Tall tales spun around long-closed gas station

KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City recently produced a story about Sam “Mr. Sam” Gillaspy and the story he told about a long-closed Route 66 gas station between Arcadia and Luther, Oklahoma.

Gillaspy, known as a longtime host at the Round Barn in nearby Arcadia, told the TV crew a secret back room in the Depression-era gas station was used in a counterfeiting scheme. He also said a homicide victim’s body was dumped there after police broke up the funny-money operation.

But no proof exists any of those things happened at the site, now known as the Rock o’ Ages Station.

Before delving into the details, we’ll let Mr. Sam and KOCO spin the 1930s tale:

Mr. Sam loves to share the story of the filling station. Two brothers owned it and, one day, a salesman stopped by and asked the brothers if they wanted to make some money.

“He reached out in his coat pocket and pulled out these two plates, these metal plates that made fake $10 bills,” Mr. Sam said.

The brothers were excited to get to work in their new counterfeiting career, Mr. Sam said.

“The counterfeiters, they built a little room back there,” he said. “Then they had a table right here and a chair. They just walked right in there and had a curtain over it and nobody ever knew that that room was there.”

Soon, the brothers traveled to Oklahoma City to pass the phony money. It didn’t take long before they were caught and sent to jail, ending the filling station and counterfeit money operation.

“Sometime after they got out of prison — see the old station is an empty building and somebody found a body laying in there,” Mr. Sam said. “So nobody could find out who he was or where he came from or if he was killed there or if he was just dumped there.”

Gillaspy went on to say he believes the body was of the salesman’s and suggests the two brothers sent to prison might have killed him in revenge.

Researcher Blue Miller of the Never Quite Lost blog determined in 2015 that no trace exists of a secret back room at the former Conoco station, nor did any local newspaper mention a counterfeiting ring there during the 1930s.

Local lore also said the gas station closed after the police bust, but a 1940 photograph shows it still operating.

Forwarding a link to the KOCO story Friday, I asked Miller whether any research had found a body was dumped at the station. A few hours later, Miller wrote:

[…] I can’t find any information regarding a body in the old Rock O’ Ages Conoco station in Arcadia. Now, this would probably have been at a time when the local newspapers reported on just about everything, and I can’t imagine they would have missed out on anything as ‘juicy’ as an unidentified murder victim. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying I can’t find any proof that it’s anything but a fine story.

Miller did uncover a story about a traveling New York rail worker, Carl Beach, slain in 1948 by two hitchhikers on Route 66 and his body was dumped under a bridge in Arcadia. The duo later was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas. One suspect was sent to the electric chair; the other was sentenced to life.

Miller said she checked her research again into whether counterfeiting occurred at the gas station. She wrote:

[…] I went back over the counterfeiting trail, half-hoping that maybe I’d missed something. While counterfeiting was big news in the 1930s and ’40 there is absolutely nothing to suggest any link with Arcadia or the Conoco station. I’ve never tracked down Red Abbott, one of the men in the famous photo, but the other man, Lyle Dean Melton, lived an apparently uneventful life and died in 1986 with no suggestion that he had either been a counterfeiter or a murderer!

I’m not accusing Gillaspy of lying about what happened at the Conoco. He probably is just repeating the stories he’d heard about it for all of his life and possibly conflated the Arcadia murder to the station. He’d been a good ambassador for Route 66 for years, and I doubt he’d tell a phony story deliberately.

This episode shows how unsubstantiated stories persist on Route 66.

For 20 years, many books and even an official government document reported Ted F. Jones, one of the early owners of the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and his wife died in a plane crash during the 1950s. Instead, local newspaper reports from the time stated Jones died of a stroke in Tucumcari in 1954, and his wife was one of the survivors.

For decades, a Gothic-looking house along Route 66 in Galena, Kansas, reportedly was the site where Ma Staffelback and several accomplices killed several men during the 1890s. However, research in 2013 cast much doubt the house ever was Staffelback’s.

The Conoco station near Luther is another case where a historic site had acquired more legend than fact. This should serve as a cautionary tale — especially in an era where facts are more easily verifiable because of vast databases on the internet.

(Image of the old gas station between Luther and Arcadia, Oklahoma, by Marcin Wichary via Flickr)

One thought on “Tall tales spun around long-closed gas station

  1. As was said in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: when people want to believe the legend not the truth, print the legend.

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