 1945. He worked in his father’s store from a young age as a counter clerk and served one
year in the Korean War before returning to Quincy in 1952. Two years after coming back to
his hometown, his father died, and at age 27 Ernest Robert Hemmings assumed ownership of
Standard Auto Parts.
The automobile industry was now expanding and unveiling new models with varied colors,
designs, and conveniences that rendered Henry Ford’s original all-black mass-produced
Model T and A cars increasingly obsolete. Although Hemmings had updated his inventory to
meet this new demand, he was a “pack rat” who kept his father’s original stock of parts. In
search of a possible market for them, he placed an ad in Motor Trend, a small but nationwide
magazine. The response overwhelmed him. Nostalgia and first-love for the machines that
usurped horses as the primary means of transport had created an enthusiastic cadre of
buyers desiring to preserve classic cars as keepsakes and collector’s items.
Hemmings later decided to sell these parts himself and used a manual typewriter and
mimeograph to produce 600 copies of a four-page stapled catalog called Hemmings Motor
News. He mailed the first-edition to people who had responded to his Motor Trend ad and
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distributed others to local customers. Subscribers could place free-ads in his magazine and
were only charged 50 cents for an annual monthly subscription. As the magazine’s only paid
employee, Hemmings himself wrote articles to fill-in between ads, drew the logo free-handed,
and devised his own system for keeping track of subscribers by creating a label for the next
issues after an order arrived.
By 1959 the magazine had turned into a 24-page publication with butcher-brown paper
bound with a spine and small enough to fit in back pockets and reached 3,000 subscribers
across the country. By April 1966 the magazine had catapulted to 25,000 subscribers, but
now large mail-order companies with more resources were also selling auto parts, and
Hemmings sensed the need for change. Publishing a monthly magazine had become a full-
time job and he also managed Standard Auto Parts, one of Quincy’s premier businesses.
In 1968 a group of investors led by Terry Ehrich, a Harvard graduate and classic car
enthusiast, bought Hemmings Motor News, and after spending a year in Quincy learning the
publishing trade first-hand from Hemmings himself, moved production to Bennington,
Vermont. After the sale, Standard Auto Parts relocated to 601 South 22 nd Street in Quincy and
for the next 20 years Hemmings served customers with a wide selection of automotive
components for both older and newer models. The magazine that he had founded, though,
expanded its circulation and currently has over 200,000 world-wide subscribers—the largest
classic car publication in the world. Related periodicals—Hemmings Muscle Machines,
Hemmings Classic Cars, and Hemmings Sport & Exotic Cars—bring total circulation to over
one-half million readers, a milestone in specialized magazine publishing history.
Sources
“Announcing the Opening of the Standard Auto Parts Co.” Quincy Whig Journal,
July 1, 1923, 13.
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Coffey, Frank and Joseph Layden. “America on Wheels: The First 100 Years:1896-
1996.” Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1996.
Donnelly, Jim. “Ernest Hemmings: 1926-2015.” Hemmings Motor News, May 2015,18-
22.
Donnelly, Jim. “Our Namesake and Founder was a Giant in the World of Old Cars.”
Hemmings Motor News, Sept. 2018.
Roberts, Sam. “Ernest Hemmings, Founder of a Car’s Bible, Dies at 88.” New York
Times, March 9, 2015, Section B, 7.
“Rusco Brake Lining Ad.” Quincy Herald-Whig, May 30, 1928, 11.
“Standard Auto Building Nears Its Completion.” Quincy Herald-Whig, Jan. 28, 1928,
15.
Volti, Rudi. “Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology.” Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, xi-42.
After Ernest Hemmings’ death in Quincy on February 25, 2015, his New York Times
obituary read in part: “From Hemmings’ hometown of Quincy, Illinois…he transformed his
mimeographed mail-order catalog into Hemmings Motor News, which became a bible for car
collectors.” His legacy lives on today whenever aficionados open his magazine or Tin Dusters,
Lug Nuts, and other classic car enthusiasts gather locally or across the world to display their
meticulously preserved mementos of America’s love affair with cars.
