‘Gas Station’ Never Has Any to Sell

It’s a sight for sore eyes for drivers nervously watching their gas gauge slide to empty as they zig and zag up the tortuous 10-mile Malibu mountain roadway.

Out of nowhere -- and in the middle of nowhere -- a gas station materializes.

But don’t expect to fill up at these pumps near the top of Latigo Canyon Road. It’s Dave Mercer’s house, not a Mobil station.

The pumps, the car jack, the oil dispensers and tire-changing equipment beneath the “Mobilubrication” and “Mobilgas” signs hanging on Mercer’s home are real. But there’s no gas for sale.

The concrete pump island and gas station fixtures that line the gravel driveway in Mercer’s frontyard are antiques. They are part of a collection of Mobil memorabilia that fills most of the house that passersby often mistake for a gas station.

The place certainly can look real enough to motorists worried about running out of gas in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains -- miles from actual filling stations along Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway to the south or the Ventura Freeway in Agoura Hills to the north.

“I’ve had a lot of people stop for gas and be mad because I didn’t have any to sell,” Mercer said. “If they’re really desperate, I’ll usually just give them a little from a container to help them out.”

Inside his home, which he has turned into a Mobil museum, Mercer has costumed mannequins, including one dressed as a uniformed Mobil gas station attendant. He occasionally puts one of them in a chair near his front door, which is a few steps from the pump island.

“One day I looked outside and some Russian tourists were talking to the dummy, asking directions,” he said. “In the summertime I’ll look out and see seven or eight people having their picture taken on my front porch. There are a lot of screeching tires. People have a look of amazement on their faces when they drive by.”

Mercer, 55, owns a civil engineering company. His collection of Mobil mementos began by accident about a dozen years ago.

He and his family were living in Thousand Oaks, and Mercer was restoring a 1963 Corvette and a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop. On a whim, he decided to buy a few petroleum-related items to use as a visual backdrop for his cars.

“That was a big mistake,” he laughs. “Look what it led to.”

He started by acquiring some old Gilmore gas station signs and oil cans. Gilmore was an early Los Angeles-based oil company, and it burnished the California car-culture image that Mercer was seeking.

He soon found himself looking for other Gilmore artifacts -- and unearthing an intriguing history about the company whose owners created Farmers Market in the Fairfax District before selling their oil company to Mobil in the 1940s.

In time, Mercer was collecting Mobil material. The brand known for its flying red Pegasus was a spinoff of the Socony-Vacuum Corp., whose predecessor was the Standard Oil Trust. Now Mobil is owned by Exxon. Eventually, Mercer found himself prowling swap meets for empty oil cans, advertising signs and antique equipment from those outfits too.

As his collection grew, Mercer looked for ways to display it. Eight years ago he decided to build a place on remote Latigo Canyon Road, in an area known as Malibu Highlands.

The hilltop site, he discovered, had its own historic gas station tie-in.

His lot was zoned for commercial use because property across the street had been used in the 1920s as the site of a combination hamburger and hot dog stand and one-pump gas station.

At that time, according to Mercer, cross-mountain traffic meandered from Mulholland Highway to the beach by way of a now-abandoned roadway that met Latigo Canyon Road in front of what is now his house.

“The little gas station was mainly used on weekends when travelers came through. There was no electricity up here; it had a little hand pump,” he said. “I thought this would be an appropriate spot for me to do my thing.”

His living room and den are filled with about 500 Mobil artifacts, including pristine antique gas pumps, hand-cranked motor oil dispensers and crates of old (but empty) oil cans.

A scale-model Mobil gas station sits in a corner. Rows of original Mobil, Gilmore, Socony, Vacuum and Standard signs cover the walls. Cabinets and shelves are filled with Mobil promotional giveaways. Racks hold vintage Mobil road maps. Mercer estimates the collection’s worth at about $400,000.

His wife puts up with it all. So do the couple’s three adult children. Sofia Mercer, in fact, even bought a couch covered with a gas station-themed print fabric for her husband.

The authentic look of his place -- he even applied three coats of paint and spray wash to the frontyard concrete pump island to give it a weathered appearance -- has forced Mercer to install several large decorative rocks in the gravel driveway to warn away passersby.

But they keep stopping.

“I see people pull in thinking it’s a real gas station and I just laugh,” said Marco Andonaegui, a Los Angeles County public works employee who helps maintain the area’s roadways.

“They stop me and say, ‘If that’s not a real gas station, where’s the nearest one?’ I tell them the closest one is eight or 10 miles away.”

Luckily, it’s downhill in both directions from Mercer’s Mobil mountaintop.

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To see video of Mercer’s “station,” go to www.latimes.com/ surroundings.