Correspondent photo / Nancilynn Gatta Gary Kleiner of Howland bends the sides of a license plate down while he is in the process of making a five pointed barn star.

HOWLAND — Gary Kleiner became interested in automobiles through his dad.

“I like to say my apprenticeship started when I was little and I held the flashlight for my dad while he did electrical work, plumbing and automotive repair,” Kleiner said. “My dad was a child of The Depression. We always worked on cars in some form or another. When I graduated from Liberty High School, we started buying wrecked and salvaged cars, legally, where we repaired them and put them back on the road. I financed my tuition at Youngstown State University through buying and redoing cars in the ’80s.”

Kleiner did not think he would become a college graduate and was more likely to be in a skilled profession.

“When I was in high school, I took a lot of shop classes. I was always handy with my hands. I thought I was going to go into trades,” he said.

While he was still a student at YSU majoring in business administration, Kleiner worked for his friend’s construction company, seeing that as a potential path to employment.

“I drove a truck. I was a mechanical contractor. I was delivering and helping out on the jobs,” Kleiner said. “I thought ‘if I don’t get a job in a year, I’ll go into the trades.'”

When he returned from the U.S. Army after completing ROTC at YSU, he worked at the construction job for a few months until he was hired at Parker Hannifin in sales support, where he has worked for more than 29 years.

At that time, Kleiner’s dad had switched to working on classic cars.

“Everything was going up pricewise, and my dad suggested buying an old car. So, I bought a 1971 Corvette. We redid that. My dad did another Corvette. We ended up having a lot of parts left over. We got a spot at the swap meet at the Canfield Fairgrounds. It was the days when people were waiting to get inside and it was nonstop for three days. My dad was retired. He was doing good with selling parts,” Kleiner said.

After his father’s sudden death, he had to decide how to proceed.

“I enjoyed the swap meet scene. I did the parts for a couple of years, but I could tell that business was starting to tail off. I got rid of the parts. I had really, really, good vendor spots, so I thought ‘I have to do something different.’ I started doing garage art, like signs and clocks and banners. It was real high-end American-made steel signs and commercial banners. I did that for a long time in several major shows a year,” he said.

Kleiner was able to pivot to a new product with a discovery at his parent’s house and his father’s affinity for cars.

“My dad never saved anything but when my brother and I were starting to thin things out at my parents’ house because we knew my mom was going to move to a nursing home, I looked in this one cabinet and I found a whole bunch of license plates and they were in really good shape. I thought, ‘I can’t throw these things out’,” Kleiner said.

He started looking online to see what other crafters were making from license plates.

“I started seeing the barn stars. A lot of the items were quite rudimentary, and I thought with my background in sheet metal and mechanically, I can do a better job,” he said. “I went to Harbor Freight and bought a bender and some clamps. My daughter with her engineering background figured out all the angles. I bend the edges over and I crimp it so there’s no sharp edges. I took them to the swap meet and people would tell me how much another guy was charging and mine were so much better.”

He started his business, All Things Auto Art, with barn stars and then bottle openers. Kleiner then met a young woman at YSU’s Summer Festival of the Arts who offered him space in her shop in Hubbard for a couple of months. His items sold so well, he decided to try selling at the inaugural season of the Youngstown Flea in 2016. It was a very organic process.

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a website. I didn’t have a social media page. It was before Father’s Day. I’d pull in and put my tent up. There were people putting up tablecloths and elaborate displays and curtains. I just had my 10×10 tent,” he said.

His items grabbed a lot of attention because typically there are not a lot of man-created products at the artisan markets.

“The nice thing about the flea community, they are there to help everyone out. They said, ‘You need to get some tablecloths. You need to do this.’ I didn’t have business cards,” Kleiner said.

He became more organized and started participating as a vendor at other events in the area such as Holiday Flea at De Yor, YSU Festival of the Arts and Fall in the Woods at Hartford Hill Winery.

“I’m on my third generation of some of the products. I keep tweaking them to make them a little bit better,” he said.

Each five-pointed barn star has nine steps and 25 bends to create it, he said.

He even takes special requests for products.

“For birthdays or holidays, someone may say, ‘My dad was born in 1971. Do you have an item from that year?'” he said.

A woman whose father died had license plates with his Vietnam battalion on them. Kleiner made a plaque for her and her brother with the plates.

He said people donate their old license plates to him, he buys some at estate sales or people bring him a license plate with a special meaning and ask him to create something with it. He also has friends and family members always scouting for license plates.

His creations now include birdhouses with a license plate roof, keychains, barn star Christmas ornaments and magnets. He has license plates from all 50 states and a few foreign countries.

What began as a way to discard the numerous license plates that his father collected became a passion for Kleiner.

“This is my therapy after work. I spend two hours in my shop every night. It helps me decompress from the day,” he said.

He is married to Maureen and they have two adult daughters.