A limited-edition Mercedes-Benz, a classic MG, and a pristine 1980s-era Chrysler Town and Country are up on the lifts at Georgica Services. A brand-new VW bus and a Porsche 911 are in the parking lot. It’s a weekday in February: Customers come and go from the front office and a battalion of staff are bustling between the shop and the office. The parts on the shelves in the basement are neatly organized by make and model and the machine shop is swept clean.
Donovan Solis is the owner of Georgica Services, which in 2011 moved from its original location on the corner of Toilsome and Woods Lanes in East Hampton Village to a larger, updated space on Springs-Fireplace Road. But Mr. Solis is not new to the business. He started working there as a teenager — washing windshields at the gas pumps — and at first, he wasn’t even getting paid to do it.
At the age of 12, after the death of his older brother in their native Guatemala, Mr. Solis traveled with his parents to California and later Hampton Bays, where they settled into a quiet life. His father worked pumping gas at the Sag Harbor Getty station, and on weekends would bring his son along.
“Would you like to be paid?” Mr. Solis remembered Jim Shelly, the station’s owner, asking him. The boy said no, but Mr. Shelly made sure he did get paid. Mr. Solis called that moment his “first and only interview.”
Those weekend visits sparked an interest in cars that joined an older curiosity about airplanes. Mr. Solis grew up near the airport in Guatemala City, the country’s capital, and flights landing and
At Hampton Bays High School he was able to enroll in BOCES classes for aviation, while his part-time job at Georgica Services grew into mopping and washing floors and attending to the gas pumps. When a maintenance tech left, Mr. Solis asked him to “give [it] a shot.” He was hired to change oil. With the money he’d saved, he went to Sears and bought his first set of tools. “I was not going to let Jim down,” he said.
He went on to become the lead tech and then the manager. When Mr. Shelly told him he’d be retiring in 2020, he asked Mr. Solis to continue his legacy.
But Mr. Solis wasn’t sure he’d want to stick around the East End. He and his wife, his former high school sweetheart, were planning to leave the area so he could pursue an aviation career.
“You’ll be able to have aviation as a hobby once you have the business,” Mr. Shelly told him.
Once a Dreamer — an immigrant who came into the country as a child without legal status — Mr. Solis is now an American citizen. And he is giving back to the community he loves. He volunteers his shop for the high school auto repair class, which operates across the street. A lifelong learner, he has branched out into electric cars and likes to describe for the students the progression from classic cars to their modern equivalents. He hopes, he said, to “inspire the younger generations.”
Sometimes, he added, he feels like a man without a country. When he’s in Guatemala, he’s an American, and when he’s here, he’s a Latino from “somewhere else.”
Judging from his accomplishments, though, Mr. Solis would be a success by any cultural standard.