Re: Crested Butte Conoco

Memories of Tony's in the 1970s. If you wanted a light bulb for, say, a 1960's automobile, he might have told you that they were on order; they were not. If, however, you needed a bulb for perhaps a 1940s car, those were likely to be in stock. He also had a stock of truly large nails (perhaps better termed "spikes",), apparently left over from the mining days, among other interesting artifacts of earlier days.

I don't recall why we got suspicious about the quality of the diesel fuel that he sold, and which we bought to refuel the 1975 Ward-LaFrance fire engine, the first fire engine ever owned in the Crested Butte area; it was the property of the Crested Butte Fire Protection District, which I started and had the privilege of serving as its first volunteer fire chief and then its first career chief. Whatever it was that made us wonder about the fuel, I took a sample to the state's testing laboratory when I had driven to Denver for some fire service conference or another. (Coincidentally, a few years ago I found a belt buckle with a similar fire engine on it; the major difference is that the one on the buckle was rear-wheel-drive only, ours was four-wheel drive, rather necessary in an area that averages 350 inches of snow a year.)

The lab quickly told me to stop using the fuel, as it was badly contaminated with gasoline. I called Assistant Fire Chief Larry Adams, asked him to find out if the Gunnison County road department would let us put a storage tank in their equipment yard, and if so to make arrangements with the non-Conoco dealer in Gunnison, who had a filling station in Crested Butte, to provide us with a tank and keep it full. That was successful. I don't recall either the name nor the brand of that dealer, even though they provided the oil for my home furnace.