An era's end

By Charles Sowell  

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011 12:56 p.m. (0)

The little gas station at the corner of McBee and South Irvine streets is a dinosaur hiding in plain sight; a footnote in history made of concrete and steel.

In Greenville’s bustling downtown, the full service gas station operated for more than half a century and was the last one left until it closed in April.

Now the site is for sale.

Frank Black opened the station just after the Korean War.

It was called Frank Black’s Esso and is still referred to as the Esso station by long-time residents.

Black became a fixture in downtown Greenville.

“He was a vivacious man, a great talker,” said semi-retired Greenville municipal judge Jim Calmes, one of six heirs who own the property.

“Frank loved Clemson football. The station was a place where you were sure to hear a good football story when you went in to have your car serviced.”

Black also loved to poor mouth, Calmes said. “He’d talk about how tough it was running a service station and then, after he retired, he and his wife donated $100,000 to Clemson.”

Black’s sidekick, Jim Beam, took over the station after Black retired in 1996 and held a lease on the property until April. The heirs decided not to renew the lease.

“He just couldn’t make a go of it there,” Calmes said. “Things had changed too much.”

Melville Westervelt, Calmes’ great grandmother, purchased the lot in 1939, with money she’d saved by running a boarding house on nearby Washington Street.

She did it in an era when women weren’t considered business capable.

She was married to John Westervelt, who at one time owned the Judson Mill and had a stake in the Brandon Mill, too, in the early 1900s.

“She was a shrewd lady. In an era when women weren’t thought of as having a head for business she thrived,” Calmes said.

Melville’s decision to buy the lot was a good one.

The federal courthouse, now known as the C.F Haynsworth Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, had been completed in 1937.

Greenville was moving away from what is now known as the West End and the current downtown’s parameters were jelling.

“Things were different back then,” Calmes said, leafing through a thick folder on the lot’s history. “She didn’t have the deed registered until 1941. People went on a handshake more than a contract or a deed. It was a much smaller town then, too. Everybody knew everybody else.”

The service station’s foundation was laid and the service bays set up in 1947, the same year that Henry Ford and Melville died.

In that brief calm between World War II and the Korean War, the city was catching its breath. People were still mourning lost loved ones from the war.

In Calmes’ family, his Aunt Snooks was getting over the death of her first husband in the Pacific theatre.

“She married a man named Henry Lightner who was shipped to Corregidor in 1941, shortly after they were married,” he said.

Lightner was captured by the Japanese, survived the Bataan Death March, and was shipped to Tokyo late in the war to serve as a human shield against allied bombing, Calmes said.

“He died there and was considered a hero by the men who survived,” he said. “When I was young, Snooks gave me his watch. It was one of the few things that she still had from Lightner’s life.”

The decision to sell was not an easy one, Calmes said.

“We really didn’t want to get rid of it,” said Calmes. “But there really wasn’t anyone who expressed an interest in running the station.”

For Calmes, selling the property has morphed into a reconnection with far-flung family members: a cousin in Highlands who raises exotic cats; an uncle in North Carolina who is confined to a nursing home; another cousin who teaches sculpture in Providence and spends her summers at a vacation home in Nova Scotia; six family members in all.

“We thought if we held onto it and just passed it on to the next generation the number of people with shares would be more than 20,” Calmes said. “That’s getting into the territory where it becomes almost impossible to do anything with the property. All it takes is one to object and a sale is stalled.”

Selling will sever a cherished connection to the family’s history in Greenville, Calmes said. It will also close the books on one of the last relics of a simpler era for the city.

“We’d hoped someone like that company that buys up old service stations and converts them into delis would buy the property,” Calmes said. “We’ve never heard anything from them.”

It seems no one has much use for a building designed to serve the motoring public in the days when cars had hoods the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck and names like Studebaker, Kaiser Frazier, Packard and Nash.