NORTH BEND – Ask anyone who knew Hugo Loveland and they will likely say he was the hardest working man in the car business.
Hugo’s work ethic helped him to be fondly remembered by many in the Valley after he passed away on Aug. 17. He was 91.
“Once you met him, you never forgot him,” said Ken Hearing, mayor of North Bend and Hugo’s neighbor for many years.
Hugo was born Jan. 9, 1914, in Portland, Ore. When Hugo was a young man, the nation was mired in the Great Depression and with few employment prospects he joined the Army. He was stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma in the horse-drawn artillery. He met his wife Ruby while serving in the Army and they married in 1934.
While Hugo was in the service the artillery went from being horse powered to mechanized. During a ceremony to commemorate the change at Fort Lewis, a horse fell on Hugo and then stepped on him as it got up. One of Hugo’s kidneys was crushed and he spent a long time recuperating in a hospital in San Francisco. Hugo, now one kidney short, was honorably discharged from the Army in 1936 and started looking for work. He found he was good with cars and started working at dealerships in the Tacoma area.
In 1955, Hugo made the move to the Valley and purchased HasBrouck Chevrolet and Oldsmobile in North Bend. His youngest child, Ralph, who was 12 at the time, remembered the move to the Valley as a step up.
“I remember it [North Bend] was a lot better than where we came from in South Tacoma,” Ralph said. “This was also the first time Dad had any employees. We [the family] still helped, but before that we cleaned out all the cars on the lot.”
For nearly 40 years Hugo would run Loveland Chevrolet and Oldsmobile, putting in 16-hour days and building up a reputation based on his work ethic. Before Interstate 90 was built south of North Bend, Hugo’s dealership and shop location on North Bend Way was on the main highway between the Snoqualmie Pass and Seattle and he saw a lot of business.
One of the employees Hugo brought on board was Craig Bennett, who came to North Bend from Florida in 1985. When Bennett first moved to the city, he lived in an apartment above the dealership and saw how hard Hugo worked. Bennett said Hugo’s attitude toward work was probably born out of the do-it-yourself ethos of those who grew up with nothing in the Great Depression.
Hugo never hired anyone for anything he could do himself, no matter how old he was. Bennett remembered a time when he and a co-worker were trying to install a pulley system on the dealership building. The ladder they were using to try to get up on the building would bend under their weight, but Hugo, who was lighter than the other two, could get up the ladder fine, so he did the job.
“He got up there and one handed this drill bit into this beam,” Bennett said. “He was in his 80s.”
But it was hard work that kept the business open, and the auto business was competitive and could be nasty for both buyer and seller. Bennett remembered Hugo going to car auctions and swiping off the cards his competition placed on cars they wanted. Ralph said his father would show him what tricks people would do to their cars to make them look in better shape than they were so he would buy them.
Bennett said Hugo stayed clear of the wheeling and dealing that a lot car of salesmen do. Whenever a customer would come in to buy a car, Hugo would direct them to the lot to look at cars. When the customer returned, Hugo would tell them the price on the vehicle and it would be final. There was no back and forth negotiating. If the customer didn’t like the price, Hugo said they could move on to another lot.
“He was very charming,” Ralph said. “Even those that didn’t like him thought he was.”
Hugo owned the business and worked there until 1994 when he sold it. The owner after Hugo had it for a couple of years before selling it to its current owner, Chaplin’s North Bend Chevrolet.
Whether he was at work or home, Hugo was also a creature of habit. He continued to work on a typewriter until his last day of work (although he did enjoy the games he could play on his computer from time to time). Hugo would take a daily nap in a Suburban parked on the lot and was once mistaken for a dead man by a child.
Once Hugo learned to do something, he did it everyday from then on. When he got a wok as a gift, he cooked every meal in the wok. When he was told aged meat was the most tender, that was all he would buy. When he and his wife planned a trip to Mexico, Hugo was devoted to learning Spanish.
Ralph, one of the four children Hugo would have, said his father was a family man. He was married to Ruby for 67 years, up until the day she died in 2001, and always made the time he was at home count.
“He truly loved his family,” Ralph said.
At his father’s funeral, Ralph said he ran into people who had been touched by Hugo’s generosity, mostly children from needy families. There was a man who as a child got his teeth fixed with money Hugo sent, one got a pocket knife from Hugo and another got glasses.
Ralph said that anyone who was around his father was better off because of it, whether they were a person in need, a family member or an employee.
“There are people who would not have been as successful as they were if they hadn’t worked for him [Hugo],” Ralph said.