Remembering the old B/A Service Station
It’s here I was branded a ‘car guy’ forever
The old B/ A service station in Lower West Pubnico is no longer the old B/ A as we knew it.
Recently it has been refurbished from head to toe by new owners and it now operates as a car dealership.
This is good news as the old service station – no longer open for business – had fallen into a state of disrepair and was in danger of demolition. This would have been bad news.
I remember when it was first built, sometime in the early- tomid 1950s.
For a bit of history: The story of B/ A ( British American Oil Company) started in Toronto in 1906 when Albert L. Ellsworth ( 1876- 1950) founded the company. Just two years later, with eight shareholders, B/ A built Canada’s third refinery. This refinery imported crude oil with its main product being kerosene and a useless refinery byproduct, which was disposed as waste was gasoline. Soon the B/ A company expanded to Quebec and other provinces, finally reaching Newfoundland at the end of the Second World War. On Jan. 1, 1969, B/ A, with its round logo, green and red, sporting two big oil drops and the letters B and A, was renamed Gulf Oil Canada Ltd. In 1986 the name changed to Ultramar. Today the round B/ A signs are very much sought after as a collector’s item and fetching high prices at auctions or at private sales.
The B/ A Service Station in Lower West Pubnico was built and operated by Benedict d’Entremont and his brother Fredrick. Ralph Douglas from Yarmouth would supply the gasoline and oil to the service station on a weekly basis. Sometimes his employee Howard Goudey would come down with the oil truck to fill the underground tanks. We enjoyed his visit as he took time to yarn a bit with the locals … as his boss did. The first owners did not keep the service station very long and in 1960 sold it to Leonce Amirault ( 1925- 2016), who had married my aunt Therese a few years before that.
Leonce buying the B/ A Service Station near my home was the clincher that still pulls strings and branded me a “car guy” forever. I was his first grease monkey and spent countless hours there after school and during summer vacation selling gasoline at 50 cents a gallon and fixing flat tires, replacing wiper blades, doing oil changes, cleaning carburetors and the like. Most of all learning what made gasoline engines of those days work.
One day, when I was manning the service station alone, an American tourist, who was spending his summer in Argyle, came in with a fairly new 1958 Renault Dauphine, a small compact car built in France. He said his car’s engine “missed” at higher speed and asked if I would clean the carburetor. I had seen mechanics do this so no problem.
I dismantled the carburetor inside a cardboard box to make sure I did not lose any parts and then forced compressed air through all the jets and passages and assembled it again. Of course the B/A did not stock carb gaskets for Renaults, so I covered the old gasket with a compound called “Gasket Goo” and the happy customer drove away.
When my uncle returned from town I told him about fixing the Renault. “You took an awful chance,” he said. “Suppose you had lost or broken one of those foreign-made parts, the car would have been laid up for days.”
Some weeks later the Renault owner returned. little
“Is the boss panicked.
He told my uncle that he had taken his car to many mechanics in the States and nobody had been able to fix his engine problem. “That young feller who fixed my car sure knew what he was doing,” he said.
High praise, but he was only partly right. Although I had fixed the problem, I did not really know what I was doing. Chances are that the carburetor was leaking air at the intake manifold and when I had innocently coated the old gasket with “Gasket Goo” I had unknowingly sealed the air leaks and solved the “skipping” problem.
Leonce Amirault sold the service station to his longtime employee David d’Entremont on July 1, 1986 and David operated the iconic place for the next 30 years.
Recently the Barrington firm Smith and Watt Ltd bought the old B/ A and it is once again in the car and truck business, as it was intended right from the start. I have so many wonderful memories of the old B/ A. in?” he said. I