The 10th Street service stations

In addition to all the gas stations on main street in Worland in the 1950s, there were still more found on 10th Street and further north. Following a hypothetical driver coming from Thermopolis, such a driver could take a left at 10th Street and Big Horn Avenue and head north.

The first gas station he’d see would be on the left, approximately the same location as a current motel located on Robertson Avenue and on the east side of 10th. There, Harold Schmidt ran a Chevron station. Across the street and a little further north, where the Subway is now located, was Earl Varney’s Mobil station. Then due north of the Varney station was a Texaco station run by “Shorty” Willard, I believe.

Still proceeding due north, our driver would find another Harold Aagard operation, a Phillips station located on the northeast corner of 10th and Russell Avenue. Directly west, across 10th Street, Roy White had his Husky station. And due north of White’s station (where V-1 was located, I believe) was Jerry Sinner’s first Sinclair station before he moved to a location I mentioned last week, at Fifth Street and Coburn. Finally, if a driver continued north on Highway 16-20, he’d see one last gas station near the old drive-in, a Gordon Refining station run by Larry Catlin.

I’m not sure if I caught all the stations on 10th and north of Worland – my notes about them are fuzzy in places – but I do feel that I’ve been able to show that Worland had a very large number of gasoline stations during the 1950s. And this glut was to have some serious consequences.

Virtually all the stations maintained underground tanks storing their gasoline. These underground tanks were very susceptible to rust, so that gasoline began to leak into the ground. Couple that with the fact that Worland is flat, with a very low gradient, so that liquids in the ground of the town don’t drain well, and you have a town floating on a sea of gasoline. This is not a good situation, of course, and when, during the early 1970s, new environmental legislation was passed, escaping hydrocarbon substances were addressed.

I’m not sure how it became well known, but it wasn’t long before the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) became well aware that Worland had a big gasoline problem. And this department set out to enforce Wyoming’s environmental laws.

The trouble with this enforcement is that by the time the DEQ learned of the big Worland problem, the primary culprits had left the scene. And so the people being accused of violation of the statutes were not those who established gasoline stations years ago and who made profits from them for years (the whole panoply of energy companies, which was legion), but people who had purchased old station properties. The rule that the DEQ enforced was that the current owners, not the original owners, were the ones who had to clean up the messes.

I had a client who bought an old station and converted it to a tax preparation business. He had never pumped an ounce of gasoline; indeed, I believe the sale of gasoline had ended some time before he bought the station. But he was the man whom the DEQ wanted to compel to clean up all that underground gasoline. At a terrific cost, I might add.

I knew Mike Sullivan, who was then the governor of Wyoming, and I wrote Mike a long letter setting out in some detail the situation with so many owners of old gas stations. And I gave him my opinion that it was fundamentally unfair for the last owner to be the fall guy. Well, it wasn’t long before Governor Sullivan started pushing legislation that changed the old rule. The State of Wyoming established a program whereby for payment of a yearly fee ($300 comes to mind), the state would take over cleanup responsibilities. This law represented a great stride in fairness for Wyoming citizens.

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books.