Last summer, Paul Budslick made a weird phone call to his business partners. Budslick wanted them to spend what he describes as “a not insignificant sum of cash” to buy a 12-foot pink fiberglass elephant.
“It’s a random phone call to get,” Budslick admits. The trio had recently purchased and upgraded a Charlotte Pike car wash. But the spot — Clean Getaway Auto Wash — had been previously derelict for so long that it had yet to attract many new customers.
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Budslick grew up in West Nashville loving Pinkie — the giant pink fiberglass elephant that lived in a car lot on Charlotte Pike. Back then, Pinkie made the rounds at neighborhood birthday parties and events. Budslick knew Pinkie would draw folks to Clean Getaway. In fact, he had previously asked Joe Agee, then the owner of both University Motors and Pinkie, if he could rent the elephant to draw folks to Clean Getaway when it reopened. Agee, who had inherited Pinkie from the old McPherson’s Motors, said Pinkie wasn’t in any shape to travel, even though he lives atop a trailer. But a month later, Agee called Budslick back. He was planning to retire. Pinkie was for sale.
Budslick’s business partners aren’t native West Nashvillians, so they were skeptical of the purchase — but Budslick’s pachyderm passion convinced them.
After Budslick got the go-ahead, he headed over to hitch Pinkie’s trailer and drive to a body shop for restoration. Before Budslick even left the parking lot, a local by the name of Spencer Connell drove up, asking questions about where Pinkie was headed. While they didn’t know each other, Budslick and Connell soon discovered they’d grown up near each other and shared a childhood love of Pinkie. In fact, Connell — a professional luthier who works on high-end guitars — had been helping keep Pinkie in shape for years, making his new Ray Ban-esque glasses with help from local artist Emily Miller and changing his holiday decor, such as the 4-foot martini for New Year’s Eve. Connell talked Budslick into letting him give Pinkie his facelift, a task that took about 150 hours.
Paul Budslick at Clean Getaway Auto Wash
“I felt like I was the pope on Charlotte with Pinkie,” Budslick says of moving him to Clean Getaway. “Everybody was pulling over. Everybody had their phones out, and my wife was sending me Instagram pictures before I could even get out of my car.”
Budslick’s instincts were right. Business at Clean Getaway picked up, as did traffic of people wanting to take selfies with Pinkie, and grandparents bringing a new generation to see their beloved elephant. “We ended up on a lot of people’s Christmas cards,” Budslick says.
Budslick owns a number of other car washes in town, some with the same business partners on Charlotte — plus one on White Bridge Road, which also houses Duke’s General Store, owned by his wife Allison Duke. While Budslick would like to see Pinkie make the birthday-party circuit again, he knows that 34-year-old fiberglass might not have a lot of miles left in it. He’s particularly concerned about the structural integrity of the trunk. Right now, he’s working on designing a bracing system to get Pinkie — trailer, trunk and all — to Murfreesboro Pike for the opening of a new car wash.
But Budslick’s investment in Pinkie isn’t due solely to the elephant’s strength as an advertising tool. Like many Nashville natives, Budslick is concerned about the increasing homogenization of Nashville’s streetscapes.
“West Nashville is special. Charlotte Pike is pretty quirky, with Pinkie and the dome bank and the Wendell Smith neon sign. We’re starting to see less and less of that quirkiness. I’m sure a chain will go in where University Motors was because, with property taxes and rent, that’s who can afford it. That’s why it is important to us to keep some character there.”
Certainly, though, there’s a little nostalgia. Budslick and Duke have two young children. Every Saturday, they head over to get a car wash and check on Pinkie, just like he used to.
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