Building a Legacy
Reading Time: 7 minutes Jacks Doors’ Jack Spence: Building a Legacy through life’s “ups and downs”
The great and glorious legacy of a human being is to live with purpose.
– Robin Sharma
Jack’s Overhead Doors, named after the owner and founder, Jack Spence, has been providing garage doors and openers to residential and commercial customers in Gilroy and the surrounding area since 1973. They handle every aspect of the job, including sales, installation, repairs, and maintenance. At 95 years old, Jack still shows up to work two days a week at the business he started 50 years ago. The company started in Jack’s garage, where he began, aptly, building garage doors. He would sell and install them during the day and build them at night. Within about a year, Jack rented a space to build the doors and worked the next few years to earn his contractor’s license.
As Jack’s business continued to grow, his next step was to open his own place. By 1978, with the help of his brother Allen Spence, an engineer who worked for Gilroy Foods, he built the Luchessa Business Park in Gilroy and moved his company in, where it is still located today. Jack still owns the buildings and leases the ones his company does not occupy to other businesses. Over time, the company shifted from constructing their own doors to functioning as a dealer plus installation and repair service.
The garage door business would not be here if Jack had followed his first love—farming. “My goal was always to farm,” he said. “I loved farming…but it didn’t work out…it wasn’t profitable.”
As a boy, Jack grew up in Merced, California, as the second oldest child (and oldest son) in a family of fourteen children. He worked on his family’s property with almond trees and also did some work at a dairy farm when he was 12. He was 14 when World War II broke out, and he quit school and went to work. At 16, he joined his dad working in a plant that dehydrated foods for the military.
When Jack was 18, he signed up to serve two years in the Navy and was sent to China to serve on a ship called the USS Stentor (ARL-26). The goal was to rebuild and refurbish the war-torn ship from WWII until it was good enough to sail it back to the U.S. On the return trip, the Stentor faced rough seas, relied on welders working around the clock to keep the ship together, and lost its navigation system. The communication systems were not very good, either, and the Navy could not reach them or find them, even with search planes. They were listed as lost at sea.
It took the Stentor 31 days to come back from China. Jack said they had to follow the stars, and thankfully, they had some people on board who knew how to direct them this way. When the Stentor arrived at San Pedro Harbor in southern California, Jack said, “They rolled out the red carpet for us.”
Jack spent six months on the ship in China before making it back to the U.S., where he stayed for his remaining two years of service on the Stentor in the San Diego harbor while the ship prepared for decommissioning.
After the military, Jack returned home to Merced and to farming. It was during the summer of 1952, that Jack met his wife Evelyn. “I met her in a tomato packing shed, when I stopped in to see one of my buddies that was working there,” Jack recalled. During the school year, Evelyn worked as a teacher in Pasadena. They hit it off, but spent seven years in a long-distance relationship, as Evelyn returned to Southern California and Jack moved with his family to Willows in Northern California. They married in 1959, and this year they are celebrating 64 years of marriage.
After farming for a while, Jack drove a truck delivering feed for a poultry company for 15 years. Although Jack’s true interest was in agriculture, he knew he needed a more profitable job. Jack and Evelyn ended up in Modesto, where they began raising their three children Brad, Rod, and Shelly. Jack found work with a company that did garage door installations, along with other jobs. One day, after one of the installers was electrocuted, Jack was asked to fill in, and this set him on the career path he maintains today.
The company’s owner originally planned to have Jack take over the business, but the man’s sons chose to do so, instead. The owner was apologetic and offered to help Jack get his own business started if he found a suitable place. Eventually, Jack and his wife moved their family to Gilroy, where Jack’s brother and his wife already lived; it seemed like the perfect place to start the garage door business at the time. Evelyn continued teaching after their move. Jack credits his wife with doing a great job of raising their three children and their daughter Shelly Hale echoed this. “She’s our glue,” she said.
Family time was often a weekend spent driving in the truck with Dad to go on a garage door installation run. It got the whole family out together, and they all helped, even in the smallest ways. All three kids grew up working for their dad, from organizing nuts and bolts at a young age, to bigger jobs as they aged. Evelyn was originally concerned that the kids would burn out on work by the time they grew up, but Jack said that they appreciated it as adults and they credit their dad with teaching them a strong work ethic.
While Jack’s sons each tried out other jobs, they all came back to Jack’s Overhead Doors. Jack’s oldest, Brad, has been running another garage door business in Paso Robles for 30 years, Brad’s Overhead Doors, which he and his dad started. Brad said his dad “made me who I am today by the things he’s taught me— quality work, my work ethic, and being there for the customer when they need you.” Brad said his dad has also taught him many other skills. “He’s very good at designing and fabricating things.” importantly, Brad said, “He’s always been there for me as a dad.” Rod and Shelly have both worked for many years at Jack’s in Gilroy. Rod oversees personnel and commercial work, and Shelly acts as the office manager and does bookkeeping. The grandchildren have worked in the business, too, over the years, with two of them still working there.
Jack said having family involved in the business “has its good points and its bad points. When things go bad, you have all of that within the family…and with the good, you can rejoice in having the good times.”
While Jack’s Overhead Doors has seen its share of ups and downs over the years, Jack said he has been most proud of “sticking to it and completing the job.”
Jack has also mentored many former employees and instructed them in how to start or run a business. He said, “They have stopped in here again and thanked me for training them.”
One such person, David Strickland, who worked for Jack for about 10 years as a young man, credits Jack with teaching him not only how to install garage doors, but how to live life. David said, “He’s an amazing guy! He was stern, but he has a soft heart.” David struggled as a young man, but he said, “Jack believed in me when I didn’t really believe in myself.” Today, David installs commercial garage doors for a company in Oklahoma where he lives. While Jack may not be showing up to work six days a week like he used to up until his 80s, he still keeps tabs on things during the two days a week he is there. Jack’s daughter Shelly said, “At 95, he still gives us good advice.”
