Why a car shop owner in Summerlin couldn’t live with retirement

Bernie Robbins, 76, hustles around the car repair shop he owns in Summerlin — he retired once for two weeks but feared it would kill him — and talks about how he could have been a professional punchball player if such a league existed.

As he inspected a brake job one of his mechanics was doing Monday — “lookin’ good” — he remembers the days in the 1950s when he could punch a hard ball of rubber more than twice the 120 feet between two sewers in the middle of a Brooklyn, New York, street.

“I don’t like to brag, but I really was the best at playing punchball in Brooklyn,” he says. “I loved that game.”

Punchball was similar to baseball but without a pitcher, catcher or batter. The “batter” tosses the ball and then uses a volleyball-type approach to put the ball in play.

Step into Robbins’ SUVs &Trucks R Us shop, 10127 W. Charleston Blvd., and you’re never quite sure what you’re going to hear. At 7:15 in the morning he talks about the game that Baseball Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Yogi Berra and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also loved growing up.

The cool morning reminds the man who spent six years in the National Guard of when kids went out to play after snow finally disappeared from New York streets.

Games aren’t all that’s on Robbins’ mind. That’s why the retired Vince Jimno, a former police chief of three California cities — Pinole, Carlsbad and Escondido — shows up every morning for a couple of hours of conversation and bagels or doughnuts. He sees Robbins as an honest, entertaining philosopher/psychologist/historian who gets him thinking.

One subject dear to Robbins’ heart is purpose. Without one, he believes no one can live a meaningful, happy life.

“I don’t know who said, ‘The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without purpose,’ but it’s so true,” Robbins says of the aphorism attributed to Myles Munroe, a Bahamian Christian evangelist who died in a 2014 plane crash.

Fourteen years ago, many people acquainted with Robbins thought he was one of the luckiest men alive. After selling his business, here was a man who could retire at 62 with no financial problems. He had used his self-taught business acumen to go from managing a warehouse and car repair business in New York to owning a string of car repair shops in Southern California.

Less than two weeks into retirement, Robbins, the father of three grown sons, felt himself disintegrating.

“I didn’t know why I was alive,” he says. “I was lost. Here I was, a guy who helped people with their car problems — 99 percent of my customers thanked me for what we did — and now I was doing nothing. I had loved talking with my customers. I love my wife, but that wasn’t enough.”

He took $50,000 out of his savings and opened a new repair shop with a name that reflected Las Vegans’ love for SUVs and trucks. He also placed traffic lights on his shop to make it easier to find in a complex of other repair shops.

His past made him feel as though he should make a positive contribution to society.

“I grew up in five different foster homes,” he says. “My mother had a nervous breakdown after my dad left her and the state took me. At one home they punished me by pulling out my hair with pliers. At others they worked me like a slave whenever I was home. They didn’t make things better, they made things worse. I reacted to that.”

To avoid going home after school to abuse, Robbins got a job at age 13 delivering prescriptions to people for tips, sometimes making three dollars a day. He also cleaned a butcher shop. He liked being around people who appreciated what he did, who talked with him like a human being instead of an animal.

“I decided way back then I’d be good to people, treat people the way I want to be treated,” he says.

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Thursday in the Life section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow him on Twitter: @paulharasim