The Peru Gazette

Mike Relation points to the location of used car parts

By John T. Ryan

In two years one of Peru’s most colorful personalities will be recalling that its been 40 years since he erected his business sign at 85 Connors Rd. Mike Relation started Rustic Auto Body as an auto body repair shop. Over the years he’s added used cars, new car parts, used car parts, antique cars and project cars. (More Photos) 

Rustic Auto Body is probably best known for its variety of used car parts. Customers come from all over the northeast knowing that this is where they very likely will find the car part they need. Rustic’s twenty-acre junkyard contains almost 1,500 cars some dating back as far as 1914. There are 100 foreign cars including eight Volkswagen bugs.  Thirty-four school buses dot the landscape and are filled with such things as rims, wheels, headlights, doors and transmissions. When a customer enters and asks for a specific part Mike Relation casually reaches under the counter, pulls out his two-foot machete and uses the machete to point to an aerial photograph of the junkyard.  Relation knows the exact location of every part in the yard and points out its location on the photograph. The customer is given the choice of either walking into the yard or riding on an ATV with Relation or his right hand man Mike Wells.  During the brief time the Gazette visited with Relation one customer from Syracuse walked into the yard looking for a part for a 1980’s vehicle while Mike Wells took another man into the yard looking for wheels for a 1987 Lincoln.

Mike Relation is a Peru native who graduated from Peru High School in 1967. Many people doubted that he would ever be able to operate his own business.  He contracted polio at five years of age, became totally paralyzed and was hospitalized for a year and a half. Mike said,  “In those days someone opened my eyelids in the morning and someone closed them at night.” Relation still has no control over his left leg and uses a cane.  He recalls the vocation rehabilitation personnel who said he would never be able to do auto body work and wouldn’t recommend auto body training for him. Instead, they approved a two year mechanical drafting program at the Manhattan Technical Institute in New York City. He studied hard and completed that program in one year. When he returned home he didn’t work in drafting but chose to pump gas and learn auto body repair from Dick Clark.

With knowledge acquired from Dick Clark, Relation opened Rustic Auto Body. Relation has a very simple business philosophy which he describes this way,  “Come to work every morning. Don’t get excited. Don’t let the little things bother us.” Note that Relation used the word “us.” Rustic Auto Body has only two staff members other than Mike. Mike’s wife Ruth does the bookkeeping and Mike Wells has worked at Rustic Auto Body for thirty-three years. Wells says, “I enjoy the work. Mike is a good friend. He pays me well and I’m glad I’ve been able to help him.”  In addition to working together at Rustic Auto Body, Wells and Relation also work with other members of the Trail Finders Snowmobile Club maintaining 157 miles of snowmobile trails between Plattsburgh and Union Falls. Relation is the club president. The trail work includes trimming trees, maintaining culverts, bridges and signs, opening and closing gates, working with landowners and grooming trails in the winter.

Many of Mike Relation’s customers have become good friends and often stop by just to trade stories. Wesley Mischler bought a 1937 Nash Ambassador from Relation twenty-seven years ago and still stops by driving that 37 Nash. Describing Relation, Wesley Mischler says, “Mike is a very smart man who accomplished a lot when people said he couldn’t do it. He does a lot to help people. He’s a good man.”