AUTOMOBILE NEWS
his father died in the early 1970s.
Several years before Jimmy Sneed died in 1994, Sunrise Ford
moved to its present location on the southern side of Fort Pierce,
in the direction of Port St. Lucie.
Tierney, married to Sneed, became the dealership’s owner
when her husband died.
At the time, a woman dealer was an exception. Ford Motor Co.
told Tierney that it had a buyer to take over, she says.
“I don’t think Ford was very accepting of me to begin with, but I
dug in my heels and said, ‘Yeah. We can do this,’” she says.
“Mary Jo is not shy,” says Jeff Sneed. “She tells you like it is, and
that’s what she did.”
Tierney and Wetzel have been together for 24 years. They
married seven years ago, and they have deepened Sunrise Ford’s
long tradition of donations to charities, including the Indian River
Lagoon, the A.E. Backus Museum & Gallery and veterans’ groups.
Before she became a car woman, Tierney was a newspaper
journalist, and she still sometimes writes a thought-provoking
blog that reads like a well-informed columnist. Tierney grew up in
Fort Pierce, went to the University of Florida, including attaining a
James W. Sneed, in hat, in front of the parts department at Sunrise Ford at its
master’s degree in journalism. Then she returned to Fort Pierce in
first formal location on U.S. 1 near downtown Fort Pierce.
1977 and worked at the Palm Beach Post and the Miami Herald.
REPORTING SKILLS
“Mary Jo was absolutely one of the greatest reporters I’ve
worked with in my journalism career,” says Peter Vilbig, a longtime
reporter and now an English instructor at New York University.
Vilbig sat next to Tierney at the Miami Herald’s Treasure Coast
bureau in the mid-1980s. That was during better financial times
for American newspapers, when the Herald tried to take over the >>
An exterior photo of Sunrise Ford, the oldest car dealership in Fort Pierce, which acquired a sister VW dealership in February.
44
Treasure Coast, employing more than a dozen reporters, editors
and photographers, based in Fort Pierce.
“When I got there, Mary Jo was obviously the spark plug of that
office. She just had a nose for news,” says Vilbig.
Vilbig recounted that for several days in the news bureau, he
witnessed “a master class in journalism” as Tierney and another
colleague, Nancy Laughlin, worked the phones to track a white
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