Dear Vance: My parents were remembering when they grew up in Cooper-Young, and a neighborhood landmark was a nice gas station on Central. As a promotion one year, the owners gave customers puppies and other prizes. Do you know who ran this establishment? — J.B., Memphis.
Two generations of Gordons — Devane Douglas Jr. (at left) and Devane Douglas Sr. — greet customers at their gas station.
Photographs courtesy of Carol Gordon Wildman
Dear J.B.: Over the years I’ve written about quite a few Cooper-Young landmarks: Edwards Pharmacy, Dardano Grocery, and the Peabody Theater immediately come to mind. So it’s a pleasure to write about Gordon’s Gulf Station, because this was where the Lauderdales’ fleet of fine automobiles was kept in tip-top shape. Devane Douglas Gordon Sr. — known to friends as D.D. or Doug (he didn’t like “Devane”) — could repair the balky distributor on our Daimler-Benz limousine better than anybody in town.
Of course, he had also done work for Charles Lindbergh, so we were in good company. More about that in a minute.
I’ll tell the story of the gas station by telling the story of the fellow who owned it. And I have this information because my pal, Carol Gordon Wildman, happens to be the granddaughter of D.D., so my job here was easy. She and her father, Devane Douglas Gordon Jr., got together one night, it seems, and answered my pesky questions about the old gas station that you see here.
A lanky fellow brought in an inner tube to be patched, from an airplane. They repaired it and Charles Lindbergh went on his way.
Devane D. Gordon Sr. was born in 1905 in the little Mississippi town of Quitman, and the family claims they were “the poorest people, in the poorest city, in the poorest county, in the poorest state in the United States.” So much to be proud of! With little reason to stick around there, D.D. left home at age 16 and struck out on his own. “He could tackle anything mechanical,” his son recalls, “working on any kind of machinery, so he did odd jobs wherever he could and slept at kinfolks’ homes.”
According to family lore, he had an interesting encounter in the early 1920s, working with an older brother at a garage somewhere in Mississippi. “On one occasion,” says Doug Jr., “a lanky fellow brought in an inner tube to be patched, apparently from an airplane. They repaired it and he went on his way.” This was in the day of “barnstorming,” with airplane pilots doing crazy stunts and charging folks for rides, and D.D. always claimed his customer that day — though he was nobody special at the time — was Charles Lindbergh.
In the 1950s, Gulf demolished the old gas station (above) and built a more modern, gleaming-white facility (below).
One afternoon, D.D. drove to tinker with a truck generator at a nearby boarding school, and that’s where he met his future wife, Audie Lee. They were married in Pickens, Mississippi, in 1925, and the new husband took a job as the shop foreman for a Ford dealer in that area. “This was when they shipped Model T Fords across the country in boxcars, standing on ends,” says Doug Jr. “The dealers then completed the assembly,” and that was his dad’s job for a few years.
In 1932, the Gordons moved to Memphis, where they had a son (Doug Jr.) and two daughters (Catherine and Anne). D.D. first opened a battery shop on Union Avenue across the street from the Commercial Appeal building, in the heart of “Automobile Row,” but soon began working as a mechanic for a Gulf gas station at Highland and Southern. Within a few years, he became the manager there.
“This was a time when you repaired everything you could,” says his son. “We pulled cars out of ditches, fixed tires and tubes, and had two service trucks — one of them an old Model A Ford that had been used to deliver vegetables and had no doors.” Gasoline was only 18 cents a gallon, he remembers.
For reasons that weren’t clear, D.D. lost his lease and Gulf sold the property to a company that replaced it with a frozen-food storage facility, the Southern United Ice Company. So D.D., searching for a new business venture, came across the old station at the northeast corner of Central and Cooper. As far as I can tell, this place originally opened as a tire and battery shop in the early 1920s and was converted to a gas station in the 1930s, but it had been closed since 1943 — quite possibly because of the strict gasoline rationing at that time.
He reopened 2142 Central in 1947 under a new name — Gordon’s Gulf. The station had only two gas pumps out front under the canopy, with a one-car garage behind the main building, but it also had a car lift and an area where his crew — including his son — washed cars, summer and winter. Besides gas and oil, Gordon offered Gulf tires, Willard batteries, and other parts for cars and trucks.
Then and now, this was a busy part of town. Right behind the station, passengers could climb concrete steps up to the Lenox Depot, located alongside the Southern Railroad that cuts through the neighborhood. Directly across Central was an old Studebaker dealership that later became Gerber Auto Repair, and on the southwest corner of the intersection was the aforementioned Dardano Grocery and Edwards Drugs. Next door was the East End Coal Company (later called the Southern Coal & Ice Company). Across Cooper was another gas station, the Site Oil Company.
Gulf began revamping its properties across the country in the early 1950s, and they demolished the old-fashioned station and replaced it with a more modern facility. I’ve included a photo of it here (above right); I’m sorry it’s grainy but it’s taken from an old 35mm slide. In April 1955, Gordon held a grand opening for his new place, where he gave away all sorts of things. As you mentioned, J.B., happy Gulf customers went home with AKC-registered cocker spaniel puppies, and others received “valuable prizes” such as matched luggage, a “super-deluxe” Coca-Cola drink box, and “Gulf lollipops and whistling rockets to all the kiddies.”
What’s more, “You could play the Gulf No-Nox alarm clock game! When the bell rings, you win!” Attendants rang a gong throughout the day, you see, and if your car was being serviced when that bell sounded, you won five gallons of gas. According to an old newspaper promotion, one lucky driver could win “FREE! - 200 gallons of new super-refined Gulf No-Nox Gas!” Nobody explained how anyone would haul that gas home; presumably they got it in installments when they visited the station.
D.D. retired from the gas station business in 1967, but he didn’t stop working. He joined his son, a senior master sergeant with the Tennessee Air National Guard, and they started building greenhouses, of all things, for customers around the Mid-South. They stayed busy until they ended that venture in 1989.
Devane Douglas Gordon Sr. passed away on January 2, 2000, at the age of 95. His son, Doug Jr., “is alive and writing at the age of 90” (and even sending emails!) to help me tell his family’s history.
Their old Gulf Station came down sometime in the 1970s. A Mapco stands on that corner today, but no matter how many times I’ve visited it, they’ve never offered me a puppy.
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Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 65 Union Avenue, Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103