Longtime auto dealer Hollenback dies

Mark Hollenback spent nearly six decades in the auto-selling business, starting out in the Spokane Valley doing grease-monkey work.

He ended up running his own business and passing it on to family members.

Hollenback, who started Hollenback Motors in the Spokane Valley and later acquired and ran Dishman Dodge, died Tuesday at the age of 91.

“He was a true gentleman and a good operator,” said Jack Pring, current chairman at Appleway Chevrolet. “Mark was nothing but a good and solid man who ran his business honestly and correctly.”

His daughter, Marti Hollenback, said her father derived his biggest satisfaction not from selling cars but from enjoying his roles as father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

After retiring from Dishman Dodge in 1995, Hollenback spent much of his time tinkering, making toys and mechanical contraptions.

“He made little mechanical squirrel-feeders for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Marti Hollenback said. Since 1995, she’s been general manager of the auto dealership.

In 1983, Mark Hollenback won the Washington State Automobile Dealers Association Dealer of the Year Award, recognition he said was the high point of his career.

That career started with the purchase, in 1940, of a Texaco service station and repair shop in Millwood. A year later, he and his wife, Allene, took over operation of a Nash Automobile franchise. But World War II halted car sales as rationing of metals slowed production. Hollenback switched to working, until 1944, at Kaiser Aluminum in the Valley.

In 1944, the Hollenbacks bought land along Trent Avenue and started a Willys, Jeep and Nash franchise. They did well enough that they expanded by buying property at Sprague and Park in the Spokane Valley, opening a second car dealership and naming them Hollenback Franchises.

By 1964, Hollenback purchased Dishman Dodge and continued to operate it until he moved its operations to a nearby facility built in 1968. Hollenback liked to joke that the land he used, a few decades earlier, had been a pig farm.

Two years ago the family-owned business completed a $2.5 million renovation of its dealership and showroom on that same land. Fittingly, the showroom was dedicated to Mark Hollenback.

“He was a businessman by nature. He was a total entrepreneur,” said Marti Hollenback. And he still loved the business, she added. “He would come by once a week, wanting to see how we were doing.

“I’d keep him apprised of everything,” she said. “It was his business, after all.”

The family has planned a memorial celebration of Mark Hollenback’s life for Sunday. Hazen & Jaeger Valley Funeral Home is handling arrangements.