Some guy who called earlier about tires is on the phone, and Joe Woosley pulls a note card from a stack of them on his desk. He has checked a half-dozen tire sources via computer and jotted down two options: “The cheap one and the right one.”

The buyer will make his choice, drive to the corner of East 18th Street and Grand Avenue and get the tires put on his car. A couple of days later, Joe will give him a call and ask how those tires are working out.

“When I call, they usually ask if there’s a problem with their check,” Joe said. Once he called a first-time customer and she said, “Dammit! You just cost me lunch!” Her friend, a longtime customer, had told her to expect a call, but she didn’t believe anybody would give you that kind of attention these days.

You might expect an old-fashioned approach from a place called Joe’s Tire Co.

“For a while, I thought maybe it was a mistake to name it that,” he said, “but I wanted people to know where I ended up.”

At the age of 49, Joe Woosley has been involved in the tire business on the East Side for about 26 years, 15 of them in his present location. He added on 3,000 square feet this year, so the guys in the shop will be a little more comfortable this winter. Three years ago, he bought a second store at 44th Street and Hickman Road.

But there’s no empire-building plan. Joe might have been through too many rough patches for that.

At one low point, he was making the rounds of 35 tire stores in town, picking up their junk tires for 25 cents apiece. That wasn’t a money-making scheme; it was his way of paying off what he owed them.

Seventeen years ago, Joe says, he had five stores up and running. Then he and his wife, Tina, found out their 4-year-old daughter, Stephanie, had cystic fibrosis. “We thought her time was short, so I sold or let the lease run out on everything except this store,” Joe said. “We wanted to spend time together.”

Good news: Stephanie is now 21 and running the store on Hickman.

His other daughter, Heather Brannan, 29, runs the store on Grand. Heather started coming to work with her dad at the age of 4, happily playing tick-tack-toe with customers and grudgingly cleaning wheels. By the age of 8 or 9, she was helping with the billing. When she was 12, “she asked if she could try collecting the overdue bills,” Joe said. “I thought it would be good experience, getting doors shut in her face – but in 15 or 20 days, she had them all collected.”

He could increase business by adding some basic mechanical services, because customers are always asking for an oil change or a front-end alignment. But Joe sends them up the street to Logan Automotive, where the owner is Bruce Logan, Joe’s high school locker partner.

Offering an oil change “would be disrespectful to my friend,” Joe says. “I would never fix a car, and he would never sell a tire.”

Joe Woosley is a great big man who has been sidelined a couple of times by health problems, but he’s still going, still working six and a half days per week. Not everybody is that lucky. When his friend, fellow tire-seller and business counselor Harry Simon died this year on a Saturday, Joe found himself at the computer on Sunday, sending a final e-mail to Harry that Harry would never see.

There’s more to life than selling tires, after all. “I get to meet a lot of people,” Joe said, “and I work with my kids every day.”