Western Auto Supply

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Western Auto Supply Company began in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1909, when bookkeeper George Pepperdine launched a mail-order business for the increasingly needy owners of Model T Fords. It grew from mailed auto supplies into stores where a tune-up, a wagon, a radio and a bicycle could all share the same shopping cart.

Pepperdine sold the Kansas City operation to Don Davis in 1915 and established a separate California Western Auto business; the two enterprises divided territories, then merged in 1955. Western Auto’s Associate Store program, introduced in 1934, carried its catalog and house brands into towns across the country. Western Flyer bikes, Truetone radios and TVs, appliances, toys and sporting goods made the chain a small-town institution with a very broad definition of “auto.”

The company bought Kansas City’s former Candler Building for its home office in 1952, crowning the local skyline with its Circle Arrow sign. Beneficial Corporation acquired Western Auto in 1961; Sears acquired it in 1988. Sears then exchanged its Western Auto interest for cash and a major equity stake in the combined Advance Auto Parts business on November 2, 1998.

Advance ended Western Auto’s wholesale distribution operation at the close of 2003. The stores and catalogs faded, but Kansas City kept the giant rooftop beacon—because apparently some corporate ghosts know how to haunt the skyline properly.

Our Western Auto Supply collection celebrates the stubbornly useful glamour of chrome handlebars, driveway repairs, catalog dreams and the Circle Arrow’s long neon afterglow.