Pub. 55 2014-2015 Issue 1

14 A t the request of NADA Director Charlie Gilchrist and TADA, Ed Wallace, award-winning journalist and broadcaster, spoke to a convention of 1,000 members of the American Legislative Council in Dallas on July 30. The Council composed of state legislators from every state, including Representative Phil King from Weatherford who will chair this national organization in 2015, heard Charlie Gilchrist address the policymakers, and were reassured by Mr. Wallace that the American dream is being realized every day in our country’s new car and truck dealerships. The following is Ed Wallace’s address to the convention. Lately a serious financial doubt has surfaced in the news: Can anyone still achieve the American Dream? Much of the debate has centered on the battle over the minimum wage, but that seems disingenuous; such jobs alone will never move one into the middle class. True, to a teenager, flipping burgers is a valuable lesson in developing workplace skills. But, if you’re still doing the same thing at 30 years of age, your odds of becoming a solid middle class citizen have prob- ably slipped away. And no improvement in the minimum wage is going to better those odds. No, the last great equal-opportunity jobs engine — it takes in anyone of desire, integrity and intelligence and gives them the opportunity to go anywhere they want in life — may be the automobile industry. Just last month new car dealers in America topped the 1 million mark for employment. Put another way, one out of every 145 work- ing Americans now makes his or her living inside a dealership. The Last Level Playing Field Forty years ago I was a 20-year-old kid, just transferred to Houston with an insur- ance company and terminated two weeks later. I don’t remember if I had five bucks in my checking account or was overdrawn that much, but it was somewhere right in that neighborhood. Attention deficit disorder made me a mediocre student in school, and in the real world it made focusing on the mundane and repetitive chores most jobs require all but impossible. Oh, and just as all the bad news arrived right after that move to Houston, I found out my wife was pregnant. A week later I found myself selling Oldsmobiles — and I haven’t looked back since. As it turns out, for all of youth’s known handicaps, everyone also has talents if they refuse to let life get the best of them; and the car business is well known for finding one’s real talent and putting it to good use. Starting out in auto sales is certainly tougher now than it was back in the 1970s, but in reality it’s still the one last great engine of commerce that offers everyone — everyone who’s truly determined to improve his or her station in life—an equal opportunity to succeed. Most would be amazed at how many General Managers, or even how many extremely successful car dealers, have no more than a high school education. One of our most successful and respected car dealers in Fort Worth was a high school dropout. In the car business MBAs don’t count for much. Ed Wallace Tells State Leaders The American Dream is Alive and Well In Franchised New Car Dealerships