Jack Fitzgerald, the founder of Fitzgerald Auto Malls, always received a warm welcome from those whom he met while running the auto dealership business he created nearly 60 years ago, according to company President Rob Smith.
“Everybody thought they knew him already because of his commercials. So, it was never a cold call,” Smith said of the Potomac resident who died last week at age 89.
Fitzgerald always returned the sentiment, Smith told Bethesda Today on Wednesday. When he and Fitzgerald were on Capitol Hill in 2009 advocating for change in the auto industry, Smith noted how Fitzgerald would enter an office and talk to the first person they saw.
“He didn’t care if it was the intern or the elected official,” Smith said. “He was going to give them the same courtesy, the same pitch, and convince them why we needed to make a change. That was Jack.”
Fitzgerald started his career as a door-to-door salesman at the age of 20, and then he transitioned into the auto industry, where he quickly became a top salesman at a Ford dealership in Washington, D.C.
He started building his auto sales empire in 1966 when he purchased a stake in a dealership in Bethesda, which grew into a company that now employs more than 1,800 people at 20 franchises in Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania, including several dealerships in Montgomery County.
Fitzgerald was known for his “no haggle, no hassle” pricing model. He emphasized his unique approach to car sales in commercials over the years, which included his famous line, “FitzWay, there’s just no better way to go.”
“The customer will tell you what he or she wants. Our job is satisfying those desires,” Fitzgerald, then 86, told Bethesda Magazine in 2021.
A born salesman and safety advocate
Growing up in Northeast Washington, D.C., after World War II, Fitzgerald told the magazine he was smitten with twin passions: cars and making money. His hero was Hollywood rebel James Dean, who wore a pompadour and drove a 1949 Mercury coupe. Fitzgerald got his first car — a 1936 Ford V-8 that didn’t have a heater — when he was in high school.
Fitzgerald said he barely made it through high school, struggling academically at St. Aloysius School and then St. John’s College High School before finally graduating from Washington, D.C.’s McKinley Technology High School. “I worked hard in school, I really did, but I wasn’t getting good grades,” said Fitzgerald, who didn’t go to college and was diagnosed as an adult with dyslexia.
By age 11, Fitzgerald had discovered a knack for selling, and his father, John, encouraged his son’s interest in sales. By the time Fitzgerald graduated from high school, he had saved several hundred dollars he’d earned by selling greeting cards, vacuum cleaners, shoes, encyclopedias and even fire alarms door to door, according to the magazine.
In 1966, after working as a car salesman for 10 years, Fitzgerald, 31, and his partner at the time, Bob Dowd, put up $90,000 for the Dodge dealership with a one-car showroom in Bethesda. The business took off from there.
In 1999, Fitzgerald launched the Fitzgerald Child Safety Seat Program with Montgomery County, offering free installations and inspections of child car seats.
“Jack Fitzgerald was not only a great businessman but also a true partner in building a stronger, safer Montgomery County,” County Executive Marc Elrich said Friday in a statement.
“Thanks to his initiative, more than 52,000 families received critical help installing child safety seats correctly —an effort that undoubtedly saved lives,” Elrich said.
On Fitzgerald’s digital tribute wall on the website of the Francis J. Collins Funeral Home in Silver Spring, a woman shared how one of his car seat safety events in 1999 “quite literally” saved her children’s lives.
“Just 24 hours after attending, we were involved in a crash with a Mack truck. Because of what I learned and the help I received at that event, my boys survived,” Christine Guarino Dorman wrote. “I have never forgotten what you did for us and the many families you’ve helped over the years.”
In October, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Dist. 8) commended Fitzgerald for being a “celebrated consumer and safety advocate,” featuring him in his local “Hero of the Week” video series. Last week, Raskin posted an online tribute to Fitzgerald.
“It’s with great sorrow that we mark the passing of my beloved friend and MoCo legend Jack Fitzgerald,” Raskin posted on X. “A famed auto dealer and champion for consumer safety, Jack spread love everywhere and turned his company into an employee-owned enterprise.”
In his tribute, Elrich also praised Fitzgerald’s 2023 decision to make Fitzgerald Auto Malls a 100% employee-owned company, which he said creates “a legacy that empowers working people and keeps opportunity rooted right here in our community.”
The company said in its website tribute to Fitzgerald that his “advocacy extended beyond his dealerships,” noting that he served on multiple national dealer councils and industry associations.
That advocacy gained him national prominence in 2009 when General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy, and announced plans to shutter more than 2,600 dealerships, including several that Fitzgerald owned, according to Bethesda Magazine. Convinced that the companies were making dealers scapegoats for manufacturing failures, Fitzgerald led a media blitz to reverse the automakers’ action.
Fitzgerald joined with fellow car dealer Tammy Darvish, then of Darcars Automotive Group, to create a nationwide coalition of dealers and lobby Congress to convince lawmakers to roll back the automakers’ decision.
“His advocacy resulted in the passage of legislation that saved thousands of jobs across the nation,” according to the Fitzgerald Auto Malls’ tribute to its founder.
Darvish, who now runs a dealership for Group1 Automotive, told Bethesda Today on Wednesday that Fitzgerald “had the courage to beat drums that so many people wanted to beat but never had the courage to.”
