South Side service station nearing end of a long tradition

Back in 1954, when Robert Wilson Dunham opened a new Standard Oil service station in Billings, it was one of 19 stations stretched out along what is now First Avenue South.

Sixty-one years later, Wilson Dunham Service, now a Conoco station, is still going strong, and it is the only business of its kind on First Avenue South. And it’s still owned by a Robert Wilson Dunham, though this one is the son of the founder and goes by the nickname Bud.

Bud Dunham said the station was named Wilson Dunham because his father never used his first name and was always known as Wilson. Bud’s older brother, Bill, was named after his grandfather and worked at the service station even longer than Bud, before retiring in 2010.

Bud said he doubts there are any older service stations in Billings that have always been in the same location, and as for any still owned by the same family for 61 years—“I don’t think there’s anything else even remotely close,” he said.

For all those years, Wilson Dunham Service, at First Avenue South and South 25th Street, has thrived by sticking with the basics of selling gas and servicing cars.

“We were going to be a service shop,” Bud said. “We were not going to be a convenience store. Everybody and his brother’s doing that.”

The station has more than longevity to recommend it. It is one of the few surviving links to what used to be a busy, bustling, even exotic corner of Billings. Though now almost surrounded by industrial businesses and vacant lots, the station used to sit in the middle of a lively neighborhood, one that included a lot of working-class houses.

Just west of the station, in what is now a wood-frame apartment building, the noted Billings madam and philanthropist Della Mae Logan once operated a brothel. Next door to Della Mae’s, now a vacant lot, there used to be a boarding house that was home to Chinese cooks and their families, brought to Billings from San Francisco by the owner of the Wong Village restaurant.

Across First Avenue South from there was a line of “cribs” where other working girls plied their trade. And just north of the station, Bud said, there used to be a big house that for a time was mostly populated by itinerant black railroad porters, who were not allowed to stay in the downtown hotels.

Bud’s father was born in 1910 and moved from Ohio to Montana in 1933 to work for his uncle, Bob Kelly, in Anaconda.

“He came through Billings and loved it, but it took him 15 years to get out of Anaconda,” Bud said. Uncle Bob owned an insurance agency and a service station, and after working for him for a while, Robert Wilson Sr. opened his own service station in Anaconda.

He married an Anaconda woman, Frances Riley, and Bill was born there in 1941, followed by Bud in 1944. (They also had a sister, who died in 1995, and another brother who lives in Spokane.) Their father finally moved to Billings in 1948 and worked for a year as a salesman for Standard Oil.

He didn’t like the job or the traveling it entailed, Bud said, and in 1949 he opened his first station in Billings, Southside Standard, on the corner of South 27th Street and First Avenue South, where the RiverStone Health Clinic now stands. He had that business for five years, until the owner of the property declined to renew the lease.

So, in 1954, he moved across the street and down the block and built a new place, Wilson Dunham Service. Before the interstate was built, Bill Dunham said, First Avenue South was Highway 10, the truck route through Billings, which explains the presence of 19 service stations on that street.

Over the years, Wilson Dunham landed contracts with numerous businesses to take care of their cars and trucks. They serviced all the vehicles owned by Star Service, Wilcoxson’s Ice Cream, Intermountain Distributing, Northern Line Layers and the Montana Power Co., to name a few.

Bill remembers ferrying Montana Power trucks from the plant down by the river up to the gas station—long before he was old enough to have a driver’s license. Wilson Dunham Service also had the contract to take care of the Billings Police Department’s “fleet,” which then consisted of four Rambler American patrol cars and a slightly larger Rambler used by the detective division.

In addition to doing all the maintenance and mechanical work on the vehicles, Bill said, “we used to wash all the police cars every Sunday morning, starting at 6 o’clock.” They washed them by hand, if you’re wondering.

Bill went to work full-time for his father early on. He said his fate was decided when he was still a teenager and all he wanted to do was play baseball. One day his father asked him if he was getting paid to play.

“I said ‘no,’” Bill recalled. “He said, ‘well, you better come down and go to work.”

The station was busy in the 1950s, Bill said, when it had seven or eight full-time workers. It used to be open seven days a week, and in 1962, when the World’s Fair in Seattle brought huge numbers of travelers down Highway 10, it stayed opened 24 hours a day that whole year.

Bill and Bud both graduated from Central High School. Bill kept working at the service station after graduation while Bud spent three years in the Air Force and then three years working for the General Services Administration in North Dakota. Working for the federal agency was interesting, Bud said, but it didn’t really suit him, and he returned home to work alongside his brother in 1973. That was also about the time Standard Oil pulled out and Wilson Dunham became a Conoco station.

Bill was pretty much running the show by then, and when their father suffered a couple of strokes in the mid-1970s, Bill took over officially. Bud said they always got along.

“He had his thing and I had my thing, and it worked, you know?” Bud said. “There wasn’t any conflict.”

Like his father before him, Bill said, “I’d always go out and hustle work,” finding more clients willing to trust their fleets to the Dunham brothers.

A couple of above-ground storage tanks, now empty, are a testament to the days when the station also served as a bulk plant. Bill remembers making fuel deliveries all over Billings and outside of town from Worden to Rockvale.

Over the decades, more houses were torn down, more businesses went up and the service stations dotting First Avenue South disappeared one by one. There were inevitable changes at Wilson Dunham Service, mostly having to do with the evolution of the automobile and the tools needed to keep them running, and in 1990 they spent $100,000 to dig up and replace their underground storage tanks.

The station is now run by Bud and two mechanics, who keep it open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. They still have full-service pumps and still use the old-fashioned blue-cloth rags to check your oil.

Inside the cramped office, the station feels like something out of the ’60s or ’70s, if you ignore a few innovations like a desktop computer. There is a glass-and-wood display case stocked with a handful of crackers, gum and candy, a small freezer full of Wilcoxson’s Ice Cream products, and a fire-engine-red gas pump from the earliest days of Wilson Dunham.

Robert Wilson Sr. died in 1994 and Bud and Bill’s mother died in 2010, the same year Bill retired from the station. Bud continues putting in 10- and 11-hour days and the station still has a solid base of contracts with businesses. Bud said he has 150 customers on house credit.

What it doesn’t have is another Dunham ready to carry on the tradition. Bud and Bill said all their children are pursuing careers that don’t involve pumping gas or working on cars.

“This will be the last generation, I’m afraid,” Bud said.

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