Succession gauntlet

Steve Cox has been in the family auto sales business for 40 years, but it almost didn't work out that way.

Cox, instead, had a young entrepreneurial mind. Like the time in the sixth grade, in the early 1960s, when he tried to turn the Cox family Chevrolet dealership into his own money machine. Every day after school Steve Cox would ride his bike a few blocks from home to the dealership, which back then was in a three-story building in downtown Bradenton.

“My duty was to fill the soda pop machine and the cracker machines,” says Cox. “That became my own little business.”

Cox recalls that Rebecca Edwards, the first woman to work for the dealership when she took a bookkeeping job in 1950, created a ledger for the startup vending business. Edwards kept a separate box in the petty cash, where the young Cox counted out nickels and dimes. And profits.