2011 2011 Relay for Life of Wabash County to be held at Paradise Spring on June 10-11, 11 a.m. to 11 a.m.
THE PAPER June 8, 2011
North Manchester’s town-wide garage sale to be held Aug. 5-6 The North Manchester Chamber of Commerce and the News-Journal are teaming together to North coordinate Manchester’s 2nd annual town-wide garage sale. The event, a huge success last year with 75 sales, is being planned for the weekend of Aug. 5-6. The thought behind having a community wide garage sale is the opportunity to create a lot of traffic into the community by offering multiple garage sales on the same weekend. “We were absolutely thrilled with the response last year and people have been calling our office already asking when the sales would be again this year,” said Tim McLaughlin, executive director of the Chamber. “People will travel for garage sales, so we think it’s very realistic to expect a lot of people making the trip to North Manchester from out of town again this year. I would love to have 100 sales going on the same weekend.” The News-Journal will run the ads for the sales (as they do now) in their newspaper and create a fullpage town map detailing the location of each participating garage sale. “We think it should be a win-win situation for everyone,” said McLaughlin. “By promoting it well, as long as we have a large number of garage (continued on page 6)
Index Classifieds................28-31 Community News ........18, 22-25 D & E ......................20-21 Sports Shorts ................19 Weekly Reports ........12-14 Vol. 34, No. 12
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McCoart’s Auto specializes in restoring Mustangs “from the ground up”
Mark McCoart by Shaun Tilghman Mark McCoart has owned and operated McCoart’s Auto Inc., located at 4 Shopping Center Lane, Somerset, since 1989. He and his staff continue to offer a full line auto service center, but they also specialize in the restoration of classic Mustangs and muscle cars. “I’ve been in business here as McCoart’s Auto Inc. since 1989, but I also
opera t e online at mustangmaker.com,” Mark said.
“I started out as general auto repair and then I got more into buying salvage cars and rebuilding wrecks.” When Mark was younger, an uncle from Kentucky gave him an old, worn out motorcycle. He fixed up the motorcycle himself and rode it around until he saw a Mustang advertised in the paper, which happened to be a 1967 Fastback. “The car was all rusted out but it had a big motor in it and I wanted it, so I traded the motorcycle for it,” Mark explained. “My dad was beside himself; he told me he didn’t even want it on the property. I kept it at my girlfriend’s and I had a neighbor that let me take it over to his place
actually still have it; in fact it was the first one I restored. “I was working the in mainten a n c e department at Wabash Alloys when I bought the building so I was sort of moonlighting in here for a while. When I started fixing up those wrecks there weren’t really any parts available for the Mustangs, so I found myself buying parts cars whenever I could. At some point I decided I was going to restore that first Mustang; once we got it looking good we started taking it to some shows and from there people wanted to know where I had it done – that’s when I started taking on other jobs.”
ued to
Those “other jobs” have contin-
typically will buy a wrecked car with low miles and use that engine. I
BEFORE roll in at McCoart’s because, even though they’re located in the small town of Somerset, they do almost all aspects of the restoration process in-house. “The Mustang stuff has always been like a hobby on the side of the business but now we’re getting to the point where there’s a waiting list for the restoration jobs,” Mark stated. “We are usually working on three or four Mustangs at a time; what most body shops do is the outer stuff and the inner stuff never gets d o n e .
AFTER and fix it up a little at a time. I finally got it looking halfway decent and I
modern, but with t h e
Basically a lot of what we do makes the car more
o l d e r style. Each restoration job is different but generally around here they are all from the ground up.” According to the website, the staff at McCoart’s care a lot about the little things. “We don’t count on others to figure problems out, we solve every problem as it comes. We don’t cover things up – we fabricate parts, weld, rewire, and renew. Being in business has taught us that doing it once correct is far better than doing it twice cheap.” “A lot of what we do is unique for anywhere – most places won’t go to the trouble of doing some of the things we do,” Mark added. “A lot of places buy an engine and drop it in, but I
can usually get the whole car for less than what guys will spend on a new engine, but you won’t see any of the big supercharged stuff like in magazines – I kind of stick with what Ford builds. There is a lot of custom stuff we do that people don’t even realize and more of the parts we use are new rather than reused.” He concluded, “We understand that every car is a dream and we treat it like our own. We give every car the attention it deserves while understanding that the customer is waiting – very few steps are sent out, therefore you get a nicer job done quicker.” For more information, check out mustangmaker.com.
Mentoring program provides opportunity to help Wabash youth by Danielle Smith Members of Wabash County’s judicial system have teamed up with Pastor Rick Tolley, New Foundations Ministries, and the Youth Service Bureau in an effort to take a proactive approach to assisting troubled youth in our county. They have enacted a mentoring program, which matches youth in the probation system with positive adult mentors. This program has been discussed between Circuit Court Judge Robert McCallen and Pastor Tolley since 2005. New life was breathed into the idea when Brian Bassett joined the Wabash County P r o b a t i o n Department. “His desire as a pro-
bation officer was hoping to maybe implement some kind of mentoring with youth,” Tolley said. “So the three of us, along with Dallas Duggan, head of probation, decided this was the time.” Tolley began creating a plan and laying the foundation for the program in May 2010. “We take kids that are on probation, they are ordered by the court to participate in the program. My job is to find suitable volunteers to match up with them. It’s similar to a Big Brothers/Big Sisters concept,” Tolley explained. Volunteers must be 21 years or older and they must complete various requirements such as a criminal background check and a home visit.
After these requirements are satisfied, they will be matched with a mentee. The volunteer is asked to spend 1-2 hours per week with their mentee for the duration of their probationary period. “We encourage them to just be involved. Take them out for a hamburger; call them; get involved in different activities whether it be fishing, bowling or just hanging out,” Tolley explained. Benefits to the mentee could be improved academic perfor mance, improved communication skills, improved family relationships, improved self-esteem, decreasing likelihood of experimenting with drugs or alcohol,
decreasing likelihood of being involved with violence and much more. “We want to try to get adults that will instill some positive ideas in kids’ heads and hopefully we can motivate them to change the direction they are going,” he said. “So many times people say ‘Well if a kid is in this situation it must be bad parenting’, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes they just need someone outside the role of a parent that can tell them the same thing that the parents have been saying, but they just haven’t gotten the message.” Along with benefits to the mentee, Tolley outlined some of the benefits this program will bring to our com-
munity in general. “They did a study at University of Minnesota that said that for every dollar a community spends on reaching out and helping at-risk kids, it returns about $4,89 to the community,” Tolley said. He hopes that this program will offer a proactive way to prevent the need to remove kids from their homes, therefore incurring the extensive costs of placing them in a detention center. “Not only is the kid helped, but they become an asset to the community,” he explained. He also feels that businesses looking to relocate or start-up would find this problem-solving approach attractive. “We can help create an environment
where businesses are saying “That’s the kind of community I want to be a part of.” The program is currently up and running, and Tolley already has visions of expanding it to reach out to kids before they even reach the probation system. However, volunteers are desperately needed in order to sustain the program. “The real answer for our community is not government involvement or some other entity’s involvement, but people getting involved,” Tolley said. “Kennedy said ‘Don’t ask what the country can do for you, but what can you do for the country’, and we can step back and say ‘What can this group or that (continued on page 6)