Out of Gas? : Manager Trying to Prevent Closing of Balboa Island’s Only Station

Service is more than just cleaning windshields at the tiny Unocal station on Balboa Island.

Customers regularly leave their cars--including a goodly number of Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs--to be gassed up and serviced while they pick up their mail or groceries.

Attendants routinely park one elderly woman’s car for her while she visits her son, who owns the restaurant across the street.

And a couple of months ago, station manager James Jennings answered the call of a customer to rescue a terrified kitten from her roof.

Jennings, who for 30 years has managed what is now the only gas station serving the island’s affluent and tightknit community of 1,700 homes, is happy to oblige.

Now, he is asking his customers, whom he regards as family, to return the many favors. Jennings has confidence they will, recalling how local businessmen helped pump gas during the 1979 shortage to make the long lines of cars flow more smoothly.

On Tuesday, Jennings’ plea was urgent. He was asking customers to sign petitions and write letters to help him save the station, which Unocal Corp. intends to close when Jennings’ $2,000-a-month lease expires on Jan. 30.

By noon the station had already collected 200 names with the help of customers, some of whom circulated the petitions among neighbors and businesses along Marine Avenue, the town’s central business district where the gas station is situated.

“I imagine if everybody who lives on the island knew what is pending, 99% would sign,” said Lew Akerman, a local real estate broker.

“If you get up in the morning and the battery is dead, what do you do?” he asked. The next nearest station is half a mile away.

“I can’t believe it,” said Betty Lou Crosson, a longtime island resident who, like Akerman, was quick to sign the petition. Another customer said she personally knows Richard J. Stegemeier, president and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Unocal, and will give him a call.

But Unocal spokeswoman Carol Scott said no outcry from the island citizenry will sway the company from its plans to sell the 60-by-80-foot lot on which the four-pump service station is squeezed.

“The decision is made,” she said.

Jennings, 60, received a letter from Unocal dated Oct. 18 that explains the station is being closed because “the return on investment is unsatisfactory.”

Scott declined to disclose the exact profitability of the station or how it compares to others in the Unocal system. She said that factors besides retail volume went into the decision, chief among them the rising property value of the station site.

“It doesn’t make sense to have a service station on that valuable a piece of property,” she said. Scott declined to disclose the company’s estimate of the value of the land.

Bob Anderson, a salesman at Balboa Island Realty, estimated that the land is worth between $400,000 and $600,000.

Jennings said he is waiting for Unocal to inform him exactly how much they want for the property, because as is the company’s standard procedure, he will have an opportunity to buy it. Currently, however, he said he doesn’t know how he could finance such a transaction.

“Decisions have been changed before,” Jennings said of Scott’s comment on the inevitability of the station’s demise. “I don’t want to slander Unocal, but I don’t think the decision was made at the proper level. It was probably made by some peon in the real estate division,” he said.

Jennings acknowledged that real estate prices have escalated dramatically on Balboa Island in the past 30 years and that his little full-service station pumps only 25,000 gallons of gasoline a month--or about a quarter the volume of some self-service stations on major highways.

The rise of self-service stations and the gasoline industry’s emphasis on high-volume business, Jennings observed, has killed off many neighborhood stations throughout the country over the past 10 years.

But Jennings said he had believed that his station would continue to be an exception.

“In years gone by, Unocal representatives said we will always keep this station,” he said, because of its uniqueness of being the only station in an area with a very wealthy and influential clientele. Moreover, he said, the station is considered an institution in the community.

Jennings said he was shocked when he received the letter.

“I had to sit down and think about it for an hour before I could talk to anyone,” he said.

Jennings still hopes there is some mistake. “I didn’t get a gold watch or anything,” he said. “I just got a cold letter.”