Folks Of Interest gas stations were around when you started to drive?

when i was a kid , back in the 70s , we had a local school bus yard. probably 20+ bus es . the prices was grt. if you waited to after midnight and brought your own can you couldnt beat the price . i new a not so smart friend that put 10 gallons of diesel in his car . then couldnt figure why it quit running !! we had other stations also .terrible herbst . i thought it was a independant but i saw someone else posted a pick in another town .so i guess there were several. mohawk was where mom and granma went . they had stamps . s&w ?? i used to spend a lot of time at the local gulf driving them insane with patching the tubes on my honda ct 70 . it had patches on patchs on pat ches . that was in martinez ca.. used to be a small town . not so much now .

 

Haha! No reason to be depressed!

Hey guys, remember the "Put a tiger in your tank!" commercials?

 

And then there was the Gulf No-Nox commercials. I remember they played these often during the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday evenings. Those were the days the whole family would gather around the tv set after dinner to watch Disney tv. Preceded by Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom.

 

Around about 1960 I started hanging out at a Standard Oil filling station/used car lot. My cousin lived across the street and was friends with the owner's son. We were all close in age and "gear heads". In 63 I got my first real job at D&S Texaco which was a full service station. I was the youngest employee and got all the crap jobs, but at 16 I loved it. I always felt that the customers were paying me to learn how to work on cars. During the school year I worked from just after school until closing. From about 5:30 till 10:00 PM I was on my own. If we got an after hours fuel drop I was the guy that went there at 11:30 PM and paid the truck driver with credit card receipts.

 

Thanks for the reply... I was wrong, I thought it looked like a station in the Vancouver, WA area.

 

Yes, but they were called livery stables then.

 

My Dad owned a Cities Service station before I came along, back in the 1930s. He was in his 20s, and the stories told about his station were epic. He didn't make much money, and always had a tough time paying his bills. The building still exists in Clarksville, TN, but the last time I drove by years ago, it was a loan company. I always paid 29.9 all through high school, then moved to Gatlinburg for a summer job in 1970. Three stations in the whole town, all with garages, and all charged 38.9 for regular. They had a captive customer in people going to or from the mountains. A new guy opened up that year, and charged 29.9, just like most of the stations that were NOT in Gatlinburg. His building mysteriously burned that same year, closing him down.
I worked at an Arco station in '74 and '75. Full service and self service.
An epic thread could be started about only the customers who didn't know how to pump their own gas. I don't know why the entire country didn't burn to a crisp in the 70s. Vivid memories of women who would start the pump while standing a few feet behind their car, close their eyes, grit their teeth, and squeeze the trigger, washing the back of their car, and everything around them, with gas..... More than once, the pumps were shut off from inside, cause we couldn't even run to the pump to shut it off without a gas bath. Usually followed by crying, because their husband had told them to pump their own gas, and not pay the extra pennies for full service.