Some people who enjoy telling the sorts of jokes that make other folks shudder will tell you that 20 years after your passing to the afterlife, a J.C. Whitney catalog will still find its way to the mailbox at your last address of record. A gag, and not a particularly good one, at that. What's more important, we'd say, is that this Chicago-based business institution, sometimes chuckled at for selling hubcaps that somewhat resemble exotic alloy wheels, an illuminated hood ornament showing a jester thumbing his nose or stick-on Jeff Gordon taillamp graphics, is one of the aftermarket industry's strongest powerhouses, stocking more than 130,000 accessories and about 1.3 million replacement components. So it's pretty clear that those catalogs aren't just going to dead people.

While it was his father that founded the firm during World War I, a brilliant, intensely driven son, Roy Warshawsky, would rename the family business as J.C. Whitney, and turn it into a direct-retail giant that's now edging closer to its 100th birthday. It can only be guessed how many other marketers of goodies for automobiles were inspired by the success that Warshawsky, and his family members, had wrought in the business. No less a luminary than Indianapolis 500 legend Andy Granatelli, of STP fame, has said that Grancor Speed Equipment, the firm he and his brothers Joe and Vince founded in Chicago following World War II, was enabled to succeed partly by marketing its flathead Ford V-8 cylinder heads and other components through the reach that the Warshawskys' company had even then.

It was Roy Warshawsky's father, Israel, who planted the seeds of his vision. Israel Warshawsky arrived in Chicago after fleeing religious persecution in his native Lithuania. In 1915, when Chicago was already a brawling, unruly metropolis of more than 2.5 million souls, automobiles were then all but commonplace. It was nearly as common to see them inert, broken down on Chicago's streets. At some point, Israel Warshawsky got an idea to buy up broken or abandoned cars, strip them of their usable parts, and resell those parts to either repair shops or the body of do-it-yourselfers that then existed. He bought some land at State Street and Archer Avenue, a prime location on the South Side of Chicago, and in 1915, opened The Warshawsky Company, the city's first large-scale auto-salvage operation.

The onset of World War I saw demand for auto parts grow exponentially, to the point where Chicago's normal supply of junked or abandoned vehicles couldn't meet it. Warshawsky then began buying up the assets of defunct auto manufacturers, and with the industry's first great shaking-out, there were plenty to be had. The scope of his salvage yard expanded to include a new retail store. Newly added to the payroll was his son, Roy, an exceptionally bright kid who had just graduated with honors from the University of Chicago.

Roy Warshawsky convinced his dad, who may or may not have been skeptical of the proposal, that the family business could boom if it made auto parts and accessories available nationally through direct mail, not just in Chicagoland to customers who visited the salvage yard and store. Around the start of World War II, he bought a $60 retail ad in Popular Mechanics magazine, and urged readers to mail in a quarter for a "giant auto parts catalog" that he'd compiled and laid out himself. The feedback was overwhelming, and persuaded Roy to implement his next idea, giving the company an identity that was a little friendlier to the tongue than the family surname. As a result, J.C. Whitney was born. By 1947, the firm occupied an entire city block on State Street, and it had adopted the slogan it still uses today, "Everything Automotive."

The transformation and growth of J.C. Whitney was driven, in part, by Roy's aggressive outreach to manufacturers of auto parts, and their representatives, as a source of sellable inventory. One of the people who knew him well was Joe Mittleman, now living on the coast of Southern California, whose father, Maury, became the West Coast representative for the Faith Manufacturing Company of Chicago, which produced chromed hood ornaments, door handles and other add-ons. After leaving the Navy in 1946, Joe Mittleman joined his father's company, and became personally acquainted with Roy Warshawsky on the trade-show circuit.

"Roy was a big man in the industry, and I will always remember in later years the picture of him walking around the show--every single show--very serious, stopping at every booth, and carrying a tape or wire recorder and constantly talking into that recorder, making notes of just about every new innovation showing. He did very little talking to the exhibitors, but a lot to his recorder."

If the pre-war years saw J.C. Whitney as an industry phenomenon, the post-war era would turn it into a household name akin to Frigidaire or Kleenex. The catalog surpassed 100 pages, and J.C. Whitney is believed to be the first automotive retailer to enact 24-hour telephone ordering. Unlike most retailers, Warshawsky would directly commission manufacturers to produce the accessories he was convinced would sell. In 1967, he was named first president of the Automotive Parts & Accessories Association, now known as the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association.

Roy Warshawsky retired in 1991, and dabbled with a collection of cars that included a 1933 Cadillac V-16 once owned by the king of Denmark. He died in 1997 at age 82, and is one of the few pure retailers to be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. His widow, Sarita, has been highly active as a philanthropist, having endowed with her late husband a chair in bioethics at the University of Chicago, and been a major supporter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This article originally appeared in the OCTOBER 1, 2006 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.