Middleburg’s Master Mechanic Is a Driving Force
by Leonard Shapiro
As a youngster growing up on the St. Louis road near Middleburg, Matt Fox always did like to take things apart—radios, motorcycles, car engines—and then put them back together. Turns out that would be perfect training for his life’s work as the masterful mechanic at Middleburg Exxon since the early 1990s.
“I just wanted to see how things worked,” Fox said. “I’d always try to put it back together, too. I usually did.”
These days he always does, and hundreds of Middleburg area residents depend on him to keep their vehicles purring smoothly down the road. Fox said there’s nothing he’s ever been asked to fix that’s been too intimidating to even try. The quizzical look on his face tells you that’s just a ridiculous question to even pose.
Fox has been a fixture at the station since 1987 when he began pumping gas and cleaning windshields part time for the man who first hired him, the station’s late owner, Billy Journell.
“I just showed up one day and got the job,” said Fox, who graduated from Loudoun Valley High School and kept working at the station when he attended junior college at NOVA. For two years, he was on the job by day and taking advanced auto mechanic courses at night.
“In high school, I did tires and oil changes,” he said. “Wayne Monroe was the head mechanic back then, and he would start to give me more and more complex jobs to do. When he decided to leave and start his own business in the early ‘90s, I took over. Billy never really said anything to me. We knew Wayne was leaving and it just kind of happened.”
Since he first began taking cars apart, they’ve become increasingly more complex, mostly because so many components are computer driven. It requires Fox to constantly keep up with the latest technology, enrolling in continuing education courses and doing plenty of reading.
“Cars are definitely better and safer, ” said Fox, an ASE certified master technician for cars and light trucks. “It used to require a lot of mechanical skill to take care of them. Now it requires more computers. You might have a brake pad problem where you can see they’re just worn out. Or you could have a diagnostic problem that will require computer sensors and miles of wiring.”
Fox said he spends more money these days on new software than he does on the actual tools of his trade. “You still do have to get specialty tools,” he said. “But most of it is computer updates. It didn’t used to be like that.”
One problem that hasn’t changed much over the years doesn’t need a computer program to ferret it out. Instead, he employs one of the most basic diagnostic methods of all—his own sense of smell.
“Rodent damage is a big problem out in this area,” he said. “They can be quite challenging. They’ll eat the wires. And you have to find the source of a bad smell. You’ll look around in there and you don’t know why he did it, where he did it or what he was thinking. But mice and chipmunks, they can get anywhere.”
His nose knows for sure.
Meanwhile, Fox has had plenty of opportunities to take his skills elsewhere, a major car dealership, a larger repair business. But he said he’s perfectly happy exactly where he’s been since his teenage years.
“I like the area,” said Fox, who lives with his wife, Nicole, and their sixth-grader son, Christopher, a few miles away near Haymarket. “Everybody knows me. But my favorite part of the job is the people.”
And a long list of people repeatedly use his services. He takes most of his jobs by appointment, with an average back-up of four or five days. Still, if there’s an emergency or a repair that must be done immediately, he’ll try to get to it as quickly as possible.
“Everyone is usually very understanding,” he said. “If I can, I’ll try to make it happen.”
Occasionally, Christopher will come to work with his dad.
“He likes being here,” Fox said. “He loves anything mechanical. I think he really is a lot like me. I know there’s a whole pile of disassembled stuff in his room.”
Though probably not for long.