On the morning of the interview, I walked into Playground Auto Service to meet the family that built it. Melissa Van Dyke was at the front counter. In the office, Denise Van Dyke had the books open. Out in the shop, Bobby Van Dyke was working on a vehicle. His brother Richie was writing up an order. BJ Van Dyke, who runs the operation alongside her husband, headed back to find George.

George could have been anywhere. He usually is.

A handful of customers sat in the lobby. An old vending machine stood against one wall. A coffee pot kept warm. An antique Shell gas pump stands out. License plates from across the country lined the upper walls.

Within a minute or two, George came up from the back, pulled up a chair and settled in.

This is what 50 years builds.

George and BJ Van Dyke were married in January 1976. They opened a Shell station with George’s father five months later. Both anniversaries land this year.

Playground Auto Service will mark 50 years in business with a public celebration from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 6, at 12 Hollywood Blvd. SW.

But the story starts before the station and before the marriage, in the cockpit of a B-17.

George’s father retired from the Air Force in 1970 after 30 years in uniform. He had flown B-17s and B-47 bombers and, before retiring, supervised a project at Lockbourne Air Force Base in Ohio to convert a fleet of C-119 cargo planes into Vietnam-era gunships. He took the assignment on the condition that he be allowed to fly one tour. When he was done, the family came to Fort Walton Beach.

George was finishing high school. He had been told he was going to Choctawhatchee but ended up in the first senior class to graduate from Fort Walton Beach High School, in 1972.

BJ grew up on a farm in Wyoming. In the summer of 1973, she rode down to Florida with an aunt who lived on Hurlburt Field. The plan was for BJ to ride along and fly home afterward.

She did not fly home, however.

The morning after she arrived, her aunt heard the base gas station was hiring and suggested she try.

• “He had said, ‘I’m not hiring girls. I tried girls. Girls don’t work, but I’m gonna give you a chance,'” BJ said of the manager at the time.

She went to work the front counter. George worked the lube bay in the back. They became friends first. They married in January 1976. The Air Force did not allow married couples to work together at the same station, so BJ transferred to the cashier’s cage at the Eglin Air Force Base commissary.

By that point, George had been at the Hurlburt station long enough to know the work. He was taking college classes locally but had lost interest. His father, retired a year and a half, was already bored after three decades in the service. The conversation was not a hard one. George knew his father had once been interested in the gas station business with some military partners. They started looking.

Two stations sat across from each other at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Beal Parkway: a Texaco on one side, a Shell on the other. George’s father knew the man running the Shell. They leased it from Moore Oil Company in June 1976 and kept the name the previous owner had used: Playground Shell.

Gas was 33 cents a gallon. The station ran two repair bays, a wash bay, a full-service island and a self-service island. It was open from 7:30 a.m. to midnight, six and a half days a week. Full-service customers paid 10 cents more per gallon and got their floorboards vacuumed, their front and back windows washed, their headlights cleaned and their air filters and oil checked.

• “When you own your own business, it’s a different world,” George said. “It’s 24/7, 365 days a year.”

It took six years before the shop carried itself.

The Van Dykes did not advertise. Their approach was to open the hood, lay out what the car needed and let the customer decide what to do now and what could wait.

“Back in those days, gas stations had a bad reputation,” George said. “Cutting belts and overselling things. We knew it was our job to undo that.”

George’s father did not just work at the station. He kept it. He had a photographic memory and a habit of writing everything down. He taught his son and daughter-in-law to track every penny on the assumption that the dollars would take care of themselves.

“He was a stickler for being exact,” BJ said. “You had to be on the penny.”

He ate breakfast every morning at John’s Diner on Beal Parkway, where the regulars talked politics. He knew the city’s sign ordinance well enough that council members called him to interpret it. He was being encouraged to run for mayor.

The big white sign at the corner of the gas station carried his commentary on the news of the week. When the city manager, whose name lent itself to wordplay, left his post, the elder Van Dyke posted, “We lost our ‘Anchor.’” People drove past on Hollywood Boulevard to see what he had put on the sign.

The business outgrew the corner. In 1983, the family broke ground on a dedicated repair shop a short distance away at 12 Hollywood Blvd. SW. They moved into the new building in 1984. For several years they ran both locations side by side, with gas and oil changes staying at the Shell station and mechanical work moving to the new shop.

George’s father had been gradually handing more of the operation over to his son. Looking back, George can see he was doing it on purpose.

• “He was teaching us the whole time,” George said. “He started moving away slowly, knowing that I needed to take more control, because eventually I would be doing it.”

He would take over sooner than they expected.

In May 1988, the senior Van Dyke and his wife were leaving town for his own 50-year high school reunion in Birmingham, his hometown. He stopped by the shop the morning they pulled out. He looked around. He talked a little. He got in the car and left. He had a heart attack while he was up there, was hospitalized at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and died before George could make it back for a second visit.

“Your first thought is, you can’t do it without him,” BJ said. “It was scary.”

George took over the floor. BJ took over the books. They got through it on what he had already taught them and on what he had written down.

“We were able to take it over and realize what was important,” George said. “He taught us more things than we realized.”

Some years later, Shell came to the Van Dykes with a proposal to convert the corner station into a convenience store. They declined and turned the lease back over. The corporation asked them to stop using the Playground Shell name, and they became Playground Auto Service. They kept the word Playground because it ran back to the days when the Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce called the area the Playground of Northwest Florida, the same naming era that produced Playground Music and the old Playground Daily News.

What started as a station and a few bays kept adding on. The mechanical side grew until they had to expand the bays out the back of the building, and then expand again. They went from one tow truck to about a dozen at the operation’s peak.

In 1980, George’s twin brother Bill joined the business as tow manager. Bill, also a Fort Walton Beach High School graduate, had attended college to study preaching and volunteered with the Fort Walton Beach Fire Department before coming on.

Today the shop has 19 employees and four ASE Master Technicians. The towing side runs 24 hours.

The towing operation also pulled Playground Auto Service into a longer relationship with the City of Fort Walton Beach. The city needed a contractor to handle police-rotation tows, the calls that come in after arrests, accidents and breakdowns. The Van Dykes offered to do the work at no cost as a service to the community. The city let them do it that way for a couple of years.

When the question of whether the arrangement amounted to favoritism eventually came up, the contract had to go out for competitive bids. The Van Dykes bid $9 a tow. They later raised the rate to $25, where it has stayed for years.

• “We feel like we’re doing something for the community,” George said. “This is where we live.”

A family operation.

The same logic shapes how the Van Dykes treat the people who work for them. The shop trains technicians up from the lube bay, then sends them to outside classes to earn certifications. All four of the shop’s Master Techs came up that way. One started at 18 and is now in his 30th year on the job.

“We watch their kids get born and watch them go off,” BJ said.

The shop pays 60 percent of employee medical insurance and contributes 3 percent on top of 401(k) accounts. Several technicians and office staff have bought their first homes while working at Playground Auto Service. When an employee is going through something, financially or personally, George said his door is open.

“When you get good people, you want to keep good people,” he said. “We try to keep everybody. It’s hard for me to let people go.”

Both of George and BJ’s sons, like their father and uncle before them, graduated from Fort Walton Beach High School (Vikings run deep). They now work alongside their parents. 

Richie joined the shop in 1998 after a stretch of odd jobs out of high school. He realized early on that he liked customer service, the talking, the leveling with people, the explaining, and that has been his lane ever since. He runs the service-writer side.

Bobby attended Okaloosa-Walton Junior College and worked at the shop part-time before deciding it was where he wanted to be. He started in the lube bay. He is now an ASE Master Tech running the mechanical side.

• “I’m a mechanical type,” he said. “It just interests me. It’s a challenge, for sure, but I like it.”

Both of their wives, Melissa and Denise, work in the office. Bobby’s son, a senior at Fort Walton Beach High School, has been coming in during the week.

“It’s just super special to have him here,” Bobby said of his son. “I get to feel a little bit of what my dad felt, having his kids here.”

“I work with my kids, my daughters-in-law, and have my grandchildren around,” George said. “That’s a gift.”

The other thing 50 years has built is a marriage.

George and BJ have worked together nearly every day they have known each other, first at Hurlburt, then through almost five decades at the station and the shop. They worked the front counter and the lube bay before they were married. They worked the front counter and the lube bay after they were married. The job has changed. The arrangement has not.

“We were friends first,” BJ said. “I just love him so much.”

“Our relationship is working together,” George said. “We started off that way. We already had some of that experience working together and seeing each other every day.”

They have had tough days. They have learned to walk away from something when it is not worth the effort and to come back to it the next morning. They go home together, decompress together and come back together. The business has not pulled them apart. Rather, it has held them in the same room, no matter what side of Hollywood they were on.

These days, the two of them have started traveling more. A trip to Canada is on the calendar for next month. BJ has been teaching Melissa and Denise the books and internal operations, slowly enough that the handoff feels natural to all of them.

George has been letting go in his own way too. He still comes in on his days off. He routes work to technicians. He fetches cars from the lot himself to save the techs the walk. He test-drives anything he can hear from the parking lot.

• “I do the same thing every day,” he said. “It’s just because it’s automatic. I even drive here on days I’m not supposed to be here.”

Their sons are clear-eyed about what their parents built and about what comes next.

“Just continuing the legacy they have built,” Richie said. “It takes four or five of us to do what those two can do on their own.”

For George, there were countless sacrifices, both hard and good times, and everything in between. He and BJ now have six grandchildren: two at the University of West Florida, three at Fort Walton Beach High School and one in the eighth grade at Liza Jackson Preparatory School. But if you ask him what the last 50 years has meant to him, he doesn’t hesitate:

“It means more than you could ever think,” he said, looking around his office at his wife and boys. “We have our kids that live here. We have our grandchildren who live here. The family’s here….it’s all right here.”