His slogan often heard when signing off the air"drive gently". Goss 62, was born and raised in a small town outside Buffalo. His father, a bus mechanic, died when Goss was young. His mother's job in an electronics factory couldn't keep the family solvent, so Goss opened a body and paint shop while a high school freshman.
"I've read a few books and concluded that the stuff was incredibly simple," he says. By the time Pat finished high school, his shop employed 23 people and grossed $900,000 a year. "We specialized in lowering car frames, so the body of the car sat lower, and painting flames on the side -- stuff like that."
While taking scattered college courses, he taught for an automotive test equipment company. "I was teaching the cream De la Creme of the technicians," he says." One day it dawned on me that I am teaching these guys who are making four and five times as much as I am." So he went back into the business. Tired of small-town life, he came to Washington in 1966: "I knew people in Washington, so I stopped here and I never left -- no grand plan."
Besides running his Silver Spring garage located in Seabrook Maryland in the suburbs of Washington DC, Goss discusses cars Saturday's on WJFK -- FM radio. His television show, "Goss Garage" is carried on news channel 8 in Arlington, VA. ,Saturday mornings at 9:30 am. MotorWeek is broadcast internationally.He also writes for publications including the Wall Street Journal and Reader's Digest.
Goss teaches car care clinics and he has consulted for the White House office of Consumer Affairs, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and others. He and his wife, Bonnie, live in West River, Maryland, south of Annapolis. She helps produces TV and radio shows and works in the garage. Goss's daughter, Marcy, works in the front office; a husband and shop foreman.
He was once asked how come cars constantly go in for repairs?
I don't take my refrigerator in the shop! "Your refrigerator doesn't fly up and down highways at high speed. It doesn't weigh thousands of pounds it's a simple machine. Today's automobiles at around 10 times the computing power of the original lunar landing module. They're among the most sophisticated equipment on the planet. And that performance is stunning. Brakes aren't locking up like they used to. Cars are considerably more durable and reliable"
"Getting good maintenance, a car should run relatively trouble-free or at least 150,000 miles. Given exemplary preventative maintenance, maybe 200,000 to 255,000 miles before needing really major repairs".
"In all my years in business -- hiring and firing people, and so on -- I truly can't remember an employee it didn't have a lot of good in him or her. Maybe not a lot of good for the particular position they were in, but overall they were good people. I've learned that what I thought was all-important when I was much younger wasn't. I used to be very concerned with money. I tried to do a good job, sure, but I was concerned with making the most dollars."
"Then I backed off that. I concentrated on doing a better job. Before long the money took care of itself. I made more concentrating on doing the best job possible than I had concentrating on the money. I've long had expensive stuff around the house. Those nice things were important to me. Then a few years back, I had a health crisis -- malignant melanoma -- which required surgery and treatment. After these treatments, I woke up one morning with a realization: Not once during all this drama had I thought, or given a damn, about any of the stuff Never once."
I said, "now, wait a minute -- there's a lesson here." These things have absolutely no meaning when it gets down to brass tacks. There is no meaning to them at all!
*excepts taken from The Washingtonian 04/23/04
