The Full Story

Barrow Body Shop history

In 1960, Gene and Emma Barrow started Barrow Enterprises as a small Shell Oil gas station on the corner of Pat Mel Road and South Cobb Drive in Smyrna, Georgia. It sat across from Cobb Center, which was the largest shopping center in the Southeast at the time. The Smyrna and Marietta area was growing quickly because of military work coming into Lockheed Aircraft just a few miles away.

Small brick houses were being built by the thousands and selling almost as soon as they were completed. Barrow Shell became the kind of neighborhood place where customers could buy gasoline on store credit, with accounts written down in a small notebook and settled at the end of the month.

This was a full-service gas station long before self-service was normal. Customers sat in their cars while their gas was pumped, windshield cleaned, and oil checked. A cold Coke in a glass bottle and a pack of salted Lance peanuts could be pulled from the vending machine on the front sidewalk, and people would sit out front catching up on local news and gossip.

Within a few years, the business became much more than a gas station. It evolved into a speed shop, gas station, wrecker service, and body shop all in one.

Gene Barrow had spent four years in the Air Force. After his honorable discharge, he and Emma moved to Miami, where Gene worked as an aircraft mechanic for Eastern Airlines. After about a year, they wanted to be closer to family in middle Tennessee. Gene applied for a position at Lockheed Aircraft, was hired, and the family settled in the Smyrna area. Gene continued to use his Air Force aircraft mechanic training at Lockheed.

Because Lockheed was a military contractor, work could be unstable, with layoffs and call-backs. That instability pushed Gene and Emma to open Barrow Shell. Gene partnered with his brother CD, and the station was run by the family. Gene worked the station during the day and the night shift at Lockheed. CD worked his day job at a wire plant and ran the station at night.

The family work schedule reflected who they were. Gene worked all day Saturday so he could go to church on Sunday. His brother, who did not care much for church, worked Sundays. It was family-owned and family-operated from the start.

The two Barrow children were part of the story too. When the station opened, Debbie was a pre-teen and Blake was a pre-schooler. Emma was a wife, mother, homemaker, and the company bookkeeper.

When car people spend enough time around a place where cars are repaired, slow cars eventually become fast cars, and fast cars become race cars. Gene developed a skill for rebuilding carburetors, and his rebuilds produced more power. Engine modifications followed, and old cars started turning into local dirt-track race cars.

Racing became an expensive obsession. After a few years, Emma finally cut off the race funding. The cars were tested on South Cobb Drive, which was then a straight two-lane asphalt road. Local police somehow always seemed to be somewhere else during the tests, then later showed up at the gas station to ask how the race car was running.

Barrow Shell even had a car compete on the NASCAR circuit and race at the legendary Talladega Superspeedway.

In 1968, Barrow Enterprises received its first towing contract with the City of Smyrna. A few years later, the company received a major towing contract with the Cobb County Police Department. Barrow Towing grew into a fleet of 35 tow trucks and became one of Atlanta’s largest towing services.

In 2008, the EPA selected Barrow Towing for one of its pilot programs originating in Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago. The Trip Program was created to clear roadways quickly after major tractor-trailer accidents, with the goal of reducing lost revenue, wasted fuel, and pollution from idling traffic backups. The program became more successful than originally designed, and Barrow Wrecker played a major role in that success.

In 1978, Blake Barrow graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Finance. He originally wanted to enter banking, but after returning home to Smyrna, he began running the tiny on-site body shop. At the time, it was a small four-bay operation. The towing service was the main business, and the body shop was still partly an excuse to build race cars, but the industry was changing quickly.

Cars were becoming more complex as plastics were introduced to save weight, and automotive refinishing techniques were changing as manufacturers introduced two-stage paint processes.

While in college, Blake did part-time painting at a local Cadillac dealership in Athens, Georgia. He introduced them to tinting and blending, also called featuring-out, so color could be matched to adjacent panels. He also showed the importance of de-trimming certain items on blended panels instead of masking them off, helping eliminate jagged tape edges that could later cause paint to flake.

Blake learned those techniques while painting cars at home in the body shop and carried that knowledge into his college work and later into Barrow Body Shop.

In the 1980s, the body shop expanded from three bays to eleven bays, and new technology was introduced. Blake Barrow became one of the first body shop owners in the Atlanta area to invest in estimating software, laser frame alignment equipment, and heated paint booth technology.

He purchased an Italian-built paint booth with downdraft technology. The heat helped evaporate impurities from the paint and quickly cure the finish so it could be washed and waxed within a few hours instead of weeks. At the same time, unibody construction was replacing full-frame vehicle design, making structural alignment more difficult and time-consuming. The investment put Barrow Body Shop ahead of the local market.

In the 1990s, the collision repair industry changed dramatically as insurance companies gained more control over shops through DRP, or Direct Repair Program, relationships. Barrow Body Shop joined two major programs. Within the first two years, one relationship became too controlling and was dissolved. The other was a strong relationship for many years because it showed real concern for repairing customers’ cars properly.

During this period, the physical plant expanded again with more room for the paint shop and front offices. Gene and Emma retired, leaving the business in the hands of their son Blake, and the Barrow story continued.