I’ve mentioned my friend Roy on a couple of occasions.  He married a girl from my hometown and at one point went to work for her parents.  Roy had worked in healthcare since getting his training in the army.  For whatever reason, they allowed him to be manager of their service station.  I have no earthly idea why anyone would do this since Roy had the mechanical aptitude of an earthworm.  I always figured that if you worked at a service station you would have to repair a car at some point.  Roy was my friend, but truthfully, he was incapable of repairing anything.  I remember many times when he would have trouble with his Corvette, he exhibited a total lack of knowledge for things mechanical.  For a while the car had a tendency to spit back through the carburetor and misfire like crazy when under heavy acceleration.  I tried to explain it was most likely a timing problem.  He always insisted it was the “idle”.

    On more than one occasion vehicles fell off of the lift behind the station.  It was usually a pick-up truck and they would crash nose first to the ground.  Miraculously no one was ever injured or killed as would be expected.  I can’t imagine how much their insurance must have run, but those were the days when people didn’t sue.  They’d be happy to get it fixed and then be able to tell the story about what happened.

    At one point they changed gasoline suppliers.  It had been a Texaco station as long as I could remember, but they decided to go with some independent brand.  As a result, the big Texaco sign had to come down.  Apparently, the fellow that owned the distributorship, Bubba, also owned the sign.  Not just the written part of the sign, but the whole she-bang, post and all.  One day Bubba came over one day, unbolted the steel post and hauled the sign off, leaving only the big concrete base with the anchor bolts sticking up.  This was right smack in front of the station.  They didn’t replace the sign.  Everybody in town knew the service station was there and those that were just passing through probably figured it out since it had gas pumps sitting out front.  I suppose folks weren’t brand loyal in those days.

    One service that they did at the station was washing cars.  Today we would call it “detailing”.  Back then it was just washing and cleaning out.  Anyway, it was a Friday morning and the Chancery Court Clerk dropped off his car so they could service it and give it a good cleaning. They had what they called a wash rack where the help did all the car washing.  We also occasionally used the high pressure hose to fill up the water tanks for the farm.  Roy’s in-laws owned a farm, too.  That’s where I worked at the time.  I have no idea why they called it a wash rack because it was just a concrete pad with a roof over it and a drain in the middle .

    When they got through cleaning the cars, they would pull them around front and park them by the road.  I never knew if this was advertisement or just getting them out of the way.  Anyway, they called the Chancery Court Clerk and told them that the car was ready to be picked up.  Somebody pulled it around front, and carefully backed it into position.  While Roy sat behind the counter and watched, the guy driving the car backed it right over the concrete block where the Texaco sign used to stand.  It was an unfortunate thing because even though the concrete was low enough to not hit the bumper, the anchor bolts managed to tear holes in the car’s gas tank.  The bolts must have caused a spark when ripping through the tank because within seconds, the car was engulfed in flames.  The guy made it out okay, but the car burned to a crisp.  First the fire department showed up then the car’s owner showed up.

    Roy stayed on for a while longer before going back to the healthcare industry where he should have stayed in the first place.  But he always liked to change things up and do something different.  At one point he wanted to work for the highway department so he could get a good tan.  But that’s another story.