Ed Weaver

By CARL E. FEATHER

Lifestyle Editor

Star Beacon

Ashtabula, OH

September 24, 2000

http://www.starbeacon.com

Ed, 69, is standing in his gas station museum on U.S. Route 50 as he delivers this succinct assessment of what has been his lifelong obsession. He brought his first piece of junk home from the trash dump in 1935, but his mother made him return it. His wife has not been as persuasive. There have been, in fact, many times over the past five decades when Ed's friends, family and neighbors questioned the sanity of a man whose raison d'être was collecting junk.

Was there an auction where an old barn or machinery shed was being cleared out? Ed was there to buy. How about a repair garage that was going out of business and had a pile of junk to dispose of? Ed was willing to haul it away for nothing.

"People thought I was strange for collecting all this stuff," he says. "There wasn't anybody else who was collecting it."

Today, auctions featuring the kind of "junk" Ed Weaver used to buy for next to nothing bring collectors from across the nation to compete in fierce bidding wars. Seldom does a week go by that someone does not pester him to sell something from the museum.

Much of Ed's collection is automobile related, accounting for the intense interest among the hundreds of collectors who knock on Ed's door every year. Of particular appeal are the six classic gas pumps in front of his museum. One of them is a Gilbert and Barker from 1910. It dispenses gasoline one gallon at a time and was the first gas pump on this stretch of U.S. Route 50, also known as the Northwestern Turnpike.

The highway was a primary east-west route in the early days of motoring and a natural for any kind of motorist-related business. After World War I, a couple of entrepreneurs built a garage on the property that Ed now owns and opened a Model T agency. The entrepreneurs sold the business, "The Northwestern Garage," to Ed's great-uncle Frank Bell. "He had been in the business in Kitzmiller - undertaking, drug store, garage and taxi service," Ed says. "In the spring of '24, they had a big flood. He came down here and built on a flood plain again."

Frank Bell enlarged the business and added gasoline pumps. Ed says at one time his uncle had a dozen pumps and a half-dozen different kinds of gas. "He just wanted to see how many different kinds of gas pumps he could get," Ed says.

Amoco cut a deal with Bell - they'd help him build a service station if he'd sell their gas exclusively. Ed's parents, George and Mary Weaver, moved to Burlington when Ed was 6 months old. George Weaver set up an auto repair business in his uncle's garage. In the early 1940s, George and Mary purchased the whole operation.

As the only son, the task of running the service station fell upon Ed. "My dad put me to work when I was about 11," he says. "He told me if I'd work in the shop, he would buy me a motor scooter. My first vehicle was a 1940 American motor scooter."

Ed says those were rationing days, and many motorists assumed they could coax a few extra gallons out of the kid at the counter. But young Ed soon proved himself a resolute, patriotic American.

The service station also played its role in winning the war by collecting tires for the periodic rubber drives. The station paid a penny a tire.

"We'd have them piled to the ceiling in that garage," he says. "They'd come in here with their Model A's and they'd have tires tied to the fenders and hanging on the radiator."

After the war, Ed built shelves around the walls of the service station so his parents could expanded their offerings to include groceries and locally grown produce. They also stocked auto parts and had hundreds of fan belts hanging from the ceiling. Ed added a line of auto accessories, but his father wasn't in favor of all these improvements. He liked to keep things a notch below mediocre.

"He had this idea that if he improved things, people would think he was making too much money and they would stop dealing with him," Ed says.

He and his parents eventually parted ways over the direction the store should take. Ed stepped down and operated as a safety net for the station, which began losing money in the late 1950s. Ed says his father was a self-taught mechanic who could work on the Tin Lizzies and farm tractors, but became a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the V-8 cruisers Detroit was turning out by the late 1950s. Failing health eventually forced him out of the auto repair business, but his mother continued to operate the gas station.

Meanwhile, Ed had found a career in auto body repair and painting. He also ran an auto painting business out of the garage next to their house, which they shared with his parents. Whenever Ed had a small amount of paint in the bottom of a can or his paint gun, he dabbed it on the garage exterior. The patchwork building became a landmark along Route 50.

When he wasn't working, Ed searched for artifacts of the passing era and stashed them in the out buildings that surrounded the garage and his home.

Ed's father died in June 1976. His mother insisted upon keeping the station open. "They hadn't made any money at it in 25 years, but they felt they couldn't close it," Ed says. When it got to the point his mother was using her Social Security check to buy gasoline and supplies for the store, Ed had a lawyer step in and convince his mother it was time to close for good. In 1980, Weaver's Northwestern Turnpike shut down and the gas pumps and tanks were removed.

Ed says he couldn't adjust to the sight of the station without pumps, and in 1982 he asked his cousin to help him move a couple of his antique pumps out front.

"I don't think I had the last one bolted down and someone stopped to take a picture," he says. "The next day, someone else stopped and took a picture."

Ed gathered up a few appropriate items to display in the window, and more people stopped. In 1986, he decided to move his collection, which was scattered between three buildings, into the old station.

Unwittingly, Ed created what has become a major tourist attraction, "Weaver's Antique Service Station." "That's what most magazines call it," he says. The attraction has been featured in the Baltimore Sun, travel magazines and West Virginia's Goldenseal magazine.

There's no sign, no admission and no set hours. If Ed is home and able to accommodate the request, he unlocks the door and gives a personal tour of the station - even in the dead of winter.

The pumps suggest this could be a working station, but a sign on the door indicates otherwise: "This is not a going business."

Ed has made a policy of maintaining the store in a state of "suspended decay." He says his father's attitude toward progress preserved the store in a Depression-era state, creating an oasis of the mid-20th century along the busy highway.

"It looks pretty typical of the Depression-era service station," he says. "Things were pretty hard back then, it's typical of how things were. There wasn't much glitter and shine."

The originality is uncanny. Ed says the only improvement he's made to the building was a new roof. Even the light fixtures, a couple of incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, haven't been updated since they were installed in 1929.

It takes a few minutes to adjust to the dim light inside the station and the overwhelming sense of being surrounded by so much original history. Slowly, you become aware of the individual items that comprise the whole: dusty glass pop bottles catching the south window light, tin advertising signs, toy fire trucks lining the shelves, oil cans and bottles, hubcaps, license plates, pop bottle cases, old photographs and Coke coolers. Pedal cars, restored and expertly painted by Ed, are all along the floor. One of them belonged to him as a child.

"I got the biggest fly spray collection the state of West Virginia," Ed says, referring to the couple dozen flint guns. Each oil company had its own brand of fly spray, and Ed has examples from many of them.

Ed says his station is strictly a hobby, but it is a time consuming one. Thousands of Route 50 travelers have stopped at the store for a tour. They come from all over the nation and world, as documented by the entries in the museum's registration book. Ed has become accustomed to the knock on his door.

He also does a monthly antiques program for nursing home residents. Ed takes a few items from his collection to the home and uses them to jog memories and stimulate conversation. He says the program is one of the most popular offered by the home.

As for the future of the station and Ed's collection, Ed admits there are days he'd like to be rid of it and its responsibility. But one also senses a kinship to all this "junk" that is as much a part of Ed as his wry humor.

"I've had a couple people who have wanted to buy it all," he says. "I don't want to sell it until the last minute, but I don't know when the last minute will be."

Weaver's garage is located on U.S. Route 50 and Patterson Creek Road, just west of Burlington, in West Virginia's eastern panhandle - about 10 miles west of Romney. The museum is open by chance - your best bet is on weekends. There is no admission.