Harbor Service Station Sign

July 1966  |  Brea and Deodara

Sealed concrete. Fresh paint. Cardboard, and under it all, the last trace of new rubber off tires nobody had mounted yet.

A working service station smells like years; old oil, spent grease, solvent worked so deep into the concrete that no amount of hosing gets it back out. This one didn't have any of that in it yet. Late July, inland from the coast. The marine layer had already burned off by midmorning, and the light coming back off the new drive was hard enough to squint at.

Inside, the shelving stood squared and full. Boxes of spark plugs and fan belts stacked tight, price tags still stapled on, corners not yet worn soft by handling. The heavy cases sat low, the small parts stacked above, nothing pulled forward to hide a gap behind it. Stock that had never once been shopped. The plate glass had no film on it yet. Somewhere in back, the compressor cycled, and out on the drive the bell hose gave its two dings for a car crossing, everything sounding harder than it ever would again, once the building had years in it.

John Moore held a car battery at chest height, thirty to forty pounds (14 to 18 kg) of hard case and strap, and had been holding it long enough now to feel it settle into his shoulders and down through his forearms. Not a comfortable way to hold anything for this long. He didn't shift his feet. He waited.

She came around the shelving with a notebook already flipping open, a pencil pulled from behind her ear where it had sat all afternoon, more habit than plan. Dark hair, damp at the temples, falling forward as she looked down at the page.

“And your name? Spell that for me?"

He did. Slow, the way a man spells a name he's never once had to think about. Her pencil followed it onto the page: J-o-h-n M-o-o-r-e.

"And you’re the owner of this new Harbor Service Station? What’s the corner we’re on?"

Brea and Deodara. She wrote it under his name and closed the book on her thumb to hold the page.¹

Then she lifted the camera. Twin-lens, waist-level, and she bent over the hood to find him in it, which meant that for the length of one breath she wasn't looking at him at all, only at his reflection, folded small inside the glass.

The bulb fired once. White, then whiter, then nothing. An afterimage kept going after the light did, floating behind the eyes a few seconds longer than it had any right to.

John Moore blinked the room back into focus. The shelves. The glass. The battery, still heavy in his hands.

The Roll Call, 1946-1969

Harbor Service Stations across Southern California. The name in front belonged to whoever ran it.

1946. South Gate. 8400 California Avenue, at Liberty. "Loren" and "Joe," Harbor Service Station - a display ad ran the names in quotation marks, the way you write a name someone is meant to ask for. Ran again two days later.²

1948. Harold’s, on Western Avenue. The Southwest Surplus Mart advertised free parking across the street at Harold’s Harbor Service Station. Harold never bought the space himself to say so.³

1949. 1820 N. Long Beach Blvd. J. & K. - an authorized-dealer roster.⁴

1950. Anaheim Street, the VFW hall. Claude Quinn presided over the Harbor Service Station Dealers at eight o’clock. What was discussed, the paper never says.⁵

1956. Gardena, 1604 W. 166th St. Ed & Lou’s - an ad, ran again that October.⁶

1957. 2620 South Street, Long Beach. Part-time attendant wanted, afternoons and weekends.⁷

1958. 13703 Victory Boulevard, Van Nuys. Full-time attendant wanted, six days, experience required.⁸

1959. Gardena, 1604 W. 166th St. Olson’s - a Christmas greeting, three years after Ed & Lou’s.⁹

1960. Burbank, 249 S. Glenoaks Boulevard. George Coontz, sixty-five, alone at 1:25 in the morning when a man in a handkerchief mask tried to rob him. Coontz yelled back: "Go ahead and shoot me, I’ll remember you." The man ran.¹⁰

1961. Pacoima, 10119 San Fernando Road. Carl J. Kirley, thirty-two. Three teenagers, hunting knives, a quarter to one in the morning: "Don’t yell, or you’ve had it." Thirty-two dollars. He was made to pretend he was counting change while they cleaned out the drawer.¹¹

1966. Brea and Deodara. John Moore. Grand opening.¹

1966. Euclid and Ocean, La Habra. Crain's ran a match-the-face contest. A reader that year could apparently pick out the service worker from a photo. He was entry No. 7.¹²

1967. Second and G, San Bernardino. James T. Hughlett, manager, when a swarm of bees settled on his display rack. A photographer caught him crouched beside the hive while an apiarist worked it loose. Hughlett: "I sell gasoline, not honey."¹³

1967. San Bernardino, three or four blocks north of Hughlett’s corner, ten days later. Robert L. Zausch, 595 G St., beaten with a tire iron and kicked by two men, in front of witnesses, in the middle of the afternoon. Treated at County General for cuts and bruises.¹⁴

1967. San Fernando Road. Gill’s - the largest loss to burglars in the district that week. A padlock pried loose.¹⁵

1967. Victory Boulevard. Bus Manning took over, fifteen years already in the trade. Harbor products and batteries, Firestone tires, towing and pick-up, and three mechanics named in his own ad space: Darrel Harwood on General Motors, Redge Lewis on Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys, Bert Morris on Chryslers.¹⁶

1968. Fletcher Drive. Carl’s hosted a DeMolay car wash, nine to four, that Saturday.¹⁷

1969. North Figueroa. Jes Par’s Harbor Service Station ran a Christmas display ad - tires, batteries, double Blue Chip stamps on every fill-up - on a page crowded with Alexander’s, Benson’s, Mr. Maury’s, Paulson’s. A whole street of named businesses, none of them slowing down.¹⁸

Nobody Answered, 1971-1972

New Year’s Eve, 1971. 595 N. G Street, San Bernardino. James Franklin Haney, twenty-two, alone at the pump at 7:55 in the morning. Two men came in, one with a gun. Sixty dollars from the register. They drove off.¹⁹

September 1972. 1981 E. Marshall Boulevard, and the Harbor Service Station stands closed.

The reporter was following up on a vandalism story that afternoon, nothing to do with gasoline - a convenience market broken into again - but Harbor's name turned up anyway, tucked into somebody else's report. Before he wrote a line of his own, he wanted the other side of it.

He found the number and dialed. He let it ring six times, then set the receiver down.

Harbor officials could not be reached for questioning on why and when that station was closed. He called Standard next. Wayne Cusick, regional office in Colton, had the date. Over two years.

Vandalism, no. Cusick had it the other way around. "Vandals commonly hit stations that are closed."

So why had nobody taken it over? "It's difficult to find a dealer for a station that's been closed."

Both companies were called. One of them answered. By then there were no other open businesses within sight of the market.²⁰

Chain of Custody

1944. September 20. First use of the name, twenty years before anyone filed on it. Westway Petroleum Company, November 5, 1964. Granted May 18, 1965. Reg. No. 789,553.²¹

1970. Celanese sold Champlin, the Oklahoma refiner, to Union Pacific.²²

1979. On April 30, Harbor Service Stations, Inc. assigned the entire interest and the goodwill to Champlin. Recorded May 11,²² the same day the new block H was filed. A second trademark followed in June, the same H set over a lowercase harbor. Both claimed first use the previous August. On the certificate, one line of housekeeping: owner of U.S. Reg. No. 789,553.²³

1981. Both registered, February 17.²³

1984. Union Pacific sold Champlin’s entire retail operation to American Petrofina and closed the Enid refinery.²²

1987. June 5. Both trademarks cancelled. The registrant did not file an acceptable declaration under Section 8.²³

Sometime in there, porcelain gave way to plastic. Cheaper. Lighter. Easier to replace when it cracked.

2025. Every name in the roll call came out of one newspaper archive. Its funding was pulled in April. The entire staff's last day was June 27, and on June 27 Brian Geiger, twenty years its director, learned the state had funded the archive going forward and that the federal money had been restored as well.²⁴

What's Left

Porcelain enamel, one sheet. A rounded border runs the edge in dark teal. An orange serif H fills the field top to bottom, an anchor worked through it, two oars crossed behind. Below, letter-spaced to the width of the border: HARBOR.

White field, going soft with age at the edges. Chips scattered through the enamel to a darker substrate underneath, most of them small, a few down to bare metal. Rust blooms at the upper left corner and along the bottom edge, the kind that spreads slow, from the inside of a chip outward. Mounting holes at the four corners and at the midpoints of each side, grommeted, the metal around them worn brighter than the rest.

Somewhere in California. Which wall, the record never says.

Then the edge of the sign. Nothing more.