With 92-cent gas and aging pumps, this Atascadero station was a dying breed
Some stories feel like they are from a place lost in time.
This is one of those stories, about an Atascadero gas station five months away from 1980, but it seems like 30 years earlier. The Tasco station got its name from Atascadero.
Regulations and economics have largely squeezed out independent stations, and this was a fading era as Jim Cook wrote the story on Aug. 18, 1979:
Pumping gas and … fixing flats
The old thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade, but there’s cold soda pop in the machine and Tootsie Rolls are still a dime.
Spiked bills and invoices blossom in the window and above the bloom of paper a sign invites: Don’t just stand there, buy something.
Tasco Oil Company has plenty to sell — white gas and solvent and kerosene and motor oils and, of course, gasoline and diesel fuel.
But Tasco Oil isn’t in any OPEC cartel. It consists of one gas station just south of Atascadero on El Camino Real, a lot of fan belts — and Chuck Harrington, proprietor.
“I’ve been here pretty close to 25 years,” Harrington reports. “This was the highway (101) when I came. Before that I was an oil researcher in Hanford. But when the family came along, I couldn’t see moving every two weeks.
“So I went to work for Al Gray, and never had sense enough to leave.”
The station is one of the last of its kind — you can still get Chuck to wash your windshield, and if your car needs a quart of oil, he’ll add it from one of the glass bottles he refills from bulk oil highboys stationed in the office.
As Atascadero customer Carmen Moody put it: “He’s honest and he’s fair and you know he’s going to be honest with you. This is a real people’s place.”
With the second coming of a “gas crisis,” many of the independents have been squeezed out. In fact, the symbol of the last half of the 1970s might be the deserted cut-rate stations which have fallen victim to Big Oil’s price war in reverse.
But Harrington hangs on. Most of his business is in commercial accounts, many of these diesel customers for construction equipment and the like, because Tasco Oil hasn’t gotten around to issuing charge cards yet.
“Some of these people have been trading with me since before I was here,” Harrington said, in a conversation reminiscent of Casey Stengel. “Now that’s a pretty steady customer.”
And the gas crisis?
Harrington feels the federal government has “screwed things up. The legislators are cussing the oil companies for holding back the product. But we’re still under the federal program of allocations, so even if the refineries had it, they couldn’t sell it.”
The allocation system — which dates back to 1974 — was relaxed after Gas Crisis I, when plenty of gasoline was available, Harrington explained. But the old rules were reapplied in Gas Crisis II, allowing Tasco Oil 80 percent of its 1978 supply.
“If they really want to ration gas, let the price go to $2 or $3 a gallon. That will cut use way back. Look,” he grinned, “I buy this stuff to sell. I cant afford to use it.”
Cars drift by on a lazy afternoon, and Harrington cautions a friend to be careful as he climbs the old storage tanks.
“Don’t get hurt,” he warns. “I’m not sure how good my insurance is. They’re real good at collecting,” he tells a customer, “but I don’t know how they are about paying.”
Another customer pulls in under the shaded island next to the old office, and Harrington goes out to greet him.
The gas station business? After a quarter of a century, Harrington has this opinion:
“It’s better,” he says, “than looking for a job.”
