By Brandi Makuski

There’s no such thing as a slow day at Dave’s Body Shop, but owner Dave Suchon never thinks twice when it comes to helping someone else.

Through both his auto body business, and privately with his wife, Donna, Suchon has conducted fundraisers for local residents battling cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, and regularly works with Stevens Point schoolteachers to provide local kids with new bicycles.

“I’ll get a call and they’ll say, ‘Hey, Dave, we got a kid whose family doesn’t have a lot of money. Can you help?’,” Suchon said. “And we just go to Walmart and get the kid a new bike.”

Suchon said he and his wife have already donated 32 brand new bicycles since the start of 2017, with more likely to come.

Suchon’s got a long history of giving back to the community. He’s been donating bicycles and nonperishable food items since about 1988.

In 2014, he donated $1,000 in labor and services to upgrade four backboards for the Washington Elementary basketball courts. He donates hundreds of pounds of food to residents at Hi-Rise Manor twice a year, and gives away dozens of new bicycles to local youth on an annual basis.

He and his wife even paid the city’s water bill for one month after watching kids enjoy the downtown fountain. But bikes are his bailiwick, he said, because they always bring a smile to someone else’s face.

“When we were kids, the bikes weren’t this nice-looking,” he said on March 16, as he looked over about a dozen new bikes he’d just purchased. Six of the bikes were being donated for the city’s annual Easter Egg Roll; the others were headed to various local churches and schools.

“It just helps the community, ya know; everybody needs a bike, or they know someone who does,” he said. “It makes a kid happy, and it sure puts a smile on my face when I put a smile on someone else’s face, ya know?”