08/29/2026
LARRY HINKLE: HINKLE'S JEEPS. This dealership in Pickens was, for several years running, the world's top seller of Jeeps. It's an important part of Pickens's history--easily forgotten in 2026 as the dealership no longer exists. Larry's story will be a key part of Volume Three. Here's a great story that I've been told more than once.
The year Toledo came gunning for Pickens
Most of you know that for years the world's largest Jeep dealership wasn't in Los Angeles or Dallas or Atlanta. It was right here — Hinkle's Jeep Sales, Larry Hinkle, proprietor, in a town of barely 3,000 with no interstate. Ask an American Motors man where the No. 1 Jeep dealer in America was and he'd say: Pickens, South Carolina.
Not everybody was happy about that. Up in Toledo, Ohio — the Jeep's own hometown, where Willys built the originals during the war — a dealership called Hawthorne AMC-Jeep wanted that title badly. Its president, Marvin Hill, ran ads chronicling his climb, bought up surplus Jeeps from slower dealers all over the country, and by early 1978 he was closing the gap: through February the count stood at Hinkle 881, Hawthorne 540. Hill told the Toledo Blade he'd overtake "his South Carolina competitor" by the end of AMC's fiscal year on September 30.
Toledo enjoyed the chase. That March, four Hawthorne men headed to Myrtle Beach on a golf trip planned a side stop in Pickens to deliver a challenge in person: a bagful of snowballs saved from the coldest, snowiest Toledo winter on record — a reminder, the Blade said, that "Toledo is on his trail." The Blade's caption writer even placed the rival dealership in "Perkins, S.C." They couldn't outsell us, and they couldn't spell us either.
And here's my favorite part, which I recently learned from a Pickens man who remembers it. At some point in the chase, the frustration up north went beyond snowballs. Hawthorne's assistant manager drove all the way down — some 600 miles — on a quieter mission: to figure out how a dealership "in the middle of nowhere" was outselling every Jeep house in America. He got his meeting with Larry, and he got his answer, though maybe not the one his boss was hoping for. There was no secret, Larry told him. No trick, no angle. You found out what a customer needed, you made him feel like somebody, and you built the Jeep the way he wanted it, hubs and hardtops and all. "You gotta treat your customers like family," Larry said, a little exasperated that it needed saying at all. In Pickens it didn't need saying. That was just how folks dealt with one another.
September 30 came and went. The title stayed in Pickens.
Does anybody remember the Toledo boys and their bag of snowballs, or a visitor from Ohio poking around the dealership asking questions? And if you worked at Hinkle's in those years, I'd love to hear what you remember about the rivalry. This story is going in the Larry Hinkle chapter of Pickens Portraits, Volume 3 — with thanks to the gentleman who shared the assistant manager story with me.
