*During a July 4 sale in 2012 at the Orr dealership, Mo and David donned their chef’s hats and aprons to prepare food for a cookout.*

*David and Mo explain to David’s grandsons, Adam and Alex, how they used to sell cars in the “olden days” before they needed rocking chairs.*

David and Maurice “Mo” Orr don’t care to talk about themselves. The brothers — both 6’4”, deep-voiced, commanding — would rather reflect on their parents’ lives and look admiringly to their children and grandchildren. At 85 and 83 years old, they each speak kindly about their progeny, including as it pertains to the car business.

“[My two oldest sons] Keith and Gregg have worked hard in the car business and have done well, as have Jason and Joel [David’s youngest children],” said Mo. “There used to be a saying that the first generation got it going, the second generation capitalized on it, and the third generation blew it — but that hasn’t been the case with us. Each generation has gotten better.”

But David and Mo believe that looking to the past is just as important as looking ahead. “I’ve had a great life and been happy most of it,” said Mo, “but the reason is because of [my father and mother.] The biggest advantage in life is having good parents.”

“No doubt about it,” David agreed. “We started off going down a path that they laid down.”

“March the 4th, 1924 ... I don’t know how many times I heard him say that date,” David said of his late father. “That day marked a big change in his life.”

On March 4, 1924, Guss Orr was a single 20-year-old manual laborer whose most recent job — laying Texarkana’s first waterline — had come to a close. In search of a job, he walked into the Cargile Motor Company and left as the dealership’s newest salesperson.

*United Way Campaign Chairman Earl Jones, Jr. presents the Business Award to Orr Chevrolet’s Mo and David Orr, in the late-1960s.*

When he returned to the rooming house where he was staying, he got to talking to a middle-aged man who also lived there. “You need to come home with me one weekend and meet my oldest daughter,” he said. That oldest daughter was 21-year-old Ruby Goldman, the woman who would become Guss’ wife.

Guss and Ruby both came from farming families, but they each felt better suited for the city. Guss was a gregarious man. “He had the salesperson personality,” Mo said. “He was real outgoing. People liked him.”

Ruby was Guss’ gentler counterpart; she loved classical music and fine art. On Saturdays, she’d sit the kids around the radio to listen to “The Firestone Hour,” a classical music radio show that featured leading opera singers. At Christmas, she’d play the piano while the family sang carols.

*The Orr brothers enjoy a little clowning around while talking about selling cars at the Honda dealership.*

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Guss sold cars. “Dad told me one time that, during the Depression, when he was a car salesman, the only person who made as much or more than he did was the manager of the JC Penney,” David recalled. “He was always after it.

“A man who worked with him told me that [Guss] would go down to Broad Street, park his car on the far west end, and walk all the way to Buhrman-Pharr. He’d go in every one of those stores and talk to everyone in there about buying a car. Then he’d have lunch down there at one of those cafés, then he’d go to the other side of the street and walk back. He spent almost a whole day just going in places asking people about buying a car.”

“He was a grinder,” Mo said. “He never gave up. I met a guy about 10 years ago who came up to me and said, ‘I worked at Cargile Motor Company in 1938 for two years, and your daddy never sat down once.’ And that was him.”

In 1941, Mr. Cargile was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and even underwent brain surgery, which only seemed to worsen his condition. “He told Dad that if he’d stay there during the war and keep that place open, he’d [pay him 25% of the profits],” recounted David. “That was exactly the kind of motivation he needed.

*Mo, Joel and David with Joel’s sons, Adam and Alex, sending “Season’s Greetings” to their friends and family at Christmas.*

“On Sunday afternoons, we’d go down to the Union Station and put him on the train, and he’d ride up to Pennsylvania, buy used cars, and ship ‘em back to Texarkana to sell.”

“It’s amazing if you think about it,” Mo remarked. “He was 20 years old in 1924 and didn’t know how to sell anything. He went in there and went to work, and by 1940, he was valuable enough to Mr. Cargile that he trusted him to stay and keep the place running.”

By 1945, Guss had earned enough money to become a partner.

David and Mo both always wanted to work for their dad. “We were so attracted to my father, so enamored, and had so much respect for him,” Mo said. “He’d come home for supper, we’d all eat, and then he’d go back down [to the store] to talk to all those mechanics—and we’d trail behind him like a couple of ducks. When we got to be 14 — our mother wouldn’t let us work until we were 14 —we’d go down there and work with him, lubricating cars, pumping gas at the filling station. That was the only thing we ever really wanted to do.”

Guss wanted his sons in the business as much as they wanted to be there, but Ruby wasn’t as sure.

“Mother was kind of a temperate horse,” Mo said. “When we started selling cars, she would tell us things like, ‘Don’t take advantage of people who aren’t very smart.’”

*During the grand opening of Orr Volkswagen of Texarkana in 2014, David and Mo dressed the part in their “hippie” attire.*

“I asked her one time why she was concerned about us working down there,” David recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t want you boys to learn the language that those men talk.’ She was very concerned about how we were going to end up as men.” (In 1953, three years before David and Mo would join the business, Ruby died of chronic glomerulonephritis, a kidney illness.)

In 1956, David and Mo both started their careers at the dealership. David had earned an accounting degree from SMU and put it to use in the accounting and sales departments. Mo started on the sales floor but struggled with it (“I wasn’t ever very good at it, and I didn’t really like doing it”); he found he fit better in the service and parts departments. “But, of course, when Dad died, we both took on managerial roles,” said Mo.

In 1966, Guss died from a stroke, and David and Mo took ownership. “We spent quite a few years struggling because Guss hadn’t had many assets,” Mo recalled. “We had lots of hard times; some of them were caused by us, and some of them were caused by the economy.”

Through the ups and downs of the next four decades, David and Mo hired and led countless employees. “Looking back on it, it seems like we trained everybody in Texarkana,” Mo said.

“I complained to my dad about that one time,” David interjected. “He looked at me and said, ‘Look! Be proud of that. Be proud of all these people around who started out here.’”

“The thing I got the most satisfaction out of in the business world was helping people — teaching them and seeing them develop,” said Mo. “People normally don’t have any confidence; I was the same way. You need to do something — give them a book or have lunch with them a few times, and try to convince them that they can do more than they think they can do. People can always do more than they think they can. They just need someone to have confidence in them.”

(“You went in there one time,” David said to Mo, “and told Randy Green that you wanted him to be the parts manager. He said he couldn’t do that. He’s been there 45 years now. You convinced him he could.”)

In the 1980s, Mo’s oldest sons, Gregg and Keith, expressed interest in joining the family business. “David was kind enough to let me buy him out,” said Mo.

In 2000, Mo officially retired. David has yet to retire. (“They still let me have an office, so I go out there every morning, read The Wall Street Journal on the internet, still have a few friends who buy stuff from me all the time . . . I just like doing that,” he said.) This difference is one of many: while Mo likes to travel, David is more of a hometown man. While Mo has cycled through many hobbies (golfing, hunting, training dogs, flying airplanes), David has remained steady in his few extracurricular interests (he was a Boy Scout leader for 20 years; he’s been a member of First Methodist Church his entire life; he is a longtime civic leader, involved with the Chamber of Commerce and local government, even serving two terms as an Arkansas state legislator).

Beyond a clear set of shared values, the brothers’ strong and lasting friendship can surely be attributed to their mutual admiration. “I have so much respect for Mo,” David said. “He’s been such a great influence on me and so many people we’ve worked with—and just people in general. Knowing him has been a great experience.”

“Anybody who knows David knows that he’s a great person,” mirrored Mo. “I’ve learned tons from him. Such a level person, dependable, always does the right thing. He’s more like my mother than any of the rest of us. If you follow in his footsteps, you’ll be in a good spot.”

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