After working at the tire store that is a fixture of Malad City since he was 12, and owning it since 1981, Rick Griffiths is finally ready to take some time off.  A float in this year’s parade will officially announce his retirement from the tire business and signal his transition to a world of less hectic weeks and weekends.  An open house will take place after the shootout at the City Park at Griffiths Tire for a couple of hours for those who want to stop by and reminisce.  

Rick bought the store in 1981 from his dad, who had purchased it in 1957, and he’s been a familiar face at the counter and in the bay ever since.  

When asked what things had changed in the tire business in that time, Rick noted “The biggest thing is the number of sizes.  It’s gone from about 15-20 common sizes to close to 200 or 300.  So, how do you really stock all of them.  You’ve got farm tires, and ATV tires.  And you can’t buy them all from one place anymore.  We used to.  We used to get them all from one supplier.”  Like many businesses, large supplier consolidation has made the tire business less face-to-face and personable, though that’s not a thing that Rick could be accused of.  He knows most of his customers, and they knew him—that’s why they keep coming back.

It's not just the tire business, but things in Malad have changed a bit too over time.  “I’ve been here since I was 12, which was long before 1981,” Rick laughed.  “All the little gas stations, and the gas station mechanics are mostly gone.  We used to have almost everything here in Malad.  I mean, you had lots of cafes.  The Deep Creek Inn.  I know we had at least three grocery stores.  All the little stores were open along Bannock Street and Main Street.  I don’t think we went out of town for a lot.  Of course, you can’t do that any more.”

Rick also mentioned how the role the tire store played in the community had changed a bit too.  It used to be quite a gathering place for people.  “We used to have a pop machine and they’d all come and roll for drinks.  All the farmers would come in, and whoever lost had to buy all the drinks and then they’d sit around and reminisce and talk.  It was always reminiscing about old times—it never got into the political area much.  They’d always tell the old stories of things that happened.  In later years we even had guys that came in from out of town and would come in and sit down.  I remember one of them was Jack Goodman.  And these other guys were all sitting around talking about their wives and how terrible they were.  I was watching Jack, because I’d never heard him say anything bad about his wife.  After awhile he stood up to go and said ‘Well, before I go I want to give you a little advice.  You know, if you give your wife a treat instead of a treatment everything goes along a lot better.’  And when he left, nobody said a word—they changed the subject,” he laughed.  “And that was good advice.”

“There was a lot of good advice I’ve heard over the years, and a lot of good stories I’ve heard over the years,” Rick continued.  “And we pulled a lot of pranks over the years.”

Rick recounted some of his favorite pranks he had been party to.  “We have a restroom in the basement,” he said.  “And whenever the salesman would come, he’d go into the basement and we’d line up some tires up at the top of the stairs.  And when we heard him coming, we’d roll the tires down the stairs and shut the light off, and then we’d hurry back to our jobs and he’d look around to see who’d done it.”

Rick also told the story of his initiation in the Lions Club.  At the time, they had a “hot seat” rigged for the new initiates, where nails were driven down into the bench, and connected to two parallel wires and a model T car battery to send a shock up into those seated.  The shock was supposed to correspond with the speaker asking for volunteers for a $100 donation for the hospital, “prompting” their spontaneous support.  His dad informed him about the seat, and insisted that he was going to sit on it with the others.  Rick decided to protect himself by taking two tractor tire tubes and shaping them to fit inside the seat of his pants.  At the meeting, when the shock went through the seat, everyone but Rick flew off the bench.  

“I could feel it on the side of my legs, and I thought ‘Oh, my heavens.’  One of the guys who used to sit down here and the tire shop and give me a hard time said, ‘You didn’t feel that?’  and I said ‘I’ve been working here so long I’ve got rubber in my blood.  It must have insulated me.’  At the end of the meeting, the guy insisted on trying it, and he sat up there on the bench.  And when they hit it, he went flying five feet off the bench.  As we were leaving, he said ‘I’ve got to research this rubber in your blood thing.  I’ve never heard of that before.’”

Rick’s official retirement date is July 4 during the parade.  Afterward, he plans on being at the store one or two days a week to close things out and deal with ongoing customers.  He and his sons are then planning to transition from “OK Tire” to “OK Sign Company” where they will be creating signage with a plasma cutter, laser cutter, and powder coating for specialty orders.  One of the first creations will be a restoration and updating of the bowling alley sign for downtown.    Examples of the kinds of products the company will make can be found on GriffithsOKTire.com.  

In October, Rick and his wife Sharilee will be taking a trip to Ireland.  “It’s time to do a little travelling and have some fun,” Sharilee said.  

“That’s something I didn’t do when I started,” Rick said.  “I started here when I was twelve, and it was always important to have this place open six days a week, so I couldn’t take time off.  We had to be here—that was instilled in me.  You only have one chance to sell a set of tires.  My only vacation for a long time was taking the trailer to Bear Lake on Friday night, coming back to work a half day on Saturday, and then going back to Bear Lake to finish up the weekend.  Then come home and be ready for work on Monday.  The only other one I had was going to St. Louis to alignment school for a week with my first wife Debbie.”

“We didn’t do a lot of stuff until the cruise,” Rick said.  “Debbie’s sister paid for it all, and I realized I’d be a fool not to take her up on it.  I’m glad I did, though.  It was only a couple of years later that Debbie passed away and I would have missed out on that time together.”    

Amazingly, the cruise in question was where he crossed paths with Sharilee, though neither of them knew it at the time.

Sharilee Griffiths grew up in Weston, though her mother was from Samaria.  “I loved Malad growing up, but I was over in Weston.  My kids love to tease me that I married a man who knows my family better than I do.”

The two met on Facebook.  She was the single adult rep for her ward.  Her first assignment was to help plan a New Years Eve party.  “I had just gone on a business tour with young BYU students and they were on this new thing called Facebook.  So I got really excited that I could create an event on there and invite everyone.  The woman who was in charge ‘liked’ Rick, so she invited him.  It turned out we had common friends so he popped up as a common friend and we started chatting and it went from there.”

Rick was on a singles site some time after his first wife, Debbie, had passed away, and he eventually moved to Facebook.  “Then I found out who she was, and I knew her grandparents.  When I first found out who she was I was like, ‘oh, so she’s short?’  So I asked her ‘are you really Nat Waldron’s daughter?”

“Once he found out I was tall enough he gave me a chance,” Sharilee said.

It turns out that they had both been on the same cruise at the same time.  Rick had spent mornings walking around the deck waiting for the ice cream shop to open, and had filled the time watching kids play games.  It turned out later when they compared pictures that the kids had been Sharilee’s.  

After their October trip to Ireland, they aren’t sure where they want to go next, but they are excited to look forward to taking some well-deserved time off.