One of the small mysteries of Route 66 is the ‘Bradley Kiser 66 Super Service Station’ in Alanreed, Texas.  The only information that is seemingly available is the notice on the building which reads ‘Built by Bradley Kiser 1930’. So, is there any more to be found? Well, a little.

Sanford Bradley Kiser was born in Tennessee in 1892, to Thomas Sanford and Sara Ann ‘Sallie’ Kiser, one of nine children. Thomas was a farmer and Bradley grew up labouring first in Tennessee and then in Oklahoma.

In 1915 the tall blue-eyed Bradley married Myrtle Alpha Boydstun, a beautiful 20-year-old Texan, and the ninth and final child of Henry Sanford Boydstun. To Route 66 aficionados and ghost town hunters that name may be familiar and that’s because Henry (and his wife Mary) were the first homesteaders in the area of what is now famed as the Jericho Gap. They filed a claim on land in 1887 and it eventually grew to have a post office and a siding for the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway. Now it’s just a name – and one that is technically misspelled!

Bradley and Myrtle had two children, a daughter Joeldine in 1916 and a son, Roy Sanford in 1921. Both children were born in Donley County, Texas, and it seems the family may have flitted between Oklahoma and Texas until 1922 by which time Bradley was farming in his own right with his younger brother, Hoyt, helping him.

Then, at some point, he appears to have diversified into building and running a service station. First thing, is that date correct? Well, maybe… According to the 1930 census, Bradley was indeed a filling station operator. However, census information was often collected for several months before the official ‘census day’ of April 1. It is entirely possible that the service station was already in operation in the late 1920s.

Bradley didn’t stay in the service station business for long. In the late 1930s he became the foreman of the Bruce Nursery, famed for its shrubs and orchard trees. (The owner, Paul M Bruce, built the famous ‘petrified wood’ house of Alanreed in 1925. It still stands six miles north of Alanreed but is now on private property.)

The Kisers then moved a little way north to Kellerville where one of Bradley’s last jobs was as an oilfield pumper (he would have been 60 by now). In 1955 they returned to McLean, living in a little house on North Clarendon, where Myrtle died in 1973. Bradley passed away nine years later in 1982; they are both buried in the cemetery in McLean.

The station was restored in around 1993 and is in the excellent care of the Old Texas Route 66 Association which continues to ensure its survival.

And then there is one final mystery, one so blindingly obvious that I actually missed it at first – the name ‘Sanford’. It was not only his given first name, but both the middle name of Bradley’s father and his father-in-law and clearly significant enough for him to add it to his son’s name (who, in turn, named his own son Roy Sanford…). Surely this can be no coincidence, but I can find no connection between the families. Yet.