photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

New signage is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, on the Cable Dahmer dealership on South Iowa Street, formerly Dale Willey.

One of the largest KC-area car dealers has just purchased an auto dealership with a half-century history in Lawrence.

That longtime Lawrence dealership is Dale Willey Chevrolet and GMC at 2840 Iowa St., and the dealer it sold to is Cable Dahmer, which now owns nine dealerships in and around the Kansas City metro area. You might recall that in 2025, Cable Dahmer bought the Lawrence Kia dealership at 1225 E. 23rd St.

The Dale Willey dealership’s sale took place on Tuesday morning, previous owner Greg Maurer said, and the location is already listed on Cable Dahmer’s website as “Cable Dahmer Chevrolet GMC of Lawrence.”

Maurer, as we’ve reported, had been with Dale Willey since the 1990s. Before he took over ownership, he worked under Willey, the dealership’s founder and namesake. While he said the car business has gotten more complicated over the years, especially with vehicles getting more high-tech, “it’s still just the car business, and it’s just people.”

Asked about the decision to sell, Maurer said he just thought it was the right time to step away.

“I’ve been here 34 years, and I’ve got 43 in the car business, and it was time to make a change,” he said.

Dale Willey Automotive goes back a couple of decades beyond Maurer’s career there. Willey came to Lawrence and opened the dealership in the 1970s.

As we reported, Willey was hands-on in how he ran his dealership and earned a lot of recognition for his work. He was chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association in 2007 and chairman of the Kansas Auto Dealers Association in 1991, and even in retirement he kept close tabs on what was going on at the dealership. He died in 2020 at age 79.

On Tuesday, Cable Dahmer CEO Carlos Ledezma said that he got to meet Willey’s wife, Jan Willey, who stopped in to visit. “It was really neat to see that legacy that she has,” Ledezma said.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

New signage is pictured Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, on the Cable Dahmer dealership on South Iowa Street, formerly Dale Willey.

While Ledezma confirmed that the dealership will have the Cable Dahmer name, other things won’t change. All the current employees are staying on, he and Maurer both said – “besides me, of course,” Maurer added.

Over the longer term, Ledezma told the Journal-World, the goal is to significantly grow the dealership’s staff. Right now, Ledezma said, there are about 35 employees, and he wants to increase that number to between 50 and 70.

“It’s adding to the Kia location that we currently have, and it’ll give us a good footprint in the Lawrence area,” he said.

Ledezma said that Cable Dahmer is a long-running business, too. The “Cable” part of Cable Dahmer, he said, dates back to 1956. He said that “the same type of legacy that Dale Willey has had for years” is “the same type of direction that I’ve attempted to continue to honor with the Cable Dahmer name, as well.”

At the dealership on Tuesday, where new signage had already gone up, new general manager Josh Hedrick told the Journal-World that “we want to be a part of the community.”

“We want to be as much Lawrence as we are Cable Dahmer,” he said.

Dale Willey Automotive had begun scaling back its operations a couple of years ago, as we reported. In January 2024, it sold two dealerships that it had purchased in 2019 – a Honda dealership and a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram dealership – to a different Kansas City-area dealer, Bob Sight Auto Group, that wanted to expand into the Lawrence market. Back then, Maurer said that running three dealerships was a demanding task, and that he wanted to “slow down a little” and focus more on the Chevrolet and GMC dealership.

On Tuesday, he thanked the community for its support, and said he was confident that the business he’d spent more than three decades with was in good hands.

“People have been good to us, and the new owners will be great to the past customers and the future customers,” Maurer said. “I think it’s just going to be a really good fit.”