Dec 10, 2017 6 min read

When Danny Isiminger got his first service station in 1968, a Texaco on Jefferson Avenue across from Washington High School, gasoline was selling for 29 cents a gallon.

He had started working without pay at the station as a teenager for previous owner Albert Long, who, a couple of years later asked him if he was interested in taking it over.

Isiminger was 23, and had just finished a stint in the National Guard. He was freshly laid off from the old Annealing Box Co. when Long offered to sell him the Texaco station. He had no money, he said, explaining that his mother put up her house as collateral for his loan.

Like a lot of first-time business owners, his days were long.

“I worked 14 hours a day, I couldn’t afford help,” he said. “I worked day and night for a long time.”

His station had two service bays, so he began building a clientele who regularly stopped in for inspections and repairs.

Isiminger, 73, will celebrate 50 years in the car-care business on Jan. 8. Today, his enterprises in the 1100 block of Jefferson Avenue include a Pennzoil 10-minute oil-change franchise, a repair and inspection station, a used car lot, 24-hour towing service and a car wash.

Aside from the repairs and towing, most of the operations would come later, as Isiminger adapted to external business factors that ranged from back-to-back Arab oil embargos in the mid-1970s to moves by domestic oil companies by the end of that decade that changed the classic business model from full-service gas stations to self-service pumps connected to convenience stores.

But in 1968, his entry into the business was to a tried-and-true method.

He recalled last week the classic formula of a half-century ago that provided a steady income for service station owners who were willing to put in the hours.

“The gas sales paid the overhead and everything you did inside was your profit,” he said. He added a towing service in 1969.

A year later, Isiminger received an offer from Mobil Oil Co. to take over a new station it had opened at 101 E. Wylie Ave., which became known as Isiminger’s Colonial Mobil. The company helped him to sell the Texaco station to make the transition.

During this time, Isiminger also became involved with Western Pennsylvania’s racing scene, sponsoring cars in late model competitions at Heidelberg Raceway and Pittsburgh Motor Speedway.

For a small businessman, Isiminger was moving up, but by the mid-1970s, gas station operators were hit by the first of two Arab oil embargoes as the group known as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, flexed its muscles and imposed an embargo of oil shipments to the U.S., making supplies of gasoline highly erratic.

A black-and-white photo from a February 1974 feature by the Observer-Reporter shows a young Danny Isiminger in front of his Mobil pumps pointing to a sign that his station could only serve gas by appointment with customers.

It was a tough time for gas stations, and Isiminger, who at the time represented a group of local service station operators, was opposed to the government’s gasoline-rationing plan.

He recalled that many dealers opened for two to three hours a day until they sold out their allotment. He said the practice further drove up the price of gasoline that had already become expensive from tight supply.

He argued that the gasoline he had to sell actually was intended for his steady customers in the local market, not for people driving from station to station until they found an operator who could serve them.

“I would drive to Fairmont Supply in the middle of the night and fuel their delivery trucks,” he said of his clandestine way of taking care of his customers during the crisis.

Around the time the embargoes ended, oil companies began changing their business model for retailing gasoline. Isiminger said Mobil, like most of the other oil companies, began converting its units to self-service pumps with convenience stores, but no service bays.

“I had a really good repair business built up, with three to four mechanics,” Isiminger said. “(Mobil) was putting money into their company-owned stations, but I wasn’t making any money.”

The change spelled trouble for many owners who had come up under the old business model.

During an interview in his office, Isiminger pulled out a Washington area business guide from the early 1970s.

There were listings for numerous service stations like his doing business in the city, most of which are long gone.

“I’ve seen a lot come and go,” he said.

Isiminger responded to the corporate convenience store model of gas station by purchasing a boarded up Exxon station in the 1100 block of Jefferson Avenue, continuing with his repair and towing business. Over the years, he purchased several houses that were adjacent to the gas station, renting them for awhile, but eventually taking them down.

In 1993, he converted the service station to the Pennzoil oil-change business. In the adjacent spaces, he eventually opened a repair shop and inspection station, a small lot for used cars and the Splish Splash car wash, all of which continue to operate today, employing 14 people, including his wife Carla, who answers the phone and books appointments. His son Neil runs the oil-change business, as well as the other operations when Danny and Carla want to take time off.

While he now operates successful multiple car-care businesses in place of the once-central service station, Isiminger, like most business operators, said his biggest challenge today is finding people willing to work.

“Help’s getting harder to find,” he said, adding that in addition to requiring a drug test for all applicants, he also conducts random drug-testing in the workplace.

At least one thing remains constant from the old days.

Isiminger said he always stresses to new employees the importance of taking care of customers to keep them coming back.

“I always tell new employees, ‘We need the customers more than they need us,'” he said. “Our business is mostly repeat business,” Carla said.

One other key piece of advice he gives to employees about keeping people coming back, he said, is his belief that the service should match what a customer needs.

“I don’t believe in selling somebody something they don’t need.”