Murry’s Auto

Melvin Murry remembers quite vividly the days he spent at the track, as his father drag raced when he was younger. It was his father who helped him develop his love of all things automotive and sparked his interested in customizing cars. “My father took me to car shows and got me interested in all types of cars—especially muscle cars—then we’d wrench on things since he was also a mechanic,” he remembers.

At first, working on cars was strictly a hobby. Murry’s day job was as a union plumber, and he’d customize cars on his free time out of a two-stall garage he rented from someone in a commercial area when he was 23 years old. It wasn’t until he was 35 that he quit his plumber job to work on customizing full time. “At first, it wasn’t even a business since I had a full-time day job,” he says. Now 38, he is proud to see his shop doing well in the small community of Peoria, Illinois, about an hour-and-a-half away from Chicago.

When Murry started out, he was doing basic things like two-tone paint jobs (which he is now famous for), vinyl graphics and simple customizations. While his dad taught him the mechanical aspects of car building, he learned about custom car painting from two different people, one being the former owner of the shop that he currently has now. “Louie Huffman owned the shop before me. I used to work for him a bit, and he showed me the ropes in terms of painting cars and making them truly unique,” he explains.

While Murry’s Custom Autobody might not be located in a thriving metropolis, his notable paint jobs and custom work on muscle cars have preceded him. He currently gets tons of cars from out of the area. “We can either go pick it up or the client usually has it shipped to us,” he says. Right now, Murry is working on a ’57 Nomad and a ’68 Camaro. He’ll be showing a customer’s ’72 Cutlass convertible at the Chicago DUB Show Tour stop in August, too. “We do work on a lot of showcars,” he explains. “Our paint jobs are so unique and eye catching that people know they’ll take home something after bringing their car to our shop.”

Murry’s detailed and custom paint jobs are so impressive, that it makes up a huge percentage of his yearly business. He likes to credit the type of paint he uses and his impeccable technique to explain why his paint jobs are so famous. He uses candy color paint, which is a brightly colored, typically high-gloss, automobile paint that provides a lot of shine and makes the car look like a “Jolly Rancher” candy, according to Murry.