PEA RIDGE — When I first began having a memory of Pea Ridge, Floyd Hall was running the filling station at the downtown intersection in town.
The small building was a unique fieldstone structure trimmed with an interesting design, and with windows set in as diamond shapes in the sides. The building itself goes back to 1930, when Clyde “Pea Ridge” Day, the baseball pitcher of 1920s’ and 1930s’ fame, built the station on the northwest corner of the downtown intersection. It sat at an angle on the lot so that the front faced the corner in a southeast direction, and the drive into the gas pumps could be entered either from the street that is now North Curtis Avenue or from the main street of town east and west, which is now West Pickens Road.
I’m thinking Pea Ridge Day may intentionally have made the side window as a diamond shape to represent a baseball diamond.
I have never learned just when Floyd Hall became the proprietor for the Pea Ridge Day Station, but I am fairly sure that by 1943-1944 he was the operator. That’s when I began remembering things about my early life. We usually bought our gasoline from Floyd Hall.
At first, he sold Esso brand.
The Esso company eventually evolved into Exxon, but I am pretty sure that about the time that change was taking place, Floyd switched over to Texaco, and he continued as a Texaco man for the rest of his time at the station. After Floyd Hall, the station later was operated by Roger Hickman; and Roger’s era was long and notable, as the Floyd Hall era had been earlier.
During the 1940s and1950s, most filling stations had an attendant who came out and pumped the gasoline for you, cleaned your windshield, checked your engine oil level and your radiator water level, and even your tire pressure if you wanted. Self-service gas stations are a modern invention. The old way was full service. Floyd often had someone hired to help run the station. I especially remember Lawson Latty, but there were a number of other men who worked for Floyd from time to time.
Early in my life, before 1946, we had no electricity on the farm, but we had a battery-powered radio.
Many radios of that day operated on 6-volt batteries.
Some people would buy a 6-volt Ray-O-Vac battery from the hardware store.
Those old batteries were about twice the size of the 6-volt lantern batteries that later came to power many large flashlights, but those Ray-O-Vacs, so faras I know, didn’t take recharging. We always used a 6-volt car battery for our radio. Actually, Dad had two car batteries for the radio, one would be running the radio at home, and one would be at Floyd Hall’s station being recharged. So when the one “ran down,” we could switch to the other and take the depleted battery to Floyd for recharging. As I recall, Floyd had a whole big shelf of batteries in the back of the station on a slow charger.
In the mid-1940s, gasoline was selling for 23 cents to 25 cents per gallon. So, today, when gasoline prices begin edging toward $4 per gallon, we get pretty nostalgic about that. Some of the Pea Ridge city fathers had annexed a small strip of land running all the way to Missouri into Pea Ridge, so we were considered to be a border city, and we could buy gasoline at Missouri prices, which were lower in those days.
I was never a trapper, or a dealer in animal skins, but I have often heard of others who could sell their coon skins and other skins to Floyd Hall at the station.
I don’t know of any other market like that in Pea Ridge.
Floyd Hall was married to Mildred Harris. We always called her “Mick.” They lived in a house that Clyde and Lois Day built in the 1920s, early in their marriage. The house is located east of today’s Pea Ridge High School on West Pickens, at the corner where Pickens turns southeastward and runs downhill, before coming up into old downtown Pea Ridge.
After Pea Ridge Day died in 1934, Lois Day and son, Charles, moved to Oklahoma for some years. I am assuming that Floyd and Mildred Hall bought the house at that time. Mildred Hall’s parents were Charley and Lizzy Harris, whose farm was a mile from townon the road to Jacket, Mo.
They lived the next place north of today’s Pea Ridge City Park. We were always close with them, through church, and we rented their land after Charley retired from farming.
The Hall and Harris families were among the mainstays of the Pea Ridge community that I first remember. I also remember well Floyd’s brothers Otis Hall and Finis Hall for their music, and sister Martha Hall, the fourth-grade school teacher. Otis and Ruth Hall and family lived at Shady Grove, Finis in Rogers, and Martha east of Pea Ridge.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 6 on 10/17/2012