Back in 1971, Cliff Jessup got a call from his mother to come work for an oil company where she was a bookkeeper. It cost 18 cents a gallon to heat your home.

And back then, it was all about filling your neighbor's tank during the cruel months. Just like the dairy farms that could only be as big as a family's ability to milk all the cows before breakfast, back then there were many one-man oil companies. You had a truck full of oil and a few hundred homes to drive to in the wintertime.

But with home heating oil at $3.25 per gallon during the peak months, price, not friendship and service, is lately the most important thing to customers.

And small oil companies can't afford to sell it cheaper.

Most of those small oil businesses are gone, unable to keep up with the big companies that can buy oil in bulk. Just like most of the dairy farms are now gone, bought by the bigger companies.

About the time the price of heating oil started to approach $3 a gallon, a doctor told Jessup that he was lucky that his prostate cancer was caught early. He started thinking about retirement.

He's been in the oil business for 35 years. Got started right after serving on a river patrol boat way up the line in the Vietnam War, just after the Tet offensive.

Fourteen years ago, having worked for others for years, he and a partner started A & J Hometown Oil in Wurtsboro.

It was that, as well as volunteering for years on industry boards, that led Jessup to be named recently as the Hudson Valley Oil Heat Council's Person of the Year.

For oil consumers and small, family-run businesses, there are no easy answers, Jessup says.

As the price keeps going up, more people can't afford what he sells.

"There are lots of people making choices that they shouldn't have to make," Jessup said. "Where they have to choose whether to heat themselves or feed themselves."

Jessup sold his stake to his partner two years ago, and only works a couple of times a week in the winters.

"Have big shoulders," he said, as advice to the new entrepreneurs.

It's a hard business now.