Jeff Moermond was a kid in 1965 when his dad, Bud Moermond, took him on a drive from Bellevue to Highland Heights to a Pure Oil station. His dad pulled up to the gas pumps and went inside to talk to the owner.
Bud came back outside after a while and started his drive back to Bellevue. Jeff Moermond said his dad looked at him and said, “Do you know whose service station that is?” He replied, “No, Dad, whose is it?”
Bud said, “It’s mine.”
Now, 60 years later, sitting in the waiting room chairs at Bud’s Automotive Service, 2029 Alexandria Pike, Jeff Moermond reminisces about a successful family business that is now third-generation-owned, with four generations of Moermonds having worked there.
Bud’s Pure Service opened on Friday, March 13, 1965, with four gas pumps and two service bays.
At the time, Highland Heights wasn’t on the map. There was no Northern Kentucky University directing thousands of students and faculty to the area. Jeff Moermond remembers thinking, “Why does my father want a gas station in the middle of nowhere?”
“It turned out U.S.27 out here was one of the busiest arteries in the state of Kentucky, and we were busy pumping gas,” he said.
Bud brought a unique skill to the shop, Jeff Moermond said, because he was a trained auto mechanic, better known as a grease monkey, back in the day. Meanwhile, Jeff Moermond, as a 12-year-old, worked as a stock boy, bathroom cleaner and light bulb changer.
“Dad said, ‘You cannot go out there pumping gas because people don’t appreciate a little kid handling that volatile fuel around their cars, and I couldn’t reach the windshield,” he said.
That changed rapidly, however, because when he turned 13, Jeff Moermond began repairing lawnmowers, chainsaws, and rototillers at home to earn some money. Bud recognized that the skill needed to be practiced in Highland Heights at the shop, and that’s when he took a more mechanical interest in the business. Jeff Moermond jokes that he took a pay cut when he started working at the shop.
He eventually went on to the state-funded journeyman Master Technician program.
Jeff Moermond and his wife, Vicki Moermond, would eventually become the business’s second-generation owners in 1989. It’s only fitting that the pair met at none other than Bud’s when Vicki pulled up in a car full of friends to get gas pumped.
He still recalls that she didn’t buy even $1 worth of gas.
“It was probably .76 cents,” Vicki Moermond recalls, sitting in the lobby at Bud’s all these years later.
Jeff Moermond said the car had a problem with one of the headlights, so he went to work on it. A bunch of teenage boys were hanging around the shop, and Jeff Moermond said he told them, “Before that car leaves, I will have that girl’s phone number.”
“And I did,” he said. “I wrote it on a dollar bill; it was the only thing I could find. I had to write it down real quick before she got away, and the rest is history, as they say.”
Throughout the business’s operation, it has evolved and grown to meet the changing landscape around it. Jeff Moermond said when Interstate 471 came through the area, their gas business was cut in half.
Before I-471, he said the station held the record for selling the most gallons of gas at a four-pump Pure Oil station in the tri-state area. Though Bud owned the business, he leased the property from Pure Oil Company, then from Union 76 when they bought it. In 1976, Bud purchased the property amid the decline in gas sales.
Years later, when Vicki and Jeff Moermond bought the business from Bud, they did not purchase the land from him. Only a year later, they were forced out of the gas business.
In 1990, their steel gas tanks had to be removed and replaced with fiberglass tanks equipped with a catch basin, leak detectors, and other components that comply with Environmental Protection Agency Regulations. Bud told him he would be looking at well over $300,000 to stay in the gas business.
“So, dad said, ‘You’re out of the gasoline business.’ So, I said, ‘ok, that means my lease is going to come down, right?’ And he said, ‘like hell,’” Jeff Moermond said.
In an effort to generate an alternative income, the shop briefly ventured into the U-Haul business for about 10 years, but that endeavor ultimately fell by the wayside, as it proved more of a hassle than it was worth.
Vicki Moermond came to work at Bud’s in 1994. At the time, Jeff Moermond said his dad told him he might have made a mistake hiring his wife and that it was not a good idea to have a woman in a shop like that.
Even so, Vicki Moermond got to work on organizing all the paperwork, keeping track of inventory, answering phones, and even introducing a computer behind the counter. About a year into her career at the shop where she still works today, Bud told his son that hiring Vicki Moermond was one of the smartest moves he ever made.
After years of owning the business but not the property it sat on, Jeff Moermond said he attempted to make the buy, but as one of five siblings, his dad told him he wasn’t receiving special treatment. Then, one day, the secretary for the insurance company next door brought her car in to be worked on and let it slip that they would be merging with another company and selling their property. So, he and his wife headed to the bank and got approved to buy the property.
Jeff Moermond said he went to Bud and told him he was going to have some new neighbors next door. People he knew well. That’s when Bud agreed to have the property appraised and then sold it to Jeff and Vicki Moermond in 1996.
“We went back to the bank, the bank said, ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ and they loaned us the money again,” Jeff Moermond said. “And then I had a nervous breakdown. I started crunching the numbers in my head when I was lying in bed, and I just about couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what did we do?’”
Even though the couple sold the business in 2022 to Greg (Bud’s grandson) and Lisa Moermond, Jaylynn Enterprises LLC still owns the land to this day. “Jaylynn” is a combination of Jeff and Vicki Moermond’s middle names.
Greg and Lisa Moermond are the business’s third-generation owners. Their son, Thomas Moermond, works at the shop and is the fourth generation of Moermonds to work at Bud’s.
Thomas Moermond started working at the shop in 2023. He said he grew up working on things with his dad and was always around cars as a little kid.
“It’s nice,” Thomas Moermond said. “I get to spend more time with family and stuff, so that’s a big part of it.”
Jeff Moermond still works at the shop part-time, making it 56 years of dedication to the business. He said hitting the business’s 60-year milestone is “unbelievable,” especially with his dad’s background.
Harold “Bud” Moermond was born on a dairy farm on Tire Hill Road in Fort Thomas in 1923.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, Bud found himself in uniform in the army and heading to combat in the Philippines for three and a half years. When the war ended, Bud was transferred from a veteran’s hospital in the Philippines to Fort Knox and was told he probably had a year to live. He requested a transfer to Fort Thomas, where his wife and daughter lived.
Jeff Moermond said his dad at the time had Malaria and digestive issues and was about 95 pounds soaking wet. A doctor and Jeff Moermond’s mother went to work on Bud.
“He said that my mother saved his life,” Jeff Moermond said.
Bud lived until he was 98. He died in 2021.
Although Greg and Lisa Moermond purchased the business in 2022, Greg Moermond has been working at the shop since 2016. Lisa Moermond recalls her dad taking her on “field trips” to Bud’s when she was 6 or 7 for oil changes. She started working at the business in 2023, shortly after they bought it.
Before working at Bud’s, Greg Moermond gained his experience working for his dad, Mike, Jeff Moermond’s brother.
“Really, his dream has always been to own a shop,” Lisa Moermond said. “So, this just works out; not only does his dream come true, but it keeps it within the family.”
Greg Moermond said the values that have been passed down through each generation are to do whatever it takes. The people, customers, and staff come first.
“I think when you tell somebody you’re going to sell the business, I’m sure it runs through their minds, ‘Oh, no, we like what we had with Bud and his family,’ and then they realize it’s still the family,” Lisa Moermond said. “I think it makes a huge difference in the community. It makes customers feel safe to still be here.”
Bud’s isn’t just a place people go to get their cars serviced; it’s the neighborhood shop.
A customer, whom Vicki and Jeff Moermond coined “Friday George,” a resident of Cold Spring, would come in and sit down in the chair in the waiting room every Friday. When they started making new coins, Vicki Moermond said he would always bring her a new quarter. He would sit in the shop for a couple of hours reading the newspaper and then get up and leave.
“We’ve had neighbors that have been diagnosed with cancer, and they live alone, and we’ve told them, ‘I don’t care if you need a gallon of milk, call us. We’ll go get it for you,’” Vicki Moermond said. “And we’ve had them do that.”
Jeff Moermond said you could fill a book with the stories people have offered them over the years.
“It has been a pleasure,” he said. “That’s probably the best part of working on that corner all these years, the guys, the personalities, some of the best people Kentucky’s got to offer.”
