‘Whatever It Takes’: A father-son team in Philipsburg keeps houses warm and drivers safe with old-fashioned grit and a dose of humor

Editor’s note: This in the latest in a series of stories profiling Centre Countians at work.

Dougie Feaster’s laugh is so hearty, it can be heard echoing from within the office he shares with his father, Doug, tucked inside the Nittany Oil Company truck garage at the company’s Philipsburg headquarters.

Doug Feaster Sr., by contrast, speaks only when spoken to, it seems, and sometimes not even then. A glance of his stern eyes is enough to convey what he’s thinking.

“I only say it once,” Doug says. “It’s done. Once I say it, it’s over. Five minutes later, we’re laughing and joking around.”

For generations, sons followed in their fathers’ career footsteps, but today, it’s a fading tradition. Doug and Dougie, however, have been working alongside one another at Nittany as a father-son team for some 20 years. The contrast of their temperaments is surprising – and comical – to the outside observer, but when you consider the extreme circumstances under which they work and the gravity of their duties, you might wonder if there’s not some magic in how this odd couple operates. 

Doug oversees Nittany’s fleet, which consists of 120 vehicles. It’s an intense job with serious responsibility: If the company’s transports that haul gasoline get sidelined, people can’t fill up their cars and drive to school, work, medical appointments, or the grocery store. Our lives come to a standstill. If a driver doesn’t have an oil truck to make home fuel deliveries, people freeze in the winter. If the Nittany tractor-trailers, courier cars, oil tankers, and fuel trucks aren’t safe, the lives of the people who drive them are at risk, as are the lives of every other motorist on the road.

What’s more, oil and gas are highly flammable, toxic materials. Transporting them is no simple task. There are critical safety protocols that must be adhered to and state requirements the company must follow. There are no shortcuts, and there is no slacking. A minor slip-up could result in a major, tragic disaster.

“You gotta be aware of the danger,” says Doug. “There’s a lot of danger in what we do. You can’t grab a welder and start welding. There might be gas in there. My job is to assess the danger on the trucks, so they’re not out doing something that they shouldn’t – and get involved in an accident.”

“They have us here to do this job, and they don’t have to worry about it being done, or being done unsafe,” Dougie says. “I inspect all the trucks, all the cars, tractor-trailers. Everything. My name goes on this [work], so if that thing don’t go down the road safe, if something happens, it comes back to me.”

All in the family

Doug has been working at Nittany Oil since 1991. When he started, the Philipsburg garage had one bay. There are now six. He was the only mechanic overseeing the company’s fleet for 15 years. Now, in addition to his son, Doug supervises three other full-time and three part-time mechanics at garages in Belleville and Williamsport, with the main repair and maintenance garage in Philipsburg.

“We do all the repairs in-house,” Doug says. “Everything. Including building trucks. Repairing collisions. Engines, transmissions, welding, calibrations. [Dougie and I are] both registered with the state. We do all the internal and visual pressure tests on the trucks that have to be done to haul gas. Everything that breaks, we have to fix.”

“I started coming to work with [my dad] when I was 13 years old on Saturdays,” Dougie recalls. “I didn’t get paid or anything, just came to learn. And then, when I turned 16, I started working here in the summer. I watched [my dad] all my life workin’ to make sure me and my brothers and sisters and mom had what we needed, and he instilled that work ethic in me to make sure my family has what they need.”

Family runs deep in this company. Nittany owner and CEO Jim Martin started the company as the Martin Oil Company in Bellwood with his father in 1962; they purchased Nittany Oil in 1980 and have bought several other companies in the area. Jim Martin and the board of directors continue to own and operate Nittany Energy, which has grown to include 28 MinitMart convenience stores across central Pennsylvania, as well as three repair garages, and seven offices and bulk facilities across four counties. Nittany services 18,000 home heating customers with a full-line service department and sells fuel to several branded retail stations.

Martin says he has been “very pleased and confident in Doug Feaster and now his son Dougie over the many years they have done outstanding work in keeping the fleet in the best possible condition.”

‘You go and fix it’

The question of what a “typical day” for Doug and Dougie looks like elicits laughter from Nittany truck driver Ron Stiles, who relaxes against a wall and says eagerly, “I gotta hear this.”

“I never have a plan,” Doug says simply.

There’s a computerized maintenance system Doug looks at every morning. If there’s a problem with a vehicle, he decides whether it needs to be pulled off the road. He splits the routine maintenance of the vehicles among the three garage locations.

“So long as you keep up with the routine maintenance, everything falls into place,” he explains. “The vehicles have to be safe on the road. And we run ’em forever, so we’ve got to maintain them. They may be old, but they’re safe.”

And when there’s something unforeseen? A loaded tractor-trailer broken down, a truck with its brakes frozen in subzero temperatures?

“You go and fix it,” he says with a shrug.

“I grew up on a farm. And on a farm, you fix it. You don’t run to the store and buy a new one; you fix it. Everybody should grow up on a farm.”

Dougie’s day consists of a little bit of everything: inspections, oil changes, replacing tires, welding, installing and programming electronic meter boxes, plumbing the fuel trucks. You name it, Dougie can do it. His work is such a part of him that he can tell you, without looking, what truck is pulling into the Nittany bulk plants based on the sound of the engine and the way the air brakes release.

“And I can tell who’s driving it, too, because I know the way each driver is,” Dougie says.

‘The delivery has to be made’

As different as Doug and Dougie may be in their personal traits – one an unfazed, reserved man of few words, the other outgoing and outspoken – they do have one obvious quality in common: They’re both stubborn in a way that makes them perfectly suited for the line of work they share.

“Don’t tell us we can’t do somethin’, ’cuz we’ll prove you wrong,” Dougie says.

In the oil and gas industry, Doug says, you can’t afford to sit around. The Nittany mechanics understand they have people’s lives in their hands.

“The delivery has to be made,” he says. “The customers don’t wait. No matter what. We will make the delivery.”

Nittany repairs all its own vehicles, rather than sending them to the dealership or a shop, where a repair might take several days.

“It’ll be ready in an hour,” Doug says. “We’re not setting in line because there’s four people ahead of you. A fuel truck takes priority. So we fix it, get it back out the door. That’s the difference.”

Sometimes guaranteeing a delivery means being inventive. To ensure all customers get the heating oil they need this season, for instance, Doug designed, and his crew built, a smaller rig to haul home heating fuel to remote residences.

“It is for hard-to-reach houses, so we don’t get stuck going in and out, so nobody is going to go without [heating oil] if they need it,” Doug says. “There are a lot of hunting camps and stuff that you can’t fit a big truck into if you need to. I designed it, and we all built it. If you can’t get in with this, you can’t get in.”

The alternative in dire conditions would be to haul five-gallon cans into people’s properties or to set barrels down at the end of their lanes.

“We’ll do whatever we can – whatever it takes,” says Doug.

‘It’s a big job’

Doug and Dougie exude old-fashioned pride in their work, which encompasses a rare and remarkable set of diverse skills. (Doug is also a talented car painter and restores classic cars.)

“I’m the type of person, I want to be able to do something on my own,” Dougie says. “I don’t like to pay someone else to do it.”

The idea of a challenge lights a “bring it on” spark in Dougie that’s palpable. It’s a quality he’s no doubt absorbed from his father, who relied on his creative ingenuity to work with what he had when Nittany was a fledgling company.

“I had to figure things out,” Doug reflects. “It was challenging. The company has grown, for the good. It really is a good place to work.”

“I come in and look at something, I got a list of 100 things I gotta do in a certain order,” says Dougie. “I do love my job. If I didn’t love my job, I wouldn’t be here.”

As far as working together in a high-stress environment alongside heavy equipment, explosive substances, loud machinery, and with the pressure of constant deadlines, Dougie says, “There are days we bicker and argue, but we get over it. You can’t hold onto anything. [My dad] passed his knowledge on to me. He’s my boss – you just let it go. It’s got to be that way. If not, everybody would hate each other. This place, in here, everybody is family.”

“You have to separate family from work,” says Doug. “You can’t take it personal. Quittin’ time – you leave what happened at work at work. That’s the way it is.

“It’s a big job, and I’m not here all the time, so I rely on [Dougie] when I’m not here to take care of things. He’s very skilled. He knows what he’s doing. And I taught him everything he knows …,” he says, pausing to consider whether he wants to admit to all that that entails.

“…Outside the garage,” he adds with a hint of a smile mingling with the music of Dougie’s booming laugh.