Allegheny Township mechanic retools after shop fire sends life savings up in smoke
Chunks of Jamie Napoletano’s life now fit into a wheelbarrow, not even half filled with wrenches, bolts and clamps. On an afternoon in June, he sifted through his diminished collection, clutching a greasy towel and rattling off lost equipment.
By his estimate, only about 1% of his tool collection survived a fire that, in a matter of minutes, engulfed his at-home auto body shop in Allegheny Township. He’s soaking the surviving tools in a mixture of vinegar and salt, peeling away layers of soot and rust.
He’ll never get back the tools he lost or thousands of dollars in machinery damaged in the blaze.
Worst of all, he lost 20 of the classic cars that occupied his days — and served as his retirement fund.
“That was my future,” said Napoletano, 68. “I’d have sold them off.”
Napoletano was between insurance carriers at the time. After Liberty Mutual raised his rates, he switched over to State Farm. When the company dropped him six months later, he was left exposed to disaster.
All that remains is the southern wall and a handful of less valuable cars in a nearby field, which he occasionally loans to film and television production companies.
The classics were just for fun, a reward for years of changing oil and rotating tires on customers’ cars.
“Every day, I think of something that was in there that I miss,” he said, walking on the mixture of gravel, ash and mangled metal where his shop once stood.
After 50 years of working on cars without incident — including at his former shop in Penn Hills, Jamie’s Auto Service — Napoletano suspects a single lug nut did him in.
April 17 was ordinary enough. He wasn’t working much in the shop after his third shoulder surgery in a year, this time on his right side. That’s part of what led him to delay finding another insurance provider.
But his Arby’s runs were right on schedule. He’s a regular at the restaurant on Towne Center Drive.
On his way there, he spotted a stranded truck with a trailer attached.
A group of workers needed help removing stripped lug nuts from a wheel, so he took the hub to his shop and hit it with a blow torch. One of the red-hot lug nuts must have rolled into something flammable, Napoletano said, and when he came back to finish the job, his shop was ablaze.
“We come in, the place was billowing black smoke,” Napoletano said. “I tried to run around the back of the building and open the door … but the smoke started coming out the back and I wasn’t going in there blind.”
He couldn’t get to any of the 12 fire extinguishers stashed in the building.
“I just watched it like everybody else,” he said.
Fire crews, unable to tap into a nearby hydrant, used the limited water in their trucks to contain the damage. Napoletano and his daughter, Bobbi-Jo Napoletano, couldn’t bear to watch, so they went out to lunch. Firefighters spent four hours on scene. No one was hurt.
Bobbi-Jo estimates that $300,000 worth of assets were destroyed that day.
She captured the devastation in a series of photographs. One shows the scalded shell of a 1965 Chevrolet Impala that Jamie tricked out in his early 20s. Its license plate read “4-Real2,” the successor to another lifted Impala he totaled in his teens.
Getting a lift
Devastated for her father, Bobbi-Jo started a GoFundMe almost immediately. She raised more than $7,300 from family, friends and complete strangers.
Losing the garage hit her hard, too.
The father-daughter duo have worked on many cars together, including a prized 1957 Chevy truck that, thankfully, wasn’t in the shop when it burned. And she wasn’t just handing him tools, Jamie Napoletano made sure to note.
Bobbi-Jo said she harbors a great deal of respect for her father and his career as a mechanic, especially having grown up as one of five kids in a poor family from Penn Hills. When Jamie’s uncle gave him a “piece of junk” car, as he put it, at 16, he decided to do some body work and found a calling.
“He’s one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met,” Bobbi-Jo said, holding her son, Ari, in her father’s kitchen. “He’s the true American, worked himself up.”
Mechanics can have a reputation for being gruff characters, but Jamie Napoletano, by all indications, is the opposite. For starters, he dotes on Ari. Doctors have scolded him for exceeding his five-pound lift limit time and again.
And in all his years as a regular mechanic — doing inspections, changing oil and the like — he says he only ever charged folks what they could afford. Sometimes, he took payment in the form of tools. Other times, it was dogs or chickens. One customer paid with cases of cheap beer.
Operating three shops over the years — one in Plum in the late 1980s, another in Verona shortly after, and his Penn Hills shop starting in 1996 — did not make him a rich man. When he sold Jamie’s Auto Service in 2005, he only profited around $50,000, he said.
“They say what goes around comes around,” Jamie said.
His experience might not make a lot of karmic sense, but people have come out of the woodwork to help him in the fire’s aftermath.
Family and friends have supplied him with new power tools, ratcheting wrenches and other equipment. The local Arby’s has scraped together about $300 in donations for its most loyal customer.
Hearing about his plight, a producer on the television series “Mayor of Kingstown” gave him $7,000 a few weeks ago to use two of his cars in a shoot on the 16th Street Bridge.
For the scene, technicians punched holes along the side of a sedan, stuffed them with small explosive charges and put a layer of putty over top. When a button was pressed, the charges detonated in rapid succession to simulate gun shots. The other car, a 1980s hatchback, was smashed ahead of time and then used in a mock explosion.
His vehicles also have appeared in “A Man Called Otto,” “Mindhunter” and other works shot in the Pittsburgh area. Old Dodge Darts are a popular pick of producers.
Between the donations and “Mayor of Kingstown” windfall, he’s been able to install a concrete pad about one-fourth the size of his old shop. This new garage will have room for a lift, a car or two and some tools — a significant downsizing.
Finishing the job will take another $10,000, not to mention any power and telephone lines.
Family members say that, after the fire, they weren’t sure what he was going do.
“He says if he quits moving his body and doing stuff, he’ll die,” said Judy, his triplet sister.
Yet Jamie Napoletano is finding ways to move on. He recently deleted photos of the shop’s charred remains from his phone. At another point in life, he might have grown bitter, he admits.
“I’ve mellowed out so much in the later years of my life,” he said. “I’ve really learned to take life and accept it the way it is.”
Jack Troy is a TribLive reporter covering the Freeport Area and Kiski Area school districts and their communities. He also reports on Penn Hills municipal affairs. A Pittsburgh native, he joined the Trib in January 2024 after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at jtroy@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.