Long before I had a driver’s license, I got my start in the auto body business the same way a lot of great stories start: by crashing something. I was a kid in a tiny upstate New York town—the kind of town where the bike squad was basically The Sandlot , if you subtracted the pool, Wendy Peffercorn, and added a lot more trespassing. There were maybe eight of us with bikes, and we rode everywhere: fishing rods strapped to handlebars, jumping off the roofs of abandoned school buses onto roofs of junk cars at the junkyard, and once even staging a full Royal Rumble using old mattresses stacked under a roof ledge. How any of us survived Gen X childhood is a miracle. One day I decided to bomb down a washed-out trail where a railroad trestle used to be. Abandoned tracks were everywhere back then, and this one had a big, eroded drop-off with ruts from dirt bikes. I wasn't trying to impress anybody—I was alone, just a kid entertaining himself in a world without Candy Crush or cell phon...