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Change, from the ground up

A businessman acts on his instincts about little glass pipes sold nearby.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM, Time Staff Writer
Published August 31, 2007

When he saw the glass pipes in the case at the Chevron station on State Road 60, Carl Bergman paused.

The label said "For Tobacco Smoking Only." The glass pipes were painted with flowers. Bergman didn't say anything.

He owns an auto garage two doors down from the Chevron Station near Parsons Avenue. In his office, he keeps pictures of himself with his son's Boy Scout troop.

He didn't like the look of those pipes, but it wasn't his business what the Chevron station was selling.

That's how it went for four years.

A few months ago, Bergman bought the property next to the Chevron station. He wanted to expand his business to a bigger space and stop paying rent.

The new lot smelled like urine. There were beer bottles everywhere. Homeless men had been living there.

Bergman picked up all the beer bottles. He kept thinking about those little glass pipes.

It seemed like there was a connection.

"It was bothering me," he said. "I cater to a higher-end clientele, and ... I was moving closer to the problem. I was putting the problem in my back yard. And I didn't like my back yard to be like that."

* * *

Mathew Joseph says he never got complaints about the merchandise for sale at his Chevron station.

"There are so many things in the store," he said this week. "You could name things whatever you want. I sell lighters. People could call it crack utensils. What am I supposed to do?"

He added, "People could use a lot of things for a lot of things. It's not my problem."

He leases the station from a distributor, Automated Petroleum, which also supplies him with gas. He says he loses money on the gas. High-margin products in the convenience store, such as pipes, make up for it.

"To this date, I've only gotten appreciation from customers," Joseph said.

The only complaints, he said, were about the homeless men in the back lot.

"But that is not my headache," Joseph said. "That is the headache of the sheriff."

Besides, the homeless never bought any glass pipes, he said. They bought beer and cigarettes.

"Whatever I sell in the store is legal," Joseph said. "I want to run a family operation. You tell me - look around the store and tell me what is different from any other store in the whole county."

* * *

When Bergman came to talk to him, Joseph told him much the same thing.

"He said that none of it's illegal," Bergman recalled.

Joseph remembers feeling insulted by Bergman's questions.

"The way he was talking, looking down at me as if I'm creating all the problems, I did not appreciate," he said.

They were at an impasse. So Bergman wrote a letter to Chevron.

"I was wondering if you at corporate have any power to get them to clean up their act," he said. He got a bland, polite response.

"Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. We apologize for the inconvenience that it caused," a Chevron official wrote.

"I thought, 'Well, I'm not going to win that easily," Bergman thought.

He began contacting the Chamber of Commerce, the Sheriff's Office and the media.

"I wanted them to see what was going on," he said.

* * *

On Aug. 20, Jim Hiltz showed up at the Chevron station.

Hiltz works for Automated Petroleum, the company that leases the station to Joseph. Word had come down to him from Chevron that he was to "go down and see what the true facts were," he said.

He packed up the little glass pipes and took them out of the store.

"They call them decorative pipes, designer pipes or whatever," he said. "What someone is using them for I don't know, but I told (Joseph) I don't expect him to sell them there again. I'm concerned about our image."

After he left the station, he visited Bergman to tell him the pipes were gone.

"I felt great," Bergman said. "It only took a few e-mails, a couple of phone calls. I feel like I made a difference in the town where I live. I got rid of a little bit of the junk in my community."

For his part, Joseph said he will look into finding a way to bring the pipes back.

"It's legal," he said. "He can't dictate what I sell in my store."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 30, 2007, 07:41:13]