Charles “Charlie” Loeffelholz entered the automobile business with a background in a neighboring town's practical trades. Charles H. Bartlett's recollections place Charlie, his brother George, and Charlie Richards in Cuba City in the fall of 1913, taking over the premises of an earlier unsuccessful garage operator. Bartlett describes the brothers' blacksmith background in Dickeyville, George's experience with farm gasoline engines, and Charlie's front-office role. A Ford agency followed. 20
An original 1905–1906 business directory supplies a contemporary point of contact with that earlier trade. Under the heading Dickeysville it lists:
“Loeffelholz George, blacksmith.” 19
The move from blacksmithing and gasoline engines to cars was a change of machinery as well as a continuity of repair work. The directory does not name Charlie, but it independently places a George Loeffelholz in the trade and town described by the memoir. The firm's later advertisements show how sales and local service were presented together.
The building on North Main Street
The garage and auditorium at 109 North Main Street was completed in 1915 by builder R. F. Conlon. John and Edwin Heim were its early owners. The Loeffelholz brothers and John B. Wagner followed, before the Cuba City Motor Company. Its street floor held automobile sales and repair work; the upper floor supplied a large public room for films, dances, performances, and basketball. 21
The building joined two businesses that modern readers may expect to find apart. A customer could bring a car for service to the same address where an audience gathered upstairs. That arrangement gave the firm a place in the town's mechanical work and its recreation. The surviving photographs and printed programs make both uses visible.
Different sources date different stages of the concern. Bartlett places its beginning in 1913 and the move into the Heim premises by 1916. The municipal fire history records a transaction with Loeffelholz Bros. & Wagner in 1915. The property inventory supplies a 1917 Ford-dealership milestone. Those dates need not describe one single event: acquiring repair premises, supplying vehicles, holding a franchise, and owning the larger building were separate steps. 202223
Charles and the Fordson
In a May 23, 1919 newspaper advertisement, Charles appears in a Fordson tractor advertisement. The printed caption names Mr. Chas. Loeffelholz of Loeffelholz Bros. & Wagner and Henry Fush of Wm. Hoskins & Co., looking over work done with a Fordson on C. C. Clemens's farm. Three men are visible; the caption does not assign the names to particular positions. 24
The advertisement stages a conversation between “Chas.” and the purchaser. Its claims concern plowing, harrowing, grinding feed, and the value of having repair help nearby. The dialogue is sales copy, not a verbatim record of a private conversation. Even so, it gives a specific view of what Charles's firm offered farmers: machinery supported by local mechanical service. 24
A larger workshop
A February 20, 1920 newspaper account describes an expanding establishment. An addition measuring fifty by fifty feet brought the total floor area to 150 by fifty feet. Office and stockroom space were arranged, four repair pits had overhead tracks, and a reported $7,000 stock of Ford parts was managed by perpetual inventory. Floyd Riege, formerly an assistant bank cashier, was to join as bookkeeper, with Ford's accounting system being installed. These were the newspaper's reported business figures. 27