Soulless ghost towns, that’s what they are. Petroleum-dispensing plazas lacking even a scrap of uniqueness. Row upon row of gleaming pumps with thin-lipped slots for credit cards and beeping screens aglow with digital dispatches.
Modern gas stations — fellow motorists, let us speak plainly — have all the warmth and cuddliness of a lunar outpost.
Loneliness, thy name is BP. Or Sunoco. Or Exxon. You can pull in, fill up and pull out again without exchanging a single word with another living creature.
And then there’s Action Oil.
Tucked along Ill. Highway 351 in this speck of a town — think of a single dot in a pointillist painting — between Ogelsby and LaSalle, this filling station is a cozy throwback to a simpler time.
You can’t pay at the pump, a fact that may leave some customers flummoxed and flustered, searching in vain for a spot in which to poke the plastic. But these boxy, venerable, humble pumps (three regular, one diesel) have no such accommodation.
At Action Oil, you must indulge in a ritual so quaint that it may strike customers as akin to churning their own butter:
You must actually walk into the building to pay.
And here’s the kicker: If you are unable or unwilling to pump your own gas, a gentle toot-toot on the horn will bring forth — incredible but true — someone from Action Oil to pump it for you.
However, if you do pump it yourself and then amble inside to settle up, you pass through glass double doors with a hand-lettered sign that would make Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft blush with pride — NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, BIKINI TOPS MUST BE COVERED UP. NO SERVICE! — after which you find yourself in the comforting presence of Melody Jessen, Action Oil’s manager, as well as the classic staples of a general store: chips, soft drinks, beer, candy, gum, newspapers, cigarettes, milk, sandwiches and, on the front counter, a small rack of souvenir shot glasses with wise, thoughtful inscriptions such as “Hangovers Are For Amateurs” and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Date Ugly Women.”
Jessen is considerably less rigid than the admonishing sign on the door implies. “I could care less how people come in. But we get a lot of older clientele,” Jessen says. “Some of the older ones can be offended by today’s standards.” Jessen, who has worked there for a decade, rarely lacks company.
Not only do customers arrive throughout the day (“A couple of ’em even follow me in when I open at 6,” she says), but Action Oil is a sort of salon for the area’s older citizens, a gathering place for a group of longtime pals who can polish off a pot of coffee in nothing flat. Jessen’s father, George, is often in the crowd; he’s usually the guy who pumps the gas.
They’re there most of the day, sitting on stools over by the coffee machine in a small area just to the left of the front counter, smoking cigarettes until a cloud of gray-blue smoke is suspended in the air like an unsettled question.
“We get a lot of people who just come in,” Jessen says. “We’re an information center. We try to keep it as friendly as possible.”
If one of the regulars is going on vacation, Jessen says, “They’ll stop in and tell us so we won’t worry about them.”
Retirees help out
On a typical morning, Jessen is joined by Edith Metcalfe and Anna Mae Straiski, retirees who live nearby. Metcalfe likes to water the plants trailing languidly out of their pots in the corners of the store, because “I love plants and don’t have room for them at home,” she says.
Straiski, though, has an even more important function. According to the signboard welcoming customers inside, the manager is Mel — Jessen’s nickname — and the assistant manger is Caroline Martyn. And then there is one more line: “Security — Anna Mae.”
The 75-year-old Straiski indeed wears dark glasses and tends to fling an intimidating glare at customers, giving them the once-over.
“I was here before she was,” the straight-talking, slightly ornery Straiski says, tilting her gray-haired head to indicate Jessen.
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She’s been coming in for decades, Straiski says, since back in the days when the station was known as Freedom Oil. It’s always been independently owned, the locals recall, and got its start back in the 1930s.
“There’s a great history here,” Straiski declares.
Action Oil is owned by Diana and Michael Koenig, who live in Bloomington, Ill., and visit the station every few months. Reached by phone, Diana Koenig acknowledged that, compared with today’s hip, ultra-sophisticated stations, Action Oil is an anomaly.
“We consider ourselves the antique,” she said with a laugh. “I keep telling Mel that someday we’ll be in the history books. It’s like a little family down there.”
The Koenigs bought the station 25 years ago, she said, along with two other stations in Morton, Ill. The others recently were sold.
But despite its old-fashioned ways and off-the-beaten-track location, Action Oil remains profitable, Koenig reported.
Nowadays, though, much of that profit comes not from the gas outside but the stuff inside: beer, ice, beef jerky, smokes and other convenience store items.
“In the last five years, there’s been little profit in gas,” Koenig said.
The lights-out gas prices of the past few years — and the yo-yoing of gas prices in general — tend to enrage consumers, but gas station owners don’t like it a bit better, she added. “People think you’re ripping them off. They don’t know the taxes we pay.”
She and her husband have considered updating Action Oil with such razzle-dazzle frills as new pumps that would take credit cards, Koenig said. “But we have a lot of older customers and they’re not into that computerized world.”
So for a while longer at least, Action Oil will keep its distinction as the gas station that time forgot. It’s open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day.
Jessen and Martyn estimate they personally know about 90 percent of their customers — except at the height of the summer tourist season, when visitors to nearby Starved Rock State Park or fishermen heading for the Illinois River stop by.
A mom and pop store
Among the year-round regulars is Ryan Fenwick, a lanky, smiling truck driver from Peru, Ill. Stopping by for his regular treat — a Diet Coke, a bottle of water and two Pop-Tarts — Fenwick describes the appeal of the place: “It’s like a little mom and pop store.”
It was ever thus, says Don Donahue, another customer, who says he has been coming in for more than four decades. “It’s friendly. Convenient.” He buys a quart of motorboat oil and tips his baseball cap to Straiski and the gang over by the coffee machine.
They don’t have much trouble with the criminal element, Jessen says. “We did have an overnight break-in about a month ago. I got here and the door was broken in and they’d taken cigarettes and beer.”
But when Straiski’s not on duty, Action Oil’s neighbors — next door is the Illinois Valley Marine Corps League and across the road is a tavern called the Pop-A-Top — look out for the shop and its employees, Jessen says.
Says Jessen, “We know our customers so well that when some of them come in, we have what they want on the counter before they even get there.
“You never know,” she adds with relish, “just what might happen here in the course of a day.”