At the corner of San Vicente Boulevard and 26th Street, beside the Brentwood Country Mart where Santa Monica meets Brentwood, a bright green dinosaur stands watch over the neighborhood. For years, she has greeted drivers pulling into Sinclair Gas Station, a cheerful mascot named Clair—a playful spin on Sinclair—who became so beloved that when she suddenly disappeared one night last September, the reaction was swift and emotional. But the story of that stolen dinosaur—and the community that rallied to bring her back—really begins decades earlier, with the man who has stood on that corner welcoming customers for more than forty years.
John Fawcett arrived in Brentwood in June of 1985, when the neighborhood looked very different. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Culver City, he grew up in the gas station business—his father owned a busy station in Westwood near UCLA where John spent his teenage years learning the trade. “By the time I was in high school, I was working there every day,” he recalls. “Pumping gas, fixing things, doing whatever needed to be done.”
Around that same time, another part of his future was taking shape. John had met Cari, the girl who would become his wife, when they were teenagers. “Cari was fifteen and I was sixteen,” John says with a laugh. “We’ve been together ever since.” When the two married and started a family, John was still working at the Westwood station when an unexpected opportunity came along. Union Oil had a closed-down 76 station in Brentwood that they were planning to tear down. But one of the company’s executives believed he might be able to revive it. “They told me, ‘If you work as hard here as you do in Westwood, we’ll clean it up and hand you the keys,’” John remembers. For a young couple with a newborn child, it was both thrilling and terrifying. “It was scary,” he says. “But I believed if I worked hard enough, we could make it work.”
The first year was relentless. John opened the station at six in the morning and often didn’t return home until after midnight. “In the beginning it was just me,” he says. “If someone needed gas, I pumped it. If someone needed an oil change, I’d do that and run back out to pump gas. If someone had a flat tire, I’d fix it. I never turned anyone away.” That philosophy became the foundation of the business. “I always felt that if someone was good enough to drive into my gas station, I should be good enough to help them,” John says.
Back then Brentwood was quieter and rougher around the edges, and Montana Avenue had none of the restaurants or boutiques it has today. “There was a junkyard, a couple repair shops and not much else,” John says. “Someone once told me Montana was going to become the Rodeo Drive of the westside, and I thought she was crazy.” Over the years he watched the transformation happen in real time as the area slowly evolved into what it is today.
Today the station sits at that prominent corner as it has for decades, but what truly defines it is not the pumps or the signage—it’s John himself. With his bald head, goatee and twinkling blue eyes, he has become one of Brentwood’s most recognizable figures. “I’m on my third generation now,” John says proudly. “I had the parents come in, then their children and now their kids.” The business has remained firmly in the family. Cari has always been deeply involved, bringing warmth and creativity to the station. Their two daughters—one now a mother herself—have helped throughout the years, while their son Brent, his father’s carbon copy, works there nearly every day. “Brent grew up here,” John says, noting that his own middle name is also “Brent,” and neither were actually named after the town. “He knows the customers just like I do.”
The station’s location beside the Brentwood Country Mart has made it a quiet crossroads of the westside for decades, and over the years the customer list has naturally included more than a few famous names. Paul McCartney once stood quietly on the lot waiting for friends. “I looked over and thought, ‘That looks just like Paul McCartney,’” John recalls with a laugh. “But I told myself there’s no way he could actually be standing in my gas station. A few minutes later people walked up to him and I realized—yeah, that really was him.” But celebrity sightings are not what define the place—it is the relationships built there over four decades.
That sense of familiarity is also what turned a small addition a few years ago into something unexpectedly meaningful. When the station switched from a 76 to a Sinclair in 2019, a customer gave John a small vintage version of Sinclair’s famous dinosaur mascot. “It had just been sitting in his office for maybe twenty years,” John recalls. At the time, the dinosaur was red. John repainted it the signature Sinclair green before placing it out front of the station.
Cari named her Clair. “I thought it was cute—Clair for Sinclair,” Cari says. Then she started decorating her. “I figured the kids in the neighborhood would love it,” she says. They did. At Christmas, Clair became a reindeer with Santa riding on top. At Thanksgiving she wore turkey feathers. During baseball season she appeared in Dodgers gear. Sometimes neighborhood children even decorated her for their birthdays. “People started stopping just to take pictures,” Cari says. “Kids would wave at her from the car. It just became this little thing that made people happy.”
Then, one morning last September, the unimaginable happened. John received a call from the station before dawn: Clair was gone. Security cameras later revealed the scene: a man approached the dinosaur, realized she was bolted to the ground and returned with a truck and power saw. Within minutes, the bolts had been cut and the dinosaur lifted into the vehicle before the thieves drove away. By the time the sun came up, the neighborhood was already reacting. Parents stopped by the station saying their children were upset. Some adults even came by with tears in their eyes. “It was incredible,” John says. “People were genuinely heartbroken.” The theft came only months after the devastating fires that had shaken the community. “In a strange way, Clair had become this little bright spot,” John says. “After everything the community had been through, people just needed something that made them smile.”
At first John didn’t even want to press charges. “I told the police I didn’t want to waste resources over a dinosaur,” he says. “But the response from the community was so big that they said we had to file a report.” The story spread quickly beyond Brentwood. Television stations picked it up. Then longtime neighbor Jamie Lee Curtis posted about the missing dinosaur on Instagram, and suddenly the story reached millions. For nearly two weeks, Brentwood followed the mystery, until one night around three in the morning, a truck quietly returned. “She was wrapped in plastic,” John says of Clair. “And there was a note that said, ‘I’m sorry. Please don’t prosecute.’” The dinosaur had been damaged, but she was home.
The story might have ended there, but instead it became something even bigger. Sinclair stepped in and offered to create a brand-new dinosaur—larger and gleaming bright green. When the new Clair arrived in March, nearly six feet tall, John and Cari decided the moment deserved a celebration. The station temporarily closed for a community unveiling party. Food trucks lined the lot and a live band played. Hundreds of neighbors gathered between the pumps where they had filled their tanks for decades. Cari dressed the new dinosaur in gold and sparkles. “When they pulled the cover off, the whole crowd cheered,” she says. “It was really special.”
Today, Clair 2.0 stands proudly once again at the corner of San Vicente and 26th, greeting passersby. The original Clair is temporarily at John’s house (he plans to mount her to the back of a tiny Japanese Honda ACTY truck and drive her around town—more to come). Families still stop to take photos. Children still wave from passing cars. And just a few feet away, John still stands outside welcoming customers exactly as he has for more than four decades. For John, the secret to the station’s longevity has never been complicated. “It comes down to family and the community,” he says. “And the reason we’re still here is because of the people who come in.”
At the corner where Brentwood begins, the cars keep coming, the conversations keep flowing—and the dinosaur, once lost but now returned, stands as a cheerful reminder of just how much one small neighborhood business can mean.
Sinclair Gas Station
13060 San Vicente Blvd.
310-451-1818
sinclairoil.com