A long ride on Model Tire
Main Avenue institution looks back on 80 years in the business

Model Tire Store owner Richard Bukovec takes a break next to an old Manley tire spreader as his wife, Edith, heads toward the front desk late last week. Bukovec became a partner in the business, the longest continually open business in Durango, in 1969 with his father, Pete. /Photo by Todd Newcomer

by Jeff Mannix

Model Tire has been providing and servicing auto and truck tires on the corner of 12th & Main since 1925. Before it was Model Tire, it was Foley’s Tire, and before Foley’s, there wasn’t any need for tires.

The building housing Model Tire has been in place since the 1880s. It’s had two additions since: one in the 1940s, the result of a fire in the back of the building; and another in the 1980s that included a new facade. But the building on Main Avenue is the original, from the walls to the ceiling to the board-wood floor. It feels like a museum inside, and with the accumulated odor of 85 years of rubber soaked into the building materials, the pungency is palpable and curiously inviting.

Model’s current owner, Richard Bukovec, took over the business from his father, Pete, who started working at Foley’s as a young man. Pete was working there when Foley bought out partner, John Stoddard, and changed the name to Model Tire. Pete then bought out Foley in the early ’30s, and when Richard was 12 years old in 1951, Pete had a man-to-man talk with his athletic boy. “Pop just sat me down and said to me, ‘Son, you can keep playing ball and fritter your time away, or you can come down here, earn some money, and learn a business that will provide for you and your family forever,’” Richard relates with a wry smile and that faraway look of someone who wonders how far he could have gotten as a gifted athlete. “I don’t know if it made sense to me at the time or I just caved in, but I went to work for pop after school and during the summers when I was 12 and have been working this business for 54 years.”

The Model Tire Store sign hangs above the front entrance along Main Avenue./Photo by Todd Newcomer

Richard officially became a partner in the business in 1969, at age 30, after he’d been working at Model Tire for 18 years. He was drilled with the ethic that, if you stay in one place and don’t keep changing jobs, you would develop a reputation and always make a good living. He may have been too young and too busy to contemplate that advice, but it stuck and has proved prophetic.

In 1974, at age 34, Richard married the daughter of family friends and former Durango High School acquaintance, Edith Horvath. Edith had worked at the local telephone company for more than 15 years before she came to work at Model Tire as bookkeeper in 1973. Five years later, Edith bought out her father-in-law’s portion of the business and the real estate, and for the past 26 years, Edith and Richard have run one of the oldest tire companies in the nation, which has outlasted every business in Durango.

In 1960 when Richard was 21 and bristling with ambition, he went out on a limb and bought a tow truck to expand Model Tire’s income potential. Until that time, Model Tire had devoted a large share of its energy to recapping truck tires, primarily for the smelter located where the Animas-La Plata project is now under construction. Casings were ground down and sanded, heat and pressure machines vulcanized new tread to old tires, and4 machines were used for cooling and stretching, sanding and trimming around the clock. Richard delivered retreads and new tires on a regular run to Bayfield, Pagosa Springs, Chama, Dulce and Ruidoso. But by the 1960s, recaps were being eclipsed by growing varieties of new tires and makers, and Model’s recapping equipment was getting old and help was hard to find. “Wreckers” was the new writing on the wall.

Over the years, Model Tire used up 20 wreckers, operating as many as five at one time. Big wreckers were employed for towing off 18-wheelers; cargo trucks that slid off Molas Pass, full of onions, potatoes and gas; and even a couple of airplanes that slid off the runway at Durango-La Plata County Airport. “If you want to hear stories about towing, you’ll have to wait until I retire,” says Bukovec, “I don’t have the time to tell you about even the most interesting … and you don’t have the time to hear them all.”

Edith remembers all too clearly when Richard got his first wrecker and invited her to come along on a call. Asked where he was going and for what, “Richard said we were going to pick up a dead horse, which of course I thought meant a junk car.” With a shrug and a faint color of embarrassment, Edith continued, “So we get out to this ranch outside of town, and what does he hook up to? A dead horse, that’s what, and here we go out to his brother’s ranch to the bone yard with this horse slung up behind by his legs, just bobbing around back there. I was so embarrassed I could have died. I think it was the last call I made with Richard.”

Model Tire still keeps four wreckers in its warehouse in the alley next to the railroad tracks between 11th and 12th streets: two behemoths and two standard pick-up models. “We don’t use them much anymore,” says Richard, “It’s a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. I’m getting too old to fuss with it anymore, and the car clubs, like AAA, ruined the business … you can’t tow a car from up by Purgatory to a shop in town for $24. It don’t pay unless you got a repair shop. We’re a tire shop.”

After 54 years in the business, it’s impossible not to ask what changes Edith and Richard have seen in the tire business.

“Golly,” Edith exclaims with eyes wide open, “there used to be only a few manufacturers, like Gates, Pennsylvania, U.S. Royal, Uniroyal, Delta – and there were only a few sizes in automobile tires and only a couple of sizes in the big truck tires. Now, I don’t know, there are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 20-inch wheels, not counting the heavy trucks, and there must be dozens of tire sizes in each wheel size. Last year alone manufacturers added over 100 new sizes. We can’t stock them all, nobody can stock them all.”

Richard adds, “We can’t compete with the chain tire stores. We don’t want to. They sell their tires for less than I can buy them for, but they aren’t the regular line tires; they’re made special for them and some corners have been cut. Bring in a Goodyear or a Firestone tire from a chain store, and I can’t replace it from the regular line. And what did they save with those cheap tires? And what do they risk? A few bucks and their lives, is what.”

Model Tire has loyal customers, a couple of generations of them, and has always supplied local heavy truck and equipment operators with tires and wheels. They have been in business for 80 years for good reason. But that reason is nearly played out in this new world of discount chain stores, labor shortages, punitive shipping charges for small orders, and profitless towing. Model Tire, and the corner of Main Avenue and 12th Street, are for sale. Edith says she’s going fishing. Richard hates fishing because he isn’t getting any work done, so he’ll keep working 12 hours a day on something else. After all, old Pete Bukovec was right: stay put, work hard, and you’ll do well. It’s not likely that many 12-year-olds are hearing that anymore. •

Edith Bukovec rings up a customer the old-fashioned way at the front desk of the Model Tire Store last Thursday evening./Photo by Todd Newcomer.