Drewry Man Likes Cars, Trucks & Training He Received At VGCC

Scott Burnette has always liked cars and trucks and working on them.

Burnette, 27, who lives in Drewry in Vance County, worked at Randy’s Repair Shop in Drewry while attending Warren County High School. Upon graduation in 1990, he didn’t consider further education and “farmed for awhile.”

Deciding that farming wasn’t his future, Burnette enrolled in Vance-Granville Community College in the College Transfer program. While riding a motorcycle, he had an accident and tore up a knee. Finding it too difficult to attend classes on crutches, he dropped out.

When his leg healed, Scott decided to return to school but not to College Transfer. “I had always loved auto mechanics so I decided to enroll in Automotive Systems Technology,” he said. There he met Fred Brewer, program head and instructor for Automotive Technology, and Burnette really began to study the fine art of auto mechanics.

“Fred Brewer was a tremendous help to me,” Scott said. “Brewer really knows the electronics area of automobiles, and that was an area I was weak in. Cars are now ‘oversized computers,’ and if you don’t know about electricity and current flow, you’re lost,” he said. Brewer, who used to work at Boyd Chevrolet-Buick in Henderson, helped Burnette get a part-time job there while enrolled at VGCC, and Boyd hired him full-time in July 1997 when he completed the Vance-Granville program.

Burnette said that Jeff Coleman, the automotive instructor in VGCC’s night classes, really knows engines and rebuilding them, and Scott said talking to Coleman has helped him a lot in that area.

Burnette now works on just about everything in cars and trucks. “Fred Brewer and my service manager, Chuck Ranes, both stress starting out with the simple things and working from there,” Scott said. “Sometimes those are easy to overlook if you get too involved.”

His Vance-Granville training and Fred Brewer prepared him for just about everything, Burnette said. “Anyone who is interested in auto mechanics and goes to Vance-Granville, Fred Brewer will work with you and help you all he can,” he said. “My advice is to pay attention to electronics.”

Chuck Ranes is also a graduate of the Vance-Granville automotive program, when the school was Vance County Technical Institute and was on Chestnut Street in Henderson. He worked his way up from service technician through several promotions to service manager.

“I asked Fred Brewer if he had someone qualified to work for us, and he recommended Scott Burnette,” Ranes said. “Scott came to us with knowledge well advanced over most new mechanics, and he is one of our most dependable technicians.”

Ranes also said that General Motors has closed many of its training centers, as have other automobile companies and, “We are going to depend even more on community colleges to train our technicians in the future,” he said. “Vance-Granville has a good curriculum, and we could use a couple of more technicians like Scott Burnette right now.”

Burnette, who is single, says his main interests are cars and trucks and the Drewry Volunteer Fire Department, of which he is an active member.

He is the son of Anna West and stepson of Justice West, who live in Littleton.

Scott Burnette says he has found his niche in life and plans to remain in automotive mechanics. “I work all day at Boyd Chevrolet and go home at night and continue to work on cars,” he said.

Automotive Systems Technology classes at Vance-Granville Community Colleges still have openings for Fall Semester. Anyone interested in this program or any of the vocational programs at VGCC are encouraged to call Herbert Washington, vocational counselor, at 492-2061.