Four decades on Cheshire Bridge.
A lifetime in the making.

Kong's Body Shop was founded by Ho Sik Kong in 1985. But the work started long before that, and a long way from Atlanta.

He had been working metal since he was a boy. By the 1950s, serving as a KATUSA — Korean Augmentation to the United States Army, a program that placed South Korean soldiers directly into U.S. Army units — he was already a gifted body man. He lived on American bases and served alongside American soldiers.

What the Army gave him wasn't the skill. It was the problem: military vehicles that needed panels, and no panels to be had. So he cut apart 55-gallon drums and hand-formed what the trucks needed out of flat steel. That is the kind of thing you can only do if you already know metal.

It is also where he fell in love with the country he would eventually call home.

Getting here took him the better part of two decades. In 1972 he arrived in the United States on a work visa, alone. Bringing a family over legally is not a matter of filing a form and waiting a few months. Each step has to be earned in order — establish status, petition for a family member, wait for the petition to be approved, then wait again for a visa to become available. Immigrant visas are capped by category and by country of origin, and the wait can run for years. Every step has to clear before the next one can begin.

So he worked, and he waited, and he did it the right way. His son Sung arrived in 1980, eight years after his father. His wife followed in 1984.

Twelve years after he first landed, the Kong family was whole again.

The next year, in 1985, they opened Kong's Body Shop on Cheshire Bridge Road. It has been in the family ever since.

Ho Sik Kong passed away in 2000. By then his son Sung had earned a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and was building a career in the field. He left it to keep his father's shop open, and he has run it ever since.

Forty years on the same road. Second generation behind the counter. The tools have changed — computerized paint matching, frame benches, ADAS calibration, electric vehicles his father could never have imagined. What hasn't changed is the standard the man set when he was shaping panels out of oil drums, because that is what he had.