Pub. 9 2021-2022 Issue 2

4 RETIRING BOARD MEMBER Q&A Peter Hoffman GLANCDA Q&A With Peter Hoffman I understand that you and your family are selling your stores and getting out of the retail automobile business. Your family has been selling vehicles in Southern California for a long time. Can you give us a short review of that history? Sure. My grandfather, Paul G. Hoffman, dropped out of college to sell cars in Chicago in the early 20th century. He soon saw that Los Angeles was a strong car market, so he moved out here and began selling Studebakers door-to-door. He started his own Studebaker dealership in downtown LA and was very much a part of the early retail automotive industry in LA. He kept his Figueroa Street store but moved to the factory side, rising to be the president of the company in South Bend, Indiana. After the war, my father, Lathrop Hoffman, bought that store and owned it until Studebaker ceased operations in the late 1950s. In 1971, my father bought the VW store in Fontana — on Sierra Avenue. He then moved to Monrovia, was awarded the Honda franchise and bought the Pontiac franchise from the Bozzani family. He also had stores in Fort Bragg and Eureka by then. When I joined the organization in 1988, my sisters Mary and Elizabeth were already working in the office, and the Eureka and Fort Bragg stores had been sold. They had just opened an Acura store in Alhambra and a Lincoln-Mercury-Merkur store in Monrovia. Over the next few years, we acquired Chevrolet, Saturn, Daihatsu, Isuzu, Oldsmobile, Buick, Mazda and Subaru. Now, many of those franchises have gone away, been sold or given back to the factory, with Chevrolet, Honda and Subaru being the last to go. That sale is now pending. My nephew, Mike Hoffman, general manager of our Chevrolet store, is the only one continuing in the business. Would you please tell us about your father, Lathrop Hoffman and his influence on your life? My father was a real entrepreneur, always learning, creating, investing, building. He was able to connect with people quickly, and those connections were almost always lasting. He knew how to distill problems down to the central issue, analyze the choices and get a consensus on a solution. He knew the right thing to do, in business and personally. He was a handshake businessman and a caring human being. I really enjoyed working with him for the 26 years we worked together. He loved automobiles, enjoyed the industry with full awareness of its f laws and had many wonderful relationships with the people in it. I am not able to be him, but I have tried to keep Sierra working as he would have wanted it to work. His inf luence is still felt. Did you aspire to be part of the automotive industry, or did you have other plans? After college, I was an engineer for a while and then I went to law school and was a lawyer for a while. I was not particularly interested in the car business, but when my father asked me to change careers and join his business, I felt working with him and helping to run a business was a great opportunity, so I agreed. My wife, our two children and I moved from Irvine to Monrovia and restructured our lives around the family business. I was 37 then. Your nephew, Mike; your sisters, Mary and Liz; and your daughter, Leah, have all been part of the family business. How have they each contributed? My sister, Mary, was a long-term employee. She was here in 1988 when I got here, working in the office. Over the years, she worked as the office manager in several stores. She ended up managing our management company before she retired in 2019. Throughout that time, and now, she is a director and the secretary of the company. Liz worked in the office doing a variety of tasks. I mentioned that Mike is the general manager of