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# Matt McKay, community builder, died after a long illness
- URL: https://www.redeyebr.com/matt-mckay-community-builder-died-after-a-long-illness/
- Published: 2026-08-10T00:06:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-10T00:13:51.000Z
- Author: Mukul Verma

A stake driven into the earth usually tells us where something ends. Matt McKay saw, instead, the place where something might begin.

That was how he understood Ardendale: an ambitious attempt to create a Baton Rouge neighborhood where families of different incomes could live beside one another—and where those hoping to move forward might find a lever to help them rise. 

McKay helped establish Ardendale's first anchor: the McKay Automotive Training Center, operated by Baton Rouge Community College. Inside, aspiring mechanics learn a reliable trade and at less expense than traveling to Houston, long a destination for automotive training.

Around the center, the rest of Ardendale is taking shape through a [project of the East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority](https://www.redeyebr.com/housing-authority-goes-big/).

**McKay died Saturday night after living with Alzheimer's disease. He was 71.**

The measure of his life, however, lies not only in the business he built or the fortune it produced. It can also be found in the opportunities he seeded across the region: a classroom where a teacher can test an idea, a boarding school where a child can receive more attention, a workshop where a young adult can begin to embark on a life.

In business, McKay was best known as the co-founder of All Star Automotive Group. With his partner, John Noland, he built the regional dealership from the ground up. Noland supplied financial backing and steady counsel across the decades, though he characteristically insisted that McKay had done most of the work while he cashed all the checks. 

The company sold for about $700 million roughly a year before McKay's death.

Little of that success announced itself when one met him. Perhaps this was because he had grown up among public educators. His mother worked in school administration; his father was a teacher and principal. Education, in the McKay family, was the daily work of giving someone else a chance.

In 1991, McKay helped establish the Ascension Fund, which provides grants to public-school teachers and schools so that promising ideas are not squandered simply because the money is missing.

He and his wife, Sherri, supported Scholastic's Read and Rise literacy program in 24 low-income schools across the Baton Rouge area. They became major contributors to the McKay Academic Center for Excellence at the Dunham School, which serves students who learn differently.

They also supported the Emerge Center and THRIVE, a charter boarding school created to educate children from underserved parts of Baton Rouge and the state.

The clearest expression of McKay's faith in education may stand on Lobdell Avenue. Named in honor of his father, the automotive training center allows students to learn the practical work of repairing vehicles without having to leave South Louisiana—or assume the cost of training far from home.

McKay thought of the center as Ardendale's spark plug. The neighborhood is the first mixed-use, mixed-income community that will continue growing under the East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority.

"The key to me with Ardendale, and with other community projects I've been involved with, is that it's a stake in the ground," McKay once told *Currents*, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation's magazine. "It's a center point that says, 'Here's what can be done.'"