Is This the End of Gas City?

An oversize cow grazes in a meager corral on the grounds of 21660 S. LaGrange Road, nearby tree branches draped over its black-and-white fiberglass haunches. This immobile bovine is probably the last recognizable vestige of the Gas City empire, which began crumbling when .

Look around for other signs of the company's existence, and you'll find that they are rapidly disappearing.

The Gas City service stations that once dotted the Lincoln-Way area, as well as other Chicago suburbs, are gone, auctioned off to and replaced by Speedway gas stations.

Type "www.gascity.net" into your web browser, and the company's site no longer loads. Instead, the screen tells you that it couldn't connect to the URL.

And just last week, if you called Gas City headquarters, home of the chain's signature, larger-than-life cow since 1976, a receptionist answered, "Gas City." Call again today, and you're greeted with "McEnery Enterprises."

So is this how a 45-year-old Frankfort institution ends, quietly fading into obscurity? In all likelihood, yes, as today McEnery and Gas City representatives go before a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Chicago to discuss the company's future--or its lack thereof--said Daniel Zazove, the Chicago attorney representing McEnery and Gas City.

Since the beginning of the year, McEnery has been systematically liquidating assets to pay off $100 million to $500 million in Gas City debts. It started in April with . That same month, . (The sale initially was blocked by one of the banks holding the mortgages on two of the shops, but a judge ruled in favor of Billy McEnery's bid in May.)

Even with all this grand-scale financial dumping, McEnery isn't close to settling what the company owes. All that he has left to sell, Zazove said recently, are a few parcels of vacant land that McEnery owns.

"We're trying to get rid of the miscellaneous cats-and-dogs things," the lawyer said. "There's still some properties that he needs to get rid of."

Seeing the financial collapse of a longtime local employer is disheartening enough. But what's even more troublesome is the continuing pattern of, quite frankly, abysmal management of McEnery's other ventures, a pattern that raises questions about the stability of McEnery's other Frankfort-based businesses.

Why was , when, from all indications, it was doing good business? And what about , alleging he was subjected to racial slurs and unfairly demoted to line cook?

Or how about the claims that , only then to transfer some of those same workers to a non-union company also owned by McEnery? 

The answers to these nagging questions aren't coming from McEnery Enterprises. I was directed to speak with Billy McEnery for this story, but my calls weren't returned.

After today's hearing, I hope answers will be more forthcoming. I hope we find out what will happen to the employees at the company's Frankfort headquarters if Gas City is a thing of the past. I hope we learn how McEnery intends to settle the rest of Gas City's outstanding debts. I hope we get a better idea of what kind of company McEnery Enterprises is and what its future plans are.

And, in all honesty, I hope we discover that a certain prodigious cow still has a home on South LaGrange Road.