From picking apricots to repairing custom cars

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With more than 52,000 acres of important farmland in the county, an eight-acre farm at the western reaches of Buena Vista Road in Hollister might not seem like a big deal.

It has been a big deal, however, for 66-year-old Dennis Simunovich and his family for three generations, ever since his grandparents immigrated from Yugoslavia in the 1930s and settled in Hollister, where they bought an eight-acre apricot orchard.

“They made a living off those eight acres of apricots,” Simunovich said. “It was all a family thing. Of course, we helped pick them, we’d bring them into the shed, cut them, put them on a tray, and dry them. We’d sell to the cannery, and then we’d dry some to sell. It was a family thing for years.”

Today, the trees are gone. They were already old when his grandparents bought the orchard, and by the 1980s the trees were suffering from disease, so his father had them pulled out, and the family has been leasing the land to Flavor Farms to grow row crops since then.

While Simunovich did his share of working in the orchard growing up, it was different in Hollister in the 1960s. There was no Hwy 156 bypass, many of the roads weren’t paved, and kids rode their dirt bikes all over Park Hill and in the riverbed. When not in the orchard, he worked for the city when then-city manager Roger Grimsley hired him to clean city vehicles, fix damaged fenders and replace broken windshields.

He graduated from Hollister High School in 1978. By that time, he had discovered his love for all things related to cars, especially repairing them. While still in school, he took advantage of what was called the Regional Occupational Program (ROP) that was created in 1967 as part of the state’s effort to provide vocational and career training to high school students and adults. It offered courses in agriculture, auto mechanics, welding, drafting, health occupations, office technology and other careers.

Simunovich gravitated into auto mechanics, attending extension classes at Gavilan College. 

“They had auto body and mechanic classes, and we’d spend half the day in the ROP program learning how to do body and fender work,” he said. “I got to be real good friends with a teacher, Jess Hermocillo, and in my senior year I’d go all day to the body shop class.”

Simunovich said Hermocillo, who became a close friend, would pick out the good projects for students who were serious about learning to work on cars. He said the more he learned the more he knew that he wanted to work on cars for a living.

“My dad had pulled the apricots out,” he said, “but the sheds were still there, so I made one into a repair shop, and I made more money on the weekends than I did all week at my normal job, working for the city. Then I went to work for Roger Grimsley’s brother, David Grimsley, at his trucking company. I painted the big trucks. Then I drove a little dump truck around doing deliveries for the Rockery on Hillcrest, which was a landscaping supply place David owned. He sold it and is still kicking around at 81 as he runs his Cal Rock Quarry on Cienega Road. And I worked there for three or four years. I was making good money.”

In the 1980s, he was spending more time in the little shack on the eight acres repairing cars and trucks, and the business was growing more each year. 

Today, he said his bread-and-butter work is collision repairs.

“Your typical fender-bender is $3,000 and up,” he told BenitoLink between phone calls to various dealerships while trying to track down a bench seat for one of the cars in his shop that day. “If the car gets hit pretty good, it starts at $10,000. It’s very expensive to repair a new car nowadays. It’s all plastic and aluminum. And when the aluminum gets damaged we can’t fix it. So, we’ve got to buy a new panel. It’s not like the old days when we’d actually work the metal and do a little body work and be done. Now it’s just changing parts.”

His true love, though, is custom cars and restorations. On the day BenitoLink visited, there were several such cars scattered in his expansive shop going through various stages of restoration. 

Reflecting on how he discovered that working on cars was his passion, Simunovich remarked how things have changed since he and his teacher worked on cars together. 

“There’s nothing for kids to get in this field today,” he said. “It’s just hard to get anybody in here who wants to learn this industry.”

Simunovich said it has been many years since a kid has come into his shop and asked to help out in order to learn how to work on cars. He said if a kid, boy or girl, did come in and was really interested in helping and watching, he’d hand them a broom to sweep out the shop to earn a place at a mechanic’s elbow to watch, learn, and hand over a wrench or two.

“I’ve got one kid, the painter’s son-in-law who wants to get in the detail business,” he said. “So I go, ‘hey, I can’t pay you to teach you.’ I go, ‘if you want to hang out with your father-in-law, and absorb some of this, in a little while, maybe we’ll have a spot for you.’  When someone comes in, they got to hit the ground running.”

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