The Station

A familiar fixture on one of Jackson’s busiest intersections will soon be no more. The full-service Texaco station on the corner of Woodrow Wilson and State Street is loosing its lease and will be forced to close. Millsaps College, which owns the land, wishes to reclaim the land for future expansion and says that they “want that corner to be an important statement of Millsaps College.”

I feel for Robert Ward and his son Trey (who own the station.)  I guess it is because when I go home, I drive by a strip mall that used to be my father’s full-service Chevron station.  And while I  know time marches on, that spot of land holds many of my childhood memories. Full-service gas stations are fading into history, quickly going the way of the passenger pigeon and the VHS tape.

Dad and my next-door-neighbor went into business together in 1974.  Dad had been a traveling salesman and wanted to do something closer to home.  Canton Road Standard (later Chevron) opened for business soon afterwards.  I will always remember the smell of the tires, the tire-changing machine, the ring of the bell when the car pulled into the full-service pumps and finding dimes in the Coke machine change return.  I helped out there, pumping gas and washing windshields.  Dad and my neighbor bought the land behind the station a few years later and opened up their own garage, Auto Action. But I was sad to see the day the old two-bay service station was torn down.  A lot of great memories went along with it.

The corner of State and Woodrow Wilson won’t be the same, either. I know time marches on. But seeing that building torn down for whatever statement Millsaps wants to make will tear at my memories of a Chevron Station from long ago.