Kent Roberts takes a break from the restoration project on his 1964 Pontiac GTO. Roberts has hopes for restoring the old garage a former 1947 Mobil Gas Station on North Main Street to its glory days. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

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Kent Roberts takes a break from the restoration project on his 1964 Pontiac GTO. Roberts has hopes for restoring the old garage a former 1947 Mobil Gas Station on North Main Street to its glory days. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Kent Roberts takes a break from the restoration project on his 1964 Pontiac GTO. Roberts has hopes for restoring the old garage a former 1947 Mobil Gas Station on North Main Street to its glory days. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Kent Roberts has hopes for restoring the old garage a former 1947 Mobil Gas Station on North Main Street to its glory days. Roberts believes that the red speckled paint under old coats was the original paint scheme when the building was new. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Kent Roberts has hopes for restoring the old garage a former 1947 Mobil Gas Station on North Main Street to its glory days. This is the current office area. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

The basement in Kent Roberts’ home is his man cave. Pool table. Dart board. Jukebox. Old theater seats. Working coke machine from 1947. Pinball machine. Furnishings from the old T&F Barbecue on Council Street. A steam table buffet.

Even an old telephone booth.

“Man,” a friend told him once, “you ought to sell memberships down here.”

Now Roberts has a dream for a new man cave, one with an automotive theme.

It all starts with a 1947 service station building he purchased a couple of years ago at 1305 N. Main St. in Salisbury, next to Henderson Independent High School.

The building — only 1,500 square feet — is pretty easy to overlook today.

Its windows are boarded up. The white paint is peeling. It hasn’t even been a service station since 1971.

“I probably passed by it a million times and just didn’t pay it no mind,” Roberts says.

The old station eventually became a rental store, then the headquarters for VunCannon Irrigation Inc., which leased the building from the woman who used to have the rental place.

Roberts has seven old cars — three MGs, three Jaguars and a 1964 Pontiac GTO. “I have never sold a car,” he says.

He thinks it was in the back of his mind to find a place like an old service station and use it, in part, to restore his cars. Always a gear head, he also liked the idea of having a place for his friends — now “retired teenagers” — to hang out, bat the breeze and maybe even work on their own cars.

People told him it wasn’t just in his mind — they had heard him verbalize the idea often.

“So I’ve been talking about it for 30 years, even though I didn’t realize it,” Roberts says.

One day he drove into Salisbury from the direction of Spencer and the little white building caught Roberts’ eye. It had a simple, classic, art-deco styling, and he judged it dated back to the 1940s or 1950s.

Soon after, Roberts was talking to a financial advisor about his retirement plans, while also revealing his nagging idea for the automotive man cave.

The financial planner just happened to know the woman who owned the service station building on North Main Street. He also knew she was wanting to sell it. So Roberts bought the property.

He planned to start working on the inside of the building right after he retired as manager for the Martin-Marietta shop on Peach Orchard Road. The same week he retired, Roberts developed a painful problem with sciatica that delayed his man-cave dream.

Now he’s ready to start again, wanting to return the service station to the way it might have looked around 1953. He has chosen 1953 because of its connection to Rowan County’s birthday (1753) and as a nod to the first car he ever drove — a 1953 MG.

Sink Walser of Mid State Oil built the service station initially as a Mobil station, known for its flying Pegasus logo. It later became a Gulf station. Roberts prefers the Mobil station’s looks, especially the red, white and blue colors.

He has bought at least a dozen books with photographs of old service stations in them, but he has never found an exact match for his two-bay building.

Over the months, he also has been collecting items from old service stations, including one in Cooleemee that operated from 1947-2005. He gave the owners a price for the rights to take anything out of the old station that he wanted, and they accepted.

Among the items were a Royal Crown Cola icebox, set up to take a nickel, old display racks and a 1953 Ford wrecker that was outside, sitting in the weeds.

He has been collecting Mobil-related items, too. He figures he’ll be using eBay to find many of the things he wants.

The building had a men’s bathroom accessible from the front store/office. The ladies’ bathroom required a key and entering from the outside.

Roberts plans to knock out a wall between the restrooms and create one bathroom. He will transform a former storage area in the back into an efficiency, where he can crash if the restoration work on his cars takes him late into the night.

The women’s bathroom door will serve as an outside entrance into the efficiency, which will also be linked to the new bathroom.

The front store and office will return to 1953. Many of these stations also served as mini diners, Roberts says, so he’s thinking about placing a small lunch counter along the south wall.

The garage area will get some new lighting, and Roberts will have to perform a lot of cosmetic changes throughout the place. He plans to do all the work himself, from tearing down and building new walls to the electrical work.

“That’s the fun of it,” Roberts says. “It’s just like restoring a car.”

The outside changes will come last. Many things probably will have to be approved by the Salisbury Historic Preservation Commission.

Roberts plans to return vintage Mobil pumps to their former islands — they won’t be working models. The paint scheme will include two red stripes at top and a red stripe at bottom.

Windows and doors will be trimmed in blue.

He hopes to find or build new wooden garage doors with glass to replace the metal ones.

Roberts also is looking for Mobil signs with the Pegasus symbol.

The winged horse must face left, not right, to be correct for the time period he’s looking for, Roberts explains. In the 1960s, when the Cold War was healthy, Mobil changed its logo so Pegasus would face to the right, according to Roberts.

“I’m glad I found that out,” he says.

Divorced, Roberts is 62 and receiving a lot of encouragement on this venture from his son, James, an engineering student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

An even bigger dream Roberts has for the property is to create a small drive-in theater in the back, complete with some in-car speakers he has collected over the years. He envisions showing the movie on the back of the building as part of cookouts with friends.

Roberts sees the Mobil station as having great potential for car collectors to stop by for photo opportunities. It also will tie in neatly, he says, with the North Main Street Historic District and the transportation history theme at Spencer Shops.

“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun over the years,” Roberts predicts. “Most people seem to be eager to see how it turns out.”