Every Saturday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., in the parking lot of New Bethel Pentecostal Church on Leland Avenue in Visitacion Valley, Reginald “Reggie” Smalls fixes cars. He fixes them for free. The cars belong to congregants of New Bethel and to neighbors who have heard. He has been doing this for nineteen years.
Reggie is 58. He runs an auto shop on Bayshore Boulevard, on weekdays. The shop pays his bills. The Saturday work pays nothing and is the reason, he says, he runs the weekday shop.
He works under a portable canopy he sets up at 8:45. He has a rolling toolbox, three hydraulic jacks, a small generator for the impact wrench, and a 12-volt power supply for the diagnostic computer. The whole setup fits in a Ford E-350 van he parks at the church on Friday nights.
A typical Saturday is between five and nine cars. By his rough count he has fixed about 4,400 cars in nineteen years. He keeps a yellow legal pad in the glove compartment with the year, the car, the owner, and the work, written in his small handwriting. He does not keep the totals.
Most of the work is small: oil changes, brake pads, alternators, leaks, the check-engine light that turns out to be a loose gas cap. About one car a month is a serious repair. Reggie does the diagnosis at the church and refers anything that needs a lift or a transmission shop to his weekday garage, where he discounts the work by 60% if the customer is from the New Bethel circle.
“A car is how a single mother gets to work,” he says. “It is how an old man gets to his doctor. It is how a kid gets to his job at the Safeway. I am not fixing the car. I am fixing the week.”
Reggie grew up in Hunters Point. His father, a Navy mechanic at Treasure Island until 1987, taught him to use a wrench before he could ride a bike. Reggie joined the Air Force at 18, did six years on aircraft engines at Travis, came home in 1991 and apprenticed at three shops before opening his own in 2003.
New Bethel’s pastor, Rev. Anita Coleman, has known Reggie since he was 12. She asked him in 2006 if he would help her diagnose a noise in her Buick. The repair took him forty minutes in the parking lot. The next Saturday she had two more congregants with car questions. The Saturday clinic has happened every Saturday since, except for the seven Saturdays during Reggie’s mother’s funeral and his father’s funeral in 2017.
The church does not pay him. The congregants sometimes leave cash on his toolbox; he leaves the cash in the church donation basket on the way out. He has accepted, in nineteen years, exactly one form of payment: a homemade sweet potato pie from a member named Mrs. Carter, every Saturday, since 2009. He eats half of it at lunch and brings the other half home to his wife.
On the Saturday I visited, he replaced a starter motor on a 2003 Camry that belonged to a single mother named Daria. Daria thanked him and asked what she owed. Reggie shrugged. He said, “Drive safe.” Daria drove off. Two more cars pulled in behind her.
