Brian Hogan has been working on auto bodies since he bought his first car, when he was 13 years old.
He paid $50 for a Cutlass Supreme and changed the color on the car three times. He recalls “spending a lot of time sitting in that car and listening to the radio.”
That was the beginning of a life’s work, which led him to be the owner of Grand Auto Body at 105 Herricks Road in Garden City Park.
“I made it my perfect first car. That was my project car,” Hogan said.
Hogan, 49, is carrying on a family tradition that started when his grandfather, William Benson, opened an auto repair shop in Queens in 1939. His father, Joseph Hogan, worked with Brian’s grandfather in the 1940s and eventually opened his own shop, also called Grand Body Auto, on Jamaica Avenue in 1953.
As a fifth grader, Hogan would hop a bus each day after school to his father’s shop, where he’d sweep the place and park cars.
“As a 10-year-old, it was exciting to be doing that,” he recalled.
Hogan learned how to sand down body surfaces when he was 11, and then he graduated to his personal project on the Cutlass.
After high school, he kept working in his father’s business. He opened his shop in Garden City Park 14 years ago. He still takes satisfaction from seeing a car battered in an accident transformed into pristine form.
“There’s something about putting it back together,” he said. “There’s a thrill about doing the restoration of the car and cleaning it.”
Hogan said he follows his father’s practice of making the car look brand new again, and he guarantees his work for the lifetime of the vehicle, as his grandfather did.
“If you fix the car right, there should be no problem in guaranteeing it. If you prep and prepare each part you put on properly, it’s going to last,” he said.
That’s one reason he’s concerned about the paintless dent repair many shops are using to repair cars damaged in the freak hailstorm that struck the area on Aug. 1. He initially followed that practice, but had his doubts when he read about the method online.
Banging out the dents causes the metal to “crown.” When the surface is polished, he said the dents can reappear, which he discovered with cars he’d repaired that way. Unwitting car owners can face a double-whammy after they’ve filed an insurance claim for the original damage, he said.
“It’s the same loss repeating itself,” Hogan said.
In the wake of the storm, so-called “storm chasers” specializing in paintless dent removal flocked to the area from other parts of the country to do the work.
With approximately 200 customers still awaiting initial repairs, Hogan already has customers coming in for a second round of dent repairs. He’s currently in the process of notifying the 60,000 customers in his database that their insurance companies will cover further repairs to permanently fix the telltale pockmarks from the golfball-sized hail that pelted their vehicles.
That customer base, built up through his family’s business in Queens where he still maintains a shop on Queens Boulevard, is one reason he’s opening a new 1,600-square-foot location on Denton Avenue in New Hyde Park. He also has a 4,000-square-foot shop in Hempstead as large as his Garden City Park facility.
He’s looking forward to putting some vintage family photos in the new location. And Hogan said he’s excited to see the next generation of his family coming into the business.
His daughter, Ariel, joined the business in the front office after graduating from Herricks and his son, Joseph, will start working in the business next year as part of a work-study BOCES program.
Although his primary responsibility is overseeing things, Hogan still likes to keep his hand in – literally. With the number of cars or be restored from hail damage, that can mean sanding cars.
“Anytime we’re short-handed, I jump in,” he said. “I enjoy the physical work.”
His vocation is also his pastime. He helped his son restore a ‘99 Ford Mustang that had serious front end damage, customizing it with the nose of a Mustang Cobra and an airbrush paint job. The car won best in show at a competition in Commack.
“I’ve had hundreds of cars myself,” Hogan said.
He has rebuilt two cars, a Chevy Corvette and an early model Mustang, with custom paint jobs for the Fraternal Order of Police as touring cars for anti-drug, anti-DWI campaigns.
It’s just part of an objective to make any vehicle that comes into his shop looking much better when it leaves.
