SHELBURNE — Calvin and Joan Clark’s business employs 24 people and occupies about 80,000 square feet of Quonset huts at 400 Mohawk Trail. Not bad for something that began out of a three-room apartment in a Colrain farmhouse 50 years ago.

Clark’s Corvair Parts is celebrating a half-century since its first catalogs were mailed out, starting an enterprise that continues to thrive.

“It was just kind of a fluky thing,” Calvin Clark recalled. “My wife had I had restored a couple of Corvairs and people wanted to see them and wanted to know where we got the parts. That got me thinking.”

Calvin and Joan made a list of 150 parts for sale. Within a year and a half, they had overtaken half of their landlord’s attic and half of the man’s barn.

“We always thought it would stay as a part-time little hobby,” Joan said. “That’s all we intended it to be.”

Calvin, 76, said when they started their business he was teaching science in Shelburne Falls and Joan was a secretary at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They decided to pursue Clark’s Corvair Parts full-time starting in 1976 or 1977, when they hired two full-time employees and operated out of the 1,500-square-foot Buckland house they lived in at the time.

“In the next year, we had 10 more people working out of our house,” Calvin said. “It grew fast and then by 1978 we were starting our first building on Route 2.”

Clark’s Corvair Parts has lost three people to retirement in as many years, but Calvin said the business still has six who have been there between 25 and 45 years and is looking to hire two more employees.

Joan, 74, said she grew up on a Bernardston farm and was not introduced to car culture until high school, when she met Calvin, who taught her to drive and then how to restore vehicles. They married in 1968 and now live in Ashfield.

Calvin mentioned the basics of the business remain the same but, like most industries, there have been big changes to how it operates. He explained that when they started, 60% of orders were placed by mail while the other 40% were made over the phone. Today, 3% are made via mail, 25% to 30% of orders come in by phone and the rest are made through the company’s website, ssl.corvair.com/user-cgi/main.

Calvin recalled that when Clark’s Corvair Parts started there were 10 or 12 states UPS did not deliver to, and the Clarks had to ship to them through the Post Office.

He said Corvairs are near and dear to his heart because his parents bought one about two years before he got his license, so that’s the make he learned to drive with.

“The other nice thing about them is they’re so simple,” Joan added. “You can work on them and, over the years, because dealers no longer want to work on them and there weren’t enough repairs shops around, our customers have gotten to the point where they work on their own car, which is good. They enjoy it.”

Clark’s Corvair Parts can be reached at 413-625-9776.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com.

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