A New Life

Just then Murray, the Eagles' general manager, telephoned. Now Vermeil was fighting something deeper and stronger and older than the football coach in him, something that made him feel almost as if he was choking as he spoke the words.

"I'm getting out."

Louie Vermeil peers out of the Owl Garage. On his right, just a foot away from this 100-year-old barn he converted into a car-repair shop, stands the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, from where priests used to hurl the name of God against Louie's hammerings and grindings on the Day of Rest. On his left stands his white house, a landmark in California's Napa Valley for having sheltered a dreamer named Robert Louis Stevenson and a doer named Richard Allen Vermeil. In front of Louie is a yard full of junked cars and trucks, grave-robbed for their organs and corroded by rust. For five decades, rust and Louie have worked the same hours here.

"You'll laugh," he says, "but as a young man I was fascinated by the thought of working 24 hours straight. I did it, too."

His hat is tilted back on his head and his glasses are tilted down on the front of his nose. His jaw comes out after you even more than his son's. His hands are arthritis-cramped into two tool grips. Grease, an old and eager friend, has left a lick on his forehead.

He slams the hood on a Pinto tune-up and at 72 permits himself the heresy of a 4:30 quitting time. He swivels toward the house. In 1972 he suffered a damaged left hip when he was hit by a race car while officiating at Calistoga Speedway, of which he's president. He used a broomstick shoved under his armpit while working the next day. Three years later he consented to see a doctor and lay still for an artificial hip socket.

"You should have seen how many cars we had backed up here during World War II because nobody could get parts anywhere and I had to make them," he says. "I had a Model A pickup that sat out here a whole year before I could get to it."

He worked seven days and nights a week during the war, built a reputation as Northern California's finest machinist and then he burned out. In 1946, along with an old high school football teammate, he rebuilt the engine of a 1935 Ford convertible, painted it black with red stripes, bid his family goodby and drove East. He planned to close the Owl Garage when he returned and find work that was less draining. He saw the Indianapolis 500 and he saw Buffalo, which reminded him of San Francisco, and then all this foolishness got to him. "I felt guilty," he says. "I thought, 'What the hell am I doing out here, goofing off?' " He returned to the Owl and never vacationed again.

Now the man whom locals call The Bear pushes open the back door of his house, brushing past the painting that says WELCOME TO VERMEIL'S NEST. It has been 50 years that Louie and his wife, Alice, have been chirping and scolding each other here like a pair of bluejays.

Alice, a woman with a round, friendly face, white-rimmed glasses and blond hair arranged in a small bun, is searching her kitchen for a lost item. "What'd you lose, Mom?" grunts Louie. "Your mind?" Then, in an aside, "Don't ever compliment 'em. They'll stay in a rut."