Daughter revives Gary Turner’s Gay Parita station

The daughter of Gary Turner reopened the much-loved Gay Parita gas station west of Halltown, Missouri, 15 months after its patriarch died at age 70.

Barbara Turner moved into her father and mother’s home behind the Route 66 landmark less than two weeks ago. She quit her longtime job as a theater manager and sold her home in Charleston, South Carolina, so she could return to Missouri.

:”I wanted to carry on Mom and Dad’s legacy,” she said by phone from where her father in the early 2000s re-created a Sinclair gas station that stood on old Route 66 from 1930 to 1955. Gary Turner, with his wife Lena, then charmed thousands of Route 66 travelers for the next decade with their hospitality and homespun character.

“I want future generations to see what he did,” Barbara Turner continued. “When people come to the station, I want them to know about my parents. He built this place from the ground up. This is what he wanted a 1930 station to look like.

“I felt it couldn’t die. I had to carry it on. And my dad would have done the same for me. I decided this was what I needed to do.”

She said Gay Parita won’t have full hours for a few more weeks because she’s still cleaning and sorting items there. She’s planning a grand opening in June or July, although she still is greeting tourists in the meantime.

“The word is spreading that I’m here, and lot of people have come here already because they’re so excited,” she said.

“Every day is getting better,” she added. “It’s coming to life again.”

She said she made up her mind to help her mother run Gay Parita after her father’s death in January 2015. But Lena’s health also declined, and she died at age 72 a few months later. Barbara Turner said it took time to sort out her parents’ estate (she now is sole owner of Gay Parita station) and organize the move from South Carolina.

He father was known for chatting with visitors from sunup to sundown. Many a Route 66 tourist often would find a planned 15-minute stop at Gary Turner’s Gay Parita station stretching to two to three hours.

Don’t expect Barbara Turner to be a taciturn new owner of the station.

“They call me ‘Little Gary’ because I talked all the time, like my Dad,” she said, laughing.

She said she expects Gay Parita to be largely the same, with one key difference — she’s planning a memorial garden for her father’s and mother’s cremains. She doesn’t have all the details worked out or even an exact location, except it would be someplace where the deceased Turners can “keep watch” over their station.

“I want it to be beautiful for the people who knew my Mom and Dad,” she said.

(Image of Barbara Turner at Gay Parita station by Tommy US Sixtysix via Facebook; image of Barbara Turner with Gary and Lena Turner circa 2010)