Valley Auto Repair Owner Retires After 42 Years

photo by Mike McGuire

John Lewis just retired after 42 years of owning Valley Auto Repair on Castro Valley Boulevard.

After 42 years running Valley Auto Repair at 2769 Castro Valley Boulevard, John Lewis is retiring and has sold the shop to new owners.

“I’ll miss my customers the most,” he said. “The children of my early customers have grown up and have families of their own, and they kept taking their cars to my shop.”

He said he always tried to give people quality work at a fair price, and his customers told other customers.

Lewis was proud that in 42 years in business, he only ever got three negative Yelp reviews, and he notes none of those came from actual customers.

Lewis moved to Castro Valley as a young child in 1955 and opened the shop near today’s Burger King in 1981.

“When I first moved here, Castro Valley was a lot smaller; the interstate hadn’t been built yet, and the shop was the last gas station on the way to Pleasanton. Later, the pumps came out, and it became a tire shop, which was so successful the owner needed to move to a bigger store nearby,” he remembers.

Lewis went to Castro Valley High School and graduated with the Class of 1970. There, he took auto shop classes, which hooked him on cars at age 13.

Even after he was old enough, his parents wouldn’t let him get his own car until he could pay for it, so he went to work at Castro Valley’s Jack-In-The-Box while a high school student.

“Then there were these guys who lived next door to my parents who had hot rods. They were always working on them, and I loved those hotrods,” he said.

“So, I’ve been working on cars now for, what, 55 years now?” Lewis said. “My business started feeling like a hobby, and now it feels weird to get up in the morning and not go to work.”  

“I feel a bit guilty for not being in the shop working on people’s cars,” he added.

Lewis considers himself fortunate for having the best mechanics possible working in his shop at a time when it’s hard to attract quality employees. One of the mechanics chose to join him in retirement, while the other got a job at a shop in Alameda, he said.

He wishes the new owner the best of luck and hopes he continues to provide quality service for Castro Valley car owners.

“I had a great clientele,” he said. “People in Castro Valley are really good people.”

Among the fond memories he has of the shop were meeting his wife Jennifer there and also the longtime companionship of his Siberian husky, Toma, who helped get them together.

Jennifer, then a student at Cal State East Bay, brought her car in to get fixed. She noticed Toma was drinking from a plastic cup and returned with a nice water bowl for the dog.

On a later repair visit, she asked if she could borrow Toma for runs around Lake Chabot.

“First Toma fell in love with her, then I did,” Lewis said.