Hank fans mourn

Hank fans mourn loss of historic landmark

By Mannix Porterfield

OAK HILL — On a murky New Year’s morning 54 years ago, a baby blue Cadillac eased into a Pure Oil gas station, bearing the corpse of country-western music’s biggest star.

Just where Hank Williams died — and exactly why — remains a mystery that feeds his legend.

For years, fans of the Alabama-born troubadour sought to turn the old station, resembling an English cottage with its trademark clay tile roof and blue-and-white color scheme, into a museum to honor him.

All that failed when Oak Hill’s city council couldn’t come to terms on the lease, so the owner decided to raze the landmark structure. Crews leveled the decaying structure two weeks ago.

“I’m really devastated,” said Ralph Moore, a Lineville, Ala., resident who has authored two books on Williams.

“It’s just hard to imagine how the town of Oak Hill could allow something like that to happen. I believe the children and grandchildren of those people who are responsible for letting that happen will be ashamed of their grandpas and grandmas down the road.”

Williams was en route to Canton, Ohio, for a comeback concert, traveling the backroads of West Virginia in that pre-interstate era.

His chauffeur, Charles Carr, then 18, was adamant in a (Beckley) Register-Herald interview on the 50th anniversary of the ill-fated ride that Williams was still alive when they lit out from Bluefield. He stopped outside Oak Hill at a popular eatery and was unable to rouse Williams, then drove into town looking for assistance.

Moore and another Alabaman, Bennie Gardner, who lives in Montgomery, not far from the singer’s hometown, made several trips to West Virginia with caravans following mile by mile the “Final Journey,” and to plug for a museum at the station.

“When I first came on that lot and saw that station about 12 years ago, it was just overwhelming that it had survived all these years, with the progress going on around it,” he said.

“That’s where all the world heard the news of his death. A lot took place that day. People starting coming to Oak Hill and crowding the town. Hundreds went by the (Tyree) funeral home to try to view the body. Police had to send the car next door to protect it.”

Like other longtime fans, Gardner had envisioned the station as a museum, one that would have drawn the faithful to Oak Hill and served as a major tourist attraction.

“I can’t believe they didn’t want the museum there,” she said. “It’s really a shame.”

Not only could a museum there have been a mecca for tourists, but Moore figures the station should have been preserved for its historical value.

“That’s history,” Moore said, recalling how the Pure Oil station’s uniqueness was a mainstay across the South in his boyhood.

“People of Oak Hill should have been up in arms and joining hands around that building to protect it.”

Moore hopes to have his second Williams book, titled “Hank: His Rise to Fame and the Tragic Final Journey,” ready for distribution New Year’s Day, coinciding with the anniversary of the singer’s untimely death at 29.

“This was written more as a movie version,” he said. “This is what the movie company is going to take basically to utilize for a script. We’ve dragged our feet so long.

“There’s a lot more detail in it. I’ve taken Hank from 6 years old and brought him all the way to the funeral. The movie is going to happen. But I’m heartbroken about the gas station. We could have had a museum there and used it in the film.”

Williams left a legacy unrivaled in country-western music, penning and recording such hits as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin,’” “I Saw The Light” and “Lovesick Blues,” many of them covered decades later, even in the pop music circuit.

Despite his fame and enduring link in death to Oak Hill, resistance has been fierce when others sought to honor him in an area where ultra-conservative values conflicted with his rambling lifestyle and reputation as a boozer.

Original members of his band, “The Driftin’ Cowboys,” strongly dispute the portrait of a drunkard, however, insisting Williams was merely a binge drinker, common among entertainers who spend long weeks entertaining on the road, then unwind with the bottle.

After years of struggle, Sen. Shirley Love and Delegate Dave Perry, both D-Fayette, managed to get signs denoting the “Hank Williams Sr. Memorial Highway” erected at two entrances to Oak Hill off U.S. 19. That issue became a political football kicked around in the Legislature more than a decade.

Jack Thompson, an attorney, likewise was a strong advocate for turning the station into a museum, and also was dismayed the city couldn’t hammer out a lease with the owner, Charlie Jones.

“The building was just so uniquely constructed,” Thompson said.

“It may have been one of the last Pure Oil stations built in that style still standing. That tile roof, everything. It’s just sad. It’s a shame. It’s breaking my heart. So much for Oak Hill and its desire to protect historic buildings.”

Of late, a move is afoot to establish a museum at a restaurant outside Fayetteville. Already, a huge inventory of memorabilia has been set up inside until a permanent structure it built.

Still, the sight of an empty gas station lot in Oak Hill leaves a sour taste for many of the allegiant.

“It depresses me to believe that people in Oak Hill are that closed-minded,” Moore said.

“I see Oak Hill folding up and becoming nothing but a ghost town.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com