A little shine on the car window, a little shine on life

It's not uncommon to find a kind waitress who takes the time to make customers feel good, or a helpful cashier who makes a difference during a mad dash to the store.

But it is unusual to find any gas station attendants these days, let alone one who isn't grouchy. A guy who isn't too busy to look under the car and tell you the car is making that noise because the muffler's loose. A gas-pumping attendant like those of the old days, who even washes windows.

Say hello to Ray Lee of Fisher's Fuel Tesoro in downtown Palmer.

"I really like working around people. Everyone needs that friendly encounter to give them a little bit of peace," Lee said Tuesday while washing car windows at the station, his blue eyes serious above a characteristic smile.

As he pumps gas and wipes windows, people who've grown familiar with Ray tell him what's bothering them that day. "Somehow I find the words to say to put them to peace. I care about people. I hate to see people going through hard times," Lee said.

At the age of 57, working at a gas station comes in a long string of occupations and life experiences. Lee grew up in Tucson, Ariz., and was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. He served one tour of duty in 1966-67, after making it into the paratroopers. In Saigon, Lee served as a radio telephone operator in the First Air Calvary Division.

"My brother, two years younger than me, also got drafted. My last day in Vietnam was his first day there," Lee said. "He made it out too. My mother said she prayed the whole time."

Before being sent to Vietnam, while still in training at Fort Bragg, N.C., Lee was sent to Haiti for an alert. While there, Lee was placed on duty as a guard for then Vice President Hubert Humphrey's leer jet while Humphrey vacationed on St. Thomas Island. And, as newspaper clippings in his possession attest, he was tossed into a San Juan jail and almost had to stand trial there after a local policeman collided into Lee's rented motorbike and was injured. But Lee was cleared on the strength of the officer's testimony after he recovered, and Lee was soon sent back to North Carolina.

"I've been in harm's way so many times. That's why I'm humble and I appreciate life so much," Lee said. "We lost a lot of helicopters in Vietnam, but I wasn't on them."

After the military, Lee moved to Santa Anna, Calif., where his father and two brothers already were working for the Holly Sugar Corp. "There I was trained as an apprentice learning to be a sugar technician. I learned [the process of] taking juice from sugar beats and boiling it down to sugar."

He also had married, and the couple raised two daughters. In 1978 he left the sugar plant and moved the family to Apple Valley where he worked two years in a Catholic hospital. "It was an area more like where I grew up in Arizona. Wide open," Lee said.

Then he went to work at a Borax mine, running a 20-mule team. This was in a little town called Boron, Calif., on the way to Las Vegas at a U.S. Borax open-pit mine. Borax, extracted from borate, is used as a softener in fabric soaps and cosmetics, Lee said, and has a wide variety of uses.

The history of the area also fascinated Lee, he said. In the late 1800s, mule teams were used to carry borate from the desert. A program aired on television in the 1960s and early '70s, Death Valley Days, and hosted for a time by Ronald Reagan, told the true life stories of characters in the area, including those who made the hauls from Harmony to Death Valley that started after the 1876 borate discovery.

"The old wagon tracks bit into rocks, and you can still see them today," Lee said. The detergent company, 20 Mule Team, took the name for its lead product from the colorful era.

By 1986, Lee said his daughters were raised and he and his wife divorced. She returned to Arizona and he moved first to northern California, another small town called Lodi, where he worked for an Army depot and a pipe company. Then Lee made his way to Alaska in 1995.

"I always wanted to go north and see what this area is like," Lee said. "I really like Palmer, the small-town atmosphere."

Lee settled in, working for Fisher's Fuel, and developed a steady following of friends and customers. He also has a regime of eating right and exercising that he says keeps him physically and psychologically in strength.

"My dad was a body-builder, and we grew up doing routines. That stayed with me through the years. Whenever anything was going wrong in my life, as long as I built my body up and didn't tear it down by abusing it, I could stay healthy," Lee said.

At the gas station, Lee said he's become friends with a variety of people, including young people who he knows are abusing their bodies with drugs and alcohol.

"I think we're living in difficult times when people aren't at peace with themselves," Lee said. "For whatever reasons, maybe people are too busy to really talk to each other. We don't sit down together enough.

"I like to show everyone respect. The high school kids, I give them respect, and they eat it up. It makes me feel good to make people feel good about themselves," he said. "That's therapy for me too because my life hasn't always been easy."