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In his last two years of high school, Fred attended BOCES tech for auto mechanics and graduated top of his class. At the age of 16 Fred went to work pumping gas and washing cars for Wallace Scott Motors, a Saab,Volvo and Jeep dealership located in Briarcliff. “I hate to make that kind of decision,” he said.Fred grew up playing at Ryder Park and attending Ossining High School. Some ask him where they should go to get their cars fixed instead of at Fred’s, which is always a ticklish question for him. He doesn’t know yet what he’ll use them for, but it probably will involve cars.Īnd it will involve winters in New York - the snow always melts on its own up here, he said, but hurricanes and tornadoes make a mess of what they don’t destroy down in the Sun Belt.īaranello has two mechanics and an assistant working for him, but he still sometimes pumps gas himself, which puts him in a position to greet the people now coming by to say farewell. He’s boxing up his tools this week, and will keep at least some of them. So he’s retiring because of circumstances more than need, and he doesn’t plan to really retire. “Thank God I’m still healthy!” said Barenello, who’s now 71. His twin brother, Tom, joined him at the business soon after it opened and was his partner until his death in 2012.īaranello has lost a few fingernails and gained a few bumps and bruises but hasn’t broken any bones or suffered other serious mishaps though a half century-plus in a profession that can take a significant toll on the body. All it’s got is trusted mechanics and competitively priced gasoline.īaranello added ASE certifications as he became a more experienced mechanic but he started with just the basic skills gained as a youth by helping his father, Al, fix things.ĭad’s influence also was felt more directly at the new business: “He helped us a lot in the beginning,” he said of his father. One by one, the other service stations went out of business, replaced by convenience stores that sell gas to motorists and hope they will come in for chips, beer or ice cream.įred’s Auto doesn’t even have a rack of candy bars by the cash register or a soda machine anymore. After six years, Texaco pulled out of the market and sold Baranello the business that he still runs today.
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“Everyone said it wasn’t going to succeed because there’s so many around me.”Įveryone was wrong. “I just wanted to give it a try,” Baranello recalled Tuesday.
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That glut of gas stations set the stage for the lifelong Amsterdam resident being able to get into business at such a young age - a Texaco station had shut down, apparently because of the competition, and no one wanted to take it over, again because of the competition. There was even more competition in that neighborhood back in 1968 - three other gas stations on the same stretch of Market Street and a fourth a short distance down the hill. “I got a lot a lot of faithful customers,” Baranello said. The gas sales drive the repair business and the repair business drives the gas sales - again and again, across decades and generations in some cases. Fred’s is the only one of the three with full-service pumps and the only one that does auto repairs.
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“They made me a decent deal, so I said yes,” he said.įred’s Auto is the middle of a series of three adjacent gas stations on the main north-south road in the area: The older-generation Stewart’s is immediately south and a large Fastrac is north, just across Storrie Street.īaranello said the close competition hasn’t hurt him. to Stewart’s Shops, which plans to demolish it, probably in February, and build a large next-generation shop to replace the smaller shop it runs next door. Instead, Baranello sold the property at 134 Market St. “The mom-and-pop shops are depleting because the dealerships are putting everybody out,” he explained Tuesday.Īlso, Baranello’s longtime fuel supplier - Red Kap of Schenectady - recently was acquired by Stewart’s, so he’d have to strike a new supply deal if he wanted to keep the pumps running at Fred’s Auto. The automobiles that Baranello has fixed for over a half-century have grown increasingly reliant on computer circuitry and the dealerships that sell them are continually finding new ways to capture the market on service. But he won’t be at Fred’s Auto after Jan.