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POLLOCKSVILLE — If you’re driving down Main Street in Pollocksville and you hear a siren without seeing a police car around, don’t fret — Bell’s Service Station probably has another winner.
Station owner George Bell has a special way of letting folks know when a customer has won in the North Carolina Education Lottery: He sounds a screeching siren that you can hear up to a half-mile away.
“Everybody thinks it’s wild,” Bell laughed. “It even stops cars on the roads sometimes because they don’t know where it’s coming from.”
The siren sounds a couple dozen times a day, Bell said. The state lottery board has even honored Bell’s Service Station by awarding it with S.T.A.R. (Spectacular Technique Achieving Retailer) recognition.
The neighbors of the station — which opens “when I want to,” Bell laughed, and closes around 5 p.m. — enjoy hearing the siren.
“Everybody loves it,” Bell’s wife of 45 years, Annette, said. “When the neighbors hear it, they say, ‘We know someone’s won!’”
The 75-year-old owner and his son, Darrell, got the idea when the burglar alarm inside the station quit working. Instead of throwing out the siren, they hooked it up to the eave of the covering of the old gas pumps in front of the station.
When someone wins one of the scratch-off games, Bell scampers out to the garage and pulls the siren.
The unique way of rewarding winners is just another touch of personality at the station. At the store, which Bell opened in July, 1958, there is a box of baby rattlers, a box with a mongoose that Bell likes to show off and a plethora of other surprises.
“That’s George all the way, it’s classic George,” Swansboro’s Jim Babcock, who stopped by the station on his way from work James City, said of the siren with a chuckle. “With his baby rattlers and his one single tobacco plant out front, it just adds to the personality of the place.”
When the Bells found out the lottery was coming to the Tar Heel state, they were excited.
“I decided that it can’t be worse than a whole lot of other stuff,” George Bell said of the lottery. “They’d be playing slot machines and the other stuff anyway. It’s good for education, the schools and the rest.”
It didn’t surprise Babcock that the Bells started the practice of the siren. But he’s seen the shocked expressions of other customers when a winner comes forth.
“I’ve seen people drop what they’ve got in their hands,” Babcock laughed. “I get a kick out of it.”
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