Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for September 20, 2009

The times have most definitely changed. :-(

Notice how Perfessor has parked on the wrong side of the pump.

He better put ethyl in that. It’s also got a 325 horsepower 10 to 1 compression engine in it. It’ll just barely run on the best junk they sell for gasoline nowadays! It’ll also carry an eight foot Christmas tree in the trunk with the lid closed WITHOUT damaging the tree. I know, I’ve done it many times carrying the Christmas tree home from the tree farms around the San Francisco Bay Area!

Ahhh, I miss the smell of leaded gas.

I remember when $5.00 of gas would fill the tank on a large car. Loved the 60s.

^.^

I remember full service gas stations and 25 cent gas. Usually, there was a garage there too and we’d take the car in for service and repairs to the same station we got gas at. Everyone in the neighborhood went there and you could depend on good work for a reasonable price. Now, one hour of labor is more than what you’d spend a whole year for service and repairs in those days. Oh yeah, I miss those days a lot.

At an archery tournament in college I won a prize of $5.00 worth of gas. It wouldn’t all fit in the tank! I worked at a station in the 70’s and my sole job was to “take care of the little old ladies” I did the “full” service; even brought the credit card thingy out to the car for the customer to sign.

I earned $1.35 an hour plus 5 cents per can of oil sold. You bet I looked under your hood. A tip every now and then would have been appreciated

Hey, I lived those days. This generation of “they were so last week” will never understand our time.

And the oil companies were making good profits back then when there were full-service. Now it’s just plain highway robbery.

Hey, Susan001, yup, pop bottle caps with removable cork gaskets, The kid wearing the most bottle caps on his shirt was king of the block.

Yes, and most stations where I grew up gave away sets of glassware and or “stamps”–as in S&H Green Stamps and Top Value I think were the other ones. Oh, heck my memory eludes me. Or to put it another way–the old gray mare … Maybe that’s what we need now–get the real horses back on the road for a while. Good benefits there. Grain’s plenty. Free fertilizer. Maybe traveling a little slower would give us all a chance to really think …

And, speaking of putting Skyler through college, tell him that he could have gone to UC Berkeley for $69 a semester! NO that’s NOT $69 a unit, that’s $69 TOTAL for the semester! BOY have we gone down hill since then!!

I lived in way back in the “Dark Ages” when the mimimum wage was .75 an hour, raised to 1.19 the next year!

Gas was 19 cents a gallon in San Jose and I could fill up my little Volkswagen for 3 dollars….ah, those were the days!

When I was stationed at Ft. Bliss in El Paso in 1962, I drove a 1959 Austin Healey Sprite. My gas guage was broken, but I never ran out of gas because I knew could get 100 miles on a $1.00 of gas. A penny a mile.

Twenty years later I had a Chevy with a 400 cu in engine. Got 10 mpg. Luckly my round trip to work and back was only 10 miles. A gallon a day. I think gas was about 80 cents a gallon.

I worked night shift in a gas station in 1968. Gas was around 30 cents. No self-serv at all back then. Checked oil, washed windshields, gave out Coke glasses and stamps (I think they were “Top Value” stamps.) The Sunoco station down the street used to give little cardboard “game pieces” that you opened to see if you won money (usually a dollar or two.) A friend of mine worked there and would give me hands full of them and we would go out cruising for the evening on the “winnings” (he was fired.)

And all night gas stations did not get robbed as often, it was rare, also a person could hang out there too.

A bunch of old people here…lol. I still have the commemorative drinking glass I got free from a Chevron station showing the moon landing. I also got my very first hatchet and hunting knife set as a kid with a book of S&H green stamps my folks gave me. Boy, was that neat. Shooting marbles, making slingshots and inner-tube guns (inner-tubes?), swimming in the creek (had to wait an hour after eating, or you get cramps and drown - every mother knew THAT)….I quit, I’m getting depressed.

If you filled up on Sunday (with Purple Martin Ethyl), you had your choice of glassware or a free Sunday paper… of which you could choose from three, each of which was a good two inches thick stack of newsprint… and each of which included a comic section of a dozen pages, strips drawn beautifully and printed big… Ah, don’t get the old man started.

The best thing about full-service gas, though, was our ‘56 Chevy, with the filler hidden behind the left taillight (you had to turn a piece of chrome on the light, and it would then swing open to expose the filler). By the early ’60s, none of the pump jockeys knew where it was, and it was great fun to watch them walking around, looking at both back fenders, pulling on the license plate, and finally coming up to ask where the heck the gas went in… all for three bucks worth of gas!

Boy are you guys bringing back memories!!!! Service station attendants, “Mechanics on Duty”, trading stamps, giveaways, free maps, displays out in front of the stations for tires, batteries, CANS of oil, and windshield wipers, plus I remember when the object of a “gas war” was to have the LOWEST price on a gallon of gas. The lowest I remember was 23.9/gallon.

We use to collect glasses from the local Marathon stations. Our set of Apollo space program glasses and decanters were a victim of a move but I still have a few BC glasses, dishes, and a cookie jar. In 1972, the local Standard station gave out lapel buttons (with a minimum 8 gallon purchase) with slogans from previous presidential elections. I also remember that Gulf stations had an agreement with Holiday Inn where their stations were located next to Holiday Inns and if you paid for your stay at a Holiday Inn with your Gulf card you received a discount.

BTW jimpow, my first car was a ‘73 Caprice coupe with a 400 engine and like yours got 10 mpg in town but a whopping 15mpg on the road. It cost about $20 to fill it up, but you could comfortably seat six people and probably fit another six in the trunk!!!!

My first car was a 55 Mercury Monterey. 12 mpg from that old 292 that I rebuilt myself. You could get real auto parts from Sears, along with the tools, though I preferred Penney’s and Ward’s tools. Gas was generally 30 cents, but you could often fight it for 19 during a gas war. Once I even found it at 10 cents.

And while they gave us that free stuff they buttered up congress to pass the rules that benifitted the oil companies and congress sold us out.

My best friend’s dad used to run a Texaco station, and I used to do all that stuff the perfesser mentioned for free just for fun.

Remember when air was free? Now if you can find a station with air at all, it costs 50 cents! Boooooo!

OldHipster I remember my father having his oil checked on the Ohio turnpike by the attendant and being told he was a quart low. He even brought the dipstick right up to the driver’s window. We could see pretty well under the hood from inside the car, and I noticed that when he put the oil in, he had a rag holding the bottom of the can.

Years later I heard that attendants would not put the dipstick in all the way when they checked it so it would appear low. Then they would have oil cans that had been previously emptied from the bottom, with the spout mounted on the top. The rag was used to hide the hole on the bottom when they “emptied” the can into the filler hole. Sure enough, when they checked the oil afterward, the level was just fine. A can of oil was pretty cheap back then, but working the night shift on a busy turnpike could be very lucrative.

GOSH, there’s a lot of old people who write TONS of memories about how it used to be! Cassatt & Brookins REALLY struck a chord with everyone on this one!

…And I’m no different… Yes, I remember $0.35 / gallon gas, gas station attendants that did it all for you and getting “stuff” like drinking glasses, Blue Chip Stamps or Green Stamps, STP Stickers or stickers for other automotive products. Yes, the Oil companies did great business then until OPEC decided to gang rape the United States.

Skylar breaks the fourth wall. A question about this appears in future comments.