Published: July 04, 2007 11:26 pm      

Faces of the Flood: ‘We were ready to operate’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

In 1936, floodwaters reached the second floor of Johnstown’s Suppes Ford dealership.

Forty-one years later, Fred Suppes Jr. recalled his father’s labors as he surveyed murky water that once again swamped the family business at 101 Main St.

“My dad went through the ’36 flood in this very same building,” Suppes said. “I remembered enough stories to know that I had a mountain of work ahead of me.”

Suppes was selling Volkswagens in July 1977. The flood damage was bad enough, but the storm’s timing was even worse.

“We had just, the previous day, gotten all of the inventory from upstairs and brought it down, set it up in the showroom and other places,” he said.

Suppes, a Southmont resident who was forced to ride the Inclined Plane to reach his business, was shocked by the destruction.

He set one goal during that long, first day after the flood.

“The whole thing in my mind, as I recall, was – how do we get this place back together?” he said.

His cars, both new and used, were covered by insurance. But he needed inventory to get back in business, and new vehicles were in short supply.

“I couldn’t get any from the factory,” Suppes recalled. “They weren’t having any of that.”

Acquaintances in the Volkswagen business rode to the rescue, offering to sell Suppes some of their inventory. He heard from dealers across western Pennsylvania.

“That was a godsend,” Suppes said. “I thank them to this day.”

Then there was the cleanup effort.

Suppes credits his employees for showing up and pitching in.

“Oh, huge amounts of mud,” he said. “We used a four-wheel-drive truck and a snowplow to get it out of here.”

An electric transformer in the basement controlled the freight and passenger elevators, so those were out of commission.

But the building had sustained no real structural damage. As an indicator of how calmly the flood had risen, staff members noticed that there was no damage to the tops of their wooden office desks.

Later, someone offered an educated guess on how that could be.

“The water came, the wooden desk floated up just enough to keep the water off the top of it, and it set it down in exactly the same place,” Suppes said with a laugh.

The dealership opened about three weeks after the flood, with Suppes having procured a few cars to sell by that time.

“We weren’t pretty,” he said, “but we were ready to operate.”

And the business, now a Ford dealership in its third generation of family ownership, has continued to operate in the same spot even as other new-car dealers have set up shop in suburban Richland Township.

Suppes is retired, but his former office still has a small marker on the wall indicating the 1977 high-water mark.

What once was a scar has in some ways become a symbol of commitment.

“I don’t think you have to go to Richland to do business,” Suppes said. “I think you can do business here, too. And we’ve pretty much proven that through the years.”