More News

Linda Videtto remembers as a child watching her father, Edgar "Tucker" Richard, come home from one job, take off his uniform and put on another before heading out for the next job.

By 1959, Tucker Richard was working three jobs.

The opening of his first gas station on Main Street that is his most enduring legacy. That station, now known as Tucker's Gas and Go, is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Son Gary Richard could not say why his father worked so hard, just that he loved them all because they gave him the opportunity to interact with the community.

Tucker Richard started the day delivering mail in Damascus, a job he held for 27 years. He was the projectionist at the Druid Theater until 1956, when he bought the State Theater in Thurmont.

At the State, he was the projectionist and his wife, Helen "Sis" Tucker, sold the candy.

Gary Richard is not sure why his father opened his first station, Tucker's Save More on Main Street, across from the Druid Theater.

When the 10-year lease ended, Tucker Richard opened Tuckers Save You on Woodfield Road across from New Church Street.

During the Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s, the station was renamed Tuckers Discount Gas. In 1976, after a rumor that a shopping center would be built behind the station led the property owner to sell the station property, Tucker's Gas and Go moved to its current location between Lewis Drive and Ridge Road, Gary Richard said.

By then, Gary Richard was a partner in the business. They bought the land and building, he said. The station, which had belonged to Damascus Volunteer Fire Department Chief Roscoe Purdum, had been destroyed by a fire in 1975 and was sitting empty when they took it over.

At one point Tucker Richard also ran the BP station in Damascus, a gas station and convenience mart in Buckeystown, on Route 27 near Route 80, and the Cedar Grove gas station, Gary Richard said.

Today, each is run by a different individual, but their gas is supplied by Gary Richard, who runs Richard Petroleum, and the company he started with his father, E.C. Richard Enterprises, holds the leases for the stations.

For more than 20 years, the company has been in the heating oil business, Gary Richard said.

Since 1986, Tucker's Gas and Go has been owned by Tucker Richard's daughter, Linda, and her husband, Danny Videtto.

After a stroke in 1999 slowed down Tucker Richard, Gary Richard would drive his father to the station, where he waited on customers and talked with others.

Tucker's was the first to sell diesel fuel in the area, the first to sell unleaded gas and the first to offer racing fuel, Gary Richard said. It was the first and now only station selling kerosene in Damascus, he said.

At one time, Videtto leased four stations from his father-in-law, but in recent years he cut back to just the Main Street station. Good, reliable help to run the stations is hard to find, he said.

Tucker Richard died in 2008 and his wife died in 2003, but they are fondly remembered in the community.