BROOKINGS – At the end of 2015 and following 27 years of managing the service department at Einspahr Auto Plaza, Charlie Schnabel, now 87, retired. What now?
“When I said I was going to retire, a friend said, ‘Well, what are you going to do after you retire?’” The friend hinted that he might be “underfoot around the house.” Schnabel at the time had a small woodworking shop at the back of the house. Would that be enough to fill out his days?
The friend noted that he was driving for Brookings Area Transit Authority and that there was a real need for drivers. Schnabel checked it out, figuring he could drive about 15 to 20 hours a week. He signed on in February 2016. He’s still driving .
“Well, I pretty much do 30 to 35 hours a week now,” Schnabel said. “As long as I feel like I’m helping people, I’ll keep on doing it. I do one of the Sioux Falls runs, every Wednesday and Friday. I start picking up (passengers) at 7 in the morning.”
He drives to Sioux Falls and returns to Brookings by 10 a.m. The passengers he drives down can do their business and return home on a later BATA bus. He’s driven down as many as 12 passengers; by the time he drops them off, it’s time to return to Brookings. He may have passengers for a return trip, such as people who had taken a BATA bus to the airport rather than drive their own car down and leaving it parked while they were away. When they return to Brookings, they have BATA drive them home.
While Schnabel likes driving the bus, he still finds time to serve his community. Since 2018 he has been active in the Brookings chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace (SHP), a group that started in 2012. In the Brookings area, a chapter of about 20 to 25 peopler has to date built more than 3,000 beds. These beds have been given at no charge to children in need, ages 3 to 17 years old, who had no bed.
“It’s a good group of people, the volunteers who come,” he said. “We built 20 beds last Saturday. It took us an hour and a half.”
On May 2, the Brookings chapter will gather at its site at 1513 Western Ave. And build 97 beds to honor the late Paul Moriarty, a champion for SHP, who died in 2025. He would have celebrated his 97th birthday in May.
“All the beds come with a mattress, bedding, blank, and at times if we have them, a stuffed animal and a book,” Schnabel noted. The cost is about $200 per bed.
“Building these is fun,” he added. “But where the rubber meets the road is when you go on a delivery and take this bed into this home and you set it up for this child. And this child comes in. We’re seeing these kids sleeping on a pile of clothes. They don’t have a bed; they don’t have a mattress. If they have an air mattress, it’s probably one that goes flat by morning. They’re in a tough situation. It’s hard to believe that.”
Sleep in Heavenly Peace’s slogan is: “No kid sleeps on the floor in our town.” Sioux Falls just started a chapter last June. They’ve delivered over 1,000 beds in Sioux Falls, already – since June.
“Yankton and Madison deliver (beds) for us. They don’t want to start a chapter, but they want to give beds to kids in their communities,” Schnabel said. “So they raise the money, they get the beds and mattresses from us and they get the bedding and stuff from donations in their communities. And they make the deliveries for us. We were Chapter 34 when we started. Now there are more than 300 chapters nationwide.”
Woodworking is Schnabel’s hobby. As a member member of First United Methodist Church, he does some fixit jobs around the church as needed: “A friend and I just built a cabinet for the office, to their specifications.”
Schnabel is a native of Eureka. He graduated from high school there in 1966. Next came Yankton College, where he graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and sociology.
He then volunteered for the Army. His planned entry for active was September. However, the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) – military intelligence, image interpreter – for which he was slated did not have an opening for basic training until November, so that was when he went on active duty.
He served for three years. He had orders for Vietnam in 1971; however, while he was home on leave, those orders were revoked and he was ordered to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “That’s when the war was starting to taper off,” Schnabel said. “They didn’t need me anymore, so they redirected me to Fort Bragg. I found a place to work that actually needed my MOS. A lot of the guys sent to Bragg didn’t have any work (in their MOS). They were working in the motor pool or painting rocks.”
Discharged from the Army in November 1973, Schnabel “still didn’t know what (I) wanted to do.” He went to work as a rancher-farmer near Eureka and did that for a couple years. He came back to Brookings and attended South Dakota State University for a year.
“That just didn’t gel with m, so I got a job with the (Brookings ) Police Department as a patrolman,” he explained. “I did that for about two to three years, maybe.”
Next came 10 years at the Brookings Tire Center. Finally, Schnabel worked 27 years at Einspahr Auto Plaza as manager of the service department. He’s been 51 years in Brookings this month.
As to retirement, Schnabel takes a simple, albeit somewhat existential approach: “Sit down. Retire. Sit down, you fade out.”
Charlie and Voleta Schnabel have been married 42 years and have two sons and two grandchildren.
— Contact John Kubal at [email protected].
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