Jim White “sold” his first car at 5 years old.

As a tyke, Mr. White went to nursery school in Old Orchard. One of his teachers had been in the market for a new car and found one she liked. The youngster took in the paperwork to get signatures and make the deal official.

“They knew we were in the automobile business, and she was talking to my dad,” Mr. White recalled recently. “My dad thought it would be neat if I got involved.”

Those are the sort of things that happen when you grow up entrenched in a car salesman’s family.

For four generations now, the White family has sold cars. With Chevrolet as the backbone, the family built an auto empire that’s grown, waned, and grown again.

Right now, things look about as good as they ever have.

The company, which is celebrating its 100th year in business this year, is on track for another record year — the third straight. It employs more than 850 people, and owners expect sales to hit somewhere between $725 million and $750 million.

Not bad for a company that was started by an ambitious orphan who once made his living delivering ice and beer by horse.

White has a big presence in the Toledo area, but the family enterprise goes far beyond northwest Ohio. The company has 21 dealerships in Ohio, South Dakota, and Wyoming, selling everything from Fords to Porsches.

Jim White, who went on to become a prominent Toledo attorney in addition to his role with the dealerships, is part of the third generation, along with brothers Tim and Dave. Tim White lives in Wyoming and oversees the group’s western stores.

Dave White is the man for whom the Chevrolet and Acura dealerships in Sylvania are named.

“We’re still in the growth mode,” said Tim White. “We’re right now currently negotiating with a couple stores, one back east, and two out here.”

The group recently added Ford dealerships in Orrville, Ohio, and Laramie, Wyo., their first Ford stores.

White has been a presence in Toledo since 1940, but the company got its start in 1914 in Zanesville, Ohio, a city of 25,000 about 55 miles east of Columbus.

It was in Zanesville that founder Hugh White found his calling in the car business, first as a distributor and then as a retail dealer himself.

Hugh White was born in 1885 and orphaned at a young age. His ascent to become a successful businessman could well have been a plot in one of the “rags-to-riches” stories by Horatio Alger, a 19th century author who wrote many tales about impoverished boys who became successful through hard work.

“He started off with zero,” Dave White said of his grandfather. “And it works in this country. It still works. It’s an amazing thing.”

After a string of jobs that included his delivery routes, saloon keeper, used car salesman, and working for an automobile distributor, Hugh White opened his first dealership near Zanesville’s famous Y-Bridge.

A few years later, he opened an agency in Dayton.

But things really started cooking when Hugh’s then 30-year-old son Jim White, Sr., brought the family business to Toledo.

“He came up here with $50,000 and a mortgaged Cadillac,” Dave White said. “That’s what he started off with. He was the driving force behind all the expansion in the early ’50s and ’60s. He was the first wave of Toyota and the first wave of Honda that came into the county, and we still have those original stores.”

With Jim White, Sr., at the helm, the group became one of the largest Chevrolet dealers in the United States. At the same time, he correctly saw the future of the Japanese brands and invested accordingly.

The operation was so big that at one time, the family thought about taking the business public, Tim White said.

But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the business had begun to struggle.

Per an agreement with General Motors, many of the dealerships Jim White, Sr., accumulated were sold off after his death in 1980, shrinking the family’s holdings to five stores.

Meanwhile, the economy was hurting the dealerships that were remaining.

“In the early ’80s when business was awful and the car market was depressed, we were sort of tucking in our heads and wondering if we were going to be able to slide through the hard times,” Tim White said.

“We had to make some pretty hard decisions,” he said.

Tim White jokes that the standard business progression is that the first generation creates it, the second generation expands it, and the third generation bankrupts it.

“I think we’re past that point. At least I hope so,” he said with a laugh.

More seriously, Tim White believes one of the reasons the business has recovered, grown, and thrived is that the family takes their bond seriously and works well together.

That’s something echoed by his siblings.

“I think my grandfather, because he was an orphan, was really interested in family,” Jim White said. “And I think he instilled in all of us a very close family sense, that we should always stick together, family is very important, family comes first. I think that whole attitude has passed down over the generations.”

That’s not to say there aren’t disagreements. You don’t put three Type-A personalities in a room and expect everyone to always be on the same page, they acknowledge.

But the brothers say they’re always able to find an agreeable solution without things going nuclear.

“Honestly, we’ve never really had what I would call a major fallout with one another. If somebody’s not agreeing with a decision, we’ve always worked it out,” Jim White said.

Family members also say they benefit from a fairly flexible structure in which both executives and rank-and-file employees have opportunities to move from location to location and take on different jobs that best fit their strengths.

“We have a lot of long-term employees. We’re not one of these organizations that grind up people,” said Dave White, Jr., a member of the fourth generation and president of Dave White Chevrolet in Sylvania.

“We have loyalty to a fault almost to our employees. Hundreds have retired out of this organization,” he said.

Here in Toledo, the White family employs 250 to 300 people, depending on the time of the year.

Contact Tyrel Linkhorn at tlinkhorn@theblade.com or 419-724-6134 or on Twitter @BladeAutoWriter.

First Published October 12, 2014, 4:00 a.m.