Repo's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

By: GIL SPENCER, gspencer@delcotimes.com

03/18/2007

So, I'm getting my haircut Friday at the Media Hair Stop and the owner, Diana, asks me if I'm writing about anything interesting.

It's a fair question.

I don't claim everything I write is interesting. I shoot for about 50 percent, which in column writing and softball (.500) is a pretty good average - at least for a guy my age.

So I tell her about Peggyann Warder and the truck she just had repossessed by Chase Automotive Finance.

I tell her about how her husband, Jim, died and how the truck was in his name but that she'd kept up all the payments right up until the time Chase hired a repo company to snag it in the middle of the night. Now she was trying to get it back.

"She kept up all the payments?" Diana asks.

Yeah, I tell her.

"That's like stealing," she exclaims.

Well, I say, no, not exactly. Because the truck was not in Peggyann's name, the bank probably had the legal right to take it.

But why would it? They were getting paid. They were cashing her checks. I say I called Chase and wrote it all up for Friday's paper.

"It still sounds like stealing to me," Diana says.

So again I try to explain the legalities of the repossession business, when she stops me. It turns out me telling Diana about the repo world is like telling Ryan Howard how to hit a baseball. She and her husband, Bob, owned a repo business until very recently.

"I could tell you some stories," she says.

"Tell me," I say. "And a little more off the top."

The best one involved a minister in Philadelphia. Bob went to repo his car during a Sunday church service.

According to Diana, "He had the entire congregation chasing him around the car. They were saying they would pay whatever the minister owed, all proud of themselves. But my husband said he couldn't do it."

They wanted to know why not.

"Because it's not his car," Bob told the crowd. "It's his girlfriend's car and she wants it back."

"They didn't like hearing that," Diana says. "Especially the minister's wife."

The worst one was when Bob called over to a woman's house to find out where she was. When he was told she was at the hospital delivering a baby, he scammed her relatives into telling him which hospital. Then he went over and grabbed her car out of the parking lot.

"While she's having a baby!" Diana says. "Even I told him that was pretty low."

Diana says Bob liked his work.

"He was into the adrenaline rush."

It takes a special kind of person.

"You can't believe the number of people who come running out of their houses, naked, with guns," she says.

But for her husband, those days are over.

She sold the business a couple of months ago after Bob, an Army reservist, was sent to Iraq.

Talk about a repo job! We repo'ed the country from Saddam Hussein and his Baathist thugs and turned it over to... well, right now, it's a little hard tell who we've turned it over to.

But Diana says, based on the e-mails she gets, Bob likes the action.

"When bombs go off he says he runs toward them. It's the same thing, the adrenaline rush."

With Bob's blessing she sold the business (two trucks, computers and the office equipment). It was a side business anyway. When he's not in Iraq, Bob is an an army Unit Administrator up at Willow Grove.

And she's got the Hair Stop.

"How's that?" she asks turning me toward the mirror.

"His hair was perfect," I say.

She brushes me off, takes my money and I leave.

When I get home, I call Peggyann. I ask her if she knows the number of the repo firm that has her truck.

She mentions a guy named Patrick whose been very nice to her at the yard where the truck is being held.

"Funny you should call," she says. "I just got off the phone with him."

She says Patrick called to tell her that he'd just received a call from the president of Chase Automotive Financing.

The president told him to return her truck to her "today," the sooner the better.

"He was calling from Arizona or someplace and didn't know about the ice storm here," Patrick told her.

He asked the president if he could return it over the weekend or even Monday, because he really didn't want to send a truck out into all the ice.

I call Patrick to confirm what Peggyann tells me, but he won't. He cites some law that forbids him from discussing any details of business to third parties so... "I am going to hang up now. But I will tell you you did an excellent job." Click.

I call Chase's media person Mary Kay Bean who confirms the truck is going to be given back to Peggyann and that she will not be charged anything for the repossession.

I say I'm glad it all worked out.

And Mary Kay says, "So am I."

Now, if Bob makes it back from Iraq in one piece that will be a real happy ending.