By Becky Manley / Staff Writer
Leaning against a long-ago retired cigarette vending machine, Mack Lanham, 71, watched cars zipping along U.S. 25 West in Corbin.
With casual shrugs and short explanations, Lanham talked about his impending retirement and the closure of a Corbin business icon as the sun set and the drivers of the speeding cars switched on their headlights.
“I just decided to quit,” Lanham said.
At the end of business today, Lanham will shutter Lanham’s Service Station.
The closure marks the start of Lanham’s retirement as well as the retirement of his sole employee, Robert Thomas, 70.
Lanham owned and operated the station for 44 years.
During those years, Lanham said his routine rarely varied.
Six days a week at 7 a.m., Lanham said he switched on the lights and the coffee pot.
While Lanham waited for customers, the “regulars” gathered inside the station.
The men clutched cups of coffee, sometimes enveloped in wispy cigarette smoke, their conversation as comfortable as the periodic silences that sometimes spanned minutes before a car pulled up to the pumps, triggering the station’s bell.
That bell is an abandoned relic at most modern gas stations where attendants hover over displays of junk food and cash registers, only conversing with customers via intercom or when people venture inside the store to buy lottery tickets or to prepay for gas.
At Lanham’s, all the pumps were full serve and attendants still washed windshields, pumped free air into low tires and checked the oil.
Lanham began pumping gas at age 14 for his dad, Edd Lanham.
“I guess that’s all I’ve ever done,” Lanham said.
A “sad” loss
After the first of the year, Lanham said he will board up the windows at his station. Come spring, he hopes the market will improve enough so he can find a buyer.
If the station were to sell, it is uncertain whether the new owner would continue its full-serve tradition.
Full service gas stations are a rarity in a world that long ago yielded to the lure of high-volume sales offered by self-serve, according to Paul Fiore, executive vice president of Service Station Dealers of America and Allied Traders.
The move to self-serve began in the 1970s, when Fiore said oil companies promoted the notion that the lower self-serve prices would appeal to consumers and lead to increased sales.
“That pretty much was the beginning of the end,” Fiore said. “So it was pretty much a death spiral.”
As more people learned how to pump gas, Fiore said the price difference between full- and self-serve varied by as little as 10 cents to as much as a dollar.
By the late 1990s, Fiore said full-serve “was pretty much done.”
Today, full-serve stations where an attendant pumps gas at a per-gallon price that is slightly higher than the going rate are a rarity, according to Fiore.
“Typically those facilities are only supported by higher income municipalities or neighborhoods,” Fiore said.
That description doesn’t seem to apply to Lanham’s, which is tucked along a narrow strip of businesses that include tobacco sheds and discount shops.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the estimated median household income for Whitley County residents was just under $27,400 in 2008.
All of which makes Lanham’s a “sad” loss, Fiore said.
Earlier this month, long-time Lanham’s Service Station customer Brenda Wallen, 61, agreed the station’s closure was a sad loss to the community.
While Lanham filled the tank of her SUV, Wallen said she prefers to leave the pumping to somebody else.
“I don’t like to,” Wallen said. “You stink like gas.”
Where the “regulars” gather
Though his wife, Ruby Lanham, was the first to hear about his retirement, Lanham said the station’s “regulars” soon learned they’d lose their second home.
“Most of them, they want me to stay here,” Lanham said with a slight nod to the other end of the station.
That nod indicated a gathering of men whose numbers varied as the evening wore on.
Included among them was Ron Elliott, 64, of Corbin.
“Yeah, I’ve only been coming here about 25 years,” Elliot said. “I’m the baby of the group.”
The men gather in chairs around an old heater, sometimes sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups.
Jerry “Tack” Vanover, 56, said he’s been a regular since about 1973. That evening, Mickey McCracken, 77, was the seniority member among the regulars.
“Mack’s saved a lot of lives,” Elliot said. “He’s kept us from gettin’ run over by vacuum sweepers at home.”
The men claimed they’ve solved the world’s problems during their discussions, but grouse that nobody has listened to them.
Even Lanham, an attentive host who frequently checks the coffee pot, confessed he often ignores the conversations.
“I don’t pay much attention to them a lot of times,” Lanham said.
Lanham, who said he never seriously pursued another career except when he took — and failed — a postal exam in 1969, guessed his last vacation was in the 1980s when he drove to his brother’s fishing camp in Louisiana.
But Lanham said he’ll begin his retirement Jan. 1 with no certain plans.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” Lanham said. “I’ll think about that then.”
