In 1959, an east wind blew down the Phillips 66 station on Main Street in Centerville. The next year the owners built a new station, installing a whimsical, triangular canopy — kind of a Jetsons look — over the pumps.
Forty-seven years later, the futuristic canopy is still there, but the station has more of a bygone feel. The paint is peeling, the fabric on the folding chairs is tattered, and the pumps, never updated to digital, are no longer connected to an underground tank.
On a bright fall day, Ron Randall sits on one of the folding chairs shooting the breeze. He figures he's the oldest business still in business in Centerville.
With most of America populated by a frenetic, flashy sameness, Ron's Service and Ron himself are refreshingly dishevelled and surprising. Ron has a computer and the latest technology for doing inspections and emissions testing but rides to work each day on his horse. At lunchtime on Thursdays and Fridays, he closes the shop and goes dancing with his wife, Darlene, at the Golden Years Senior Citizens Center in Bountiful.
Randall, now 76, is a burly former Davis High football player turned rodeo cow cutter who likes to do the cha-cha. He could easily drive the two minutes to his shop but chooses to take the 90-minute scenic route by horse. That's three hours a day, just to get to work and back.
When his wife first brought up the idea of the lunchtime dancing, he said "I can't close my shop to go dancing in the middle of the day!" Then he said, OK, maybe this once. That was five years ago.
His faithful, longtime customers know his routine, so they plan their visits accordingly. Sometimes an old friend, like 93-year-old Cal Poulsen, will drive up just to chat. Poulsen's granddaughter recently moved away, leaving him a bit on the lonely side.
"Still doin' your own cooking?" Randall asks.
"Yep."
"That way you can't complain."
As for Randall himself, his customers bring him corn and tomatoes and cakes and donuts, and along about 11:30 on nondancing days Darlene drives up with a sandwich and a cookie, as she has for the past 57 years.
Sometimes, if you wait long enough, you'll be in a different spot without having to move. That's what's happened to the garage, which used to sit on the north end of town and now sits on the south, thanks to suburban sprawl. More cars go by Ron's Service now in five minutes than they used to all day long in the late '40s when his brother first hired him to pump gas.
In those days, as Randall says, there was a reason why gas stations were called service stations. He figures a business like that could make a comeback. "If a guy wanted to do a full service station — checking tires, sweeping out the cars, the whole nine yards — he could make a good living. A lot of people would pay a few more cents a gallon," he predicts.
One Centerville City Council member has wistfully talked about turning Ron's Service into a museum, leaving everything just like it is — the transistor radio, the clutter of yellowed notebooks, the folding chairs for shooting the breeze, the Jetsons canopy and its peeling paint.
In the meantime, Randall says he's turned down offers from people who, less burdened by nostalgia, want to buy the property and tear the station down.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com