I hated those metal spouts you punched into the oil can, they always leaked. Sometimes a little sometimes almost the whole can. The station I worked at had a Coke machine with 10 cent drinks. They were the flattop kind just like the oil cans. You had to punch a hole with a can opener.....
I remember a case of oil had 24 qts for $8.00 and while I was in college gas was 25.9 during the week and 19.9 on the weekend when a gas war was on (every weekend in Flint,MI in 1962) Frank
When I turned 21 in 1963, life was great. I had a part time job at a local supermarket that paid $4.50 an hour straight time. The best part was that it was union shop, so before 7AM and after 6 PM, they paid time and a half. This was all day Saturday as well (No one was open on Sunday in this days). I worked 20 to 25 hours a week going to college, most if it overtime, so I was doing alright. I had a '52 Ford mild custom. Not only was gas 23.9 a gallon, but a bottle of Kingsbury beer at the town "Muni" was a quarter. Of course, tipping the bartender was unheard of in those days. Long story short, if you had $5.00, you were set for Friday and Saturday nights. Fond memories all. I don't even remember what we did in the winter, except that getting that '52 started on sub-zero mornings was a real adventure. I had a tank heater and a dipstick heater. Some times a bucket of hot water from the tap poured over the intake manifold helped. One time a lit a tray full of charcoal and shoved it under the oil pan and almost burned the whole thing up. Ahh, memories!
fill er up, mam you know you are a quart low on oil, and by the way when was the last time you had it changed, just look in the door at the mileage, those belts look cracked also the hoses, maybe you need to bring it in and get a full service, tune up, oil change, belts and hoses, let me get that windshield for you, those wiper blades look alittle worn can change them in a minute, ok $4.75 for the gas, have a nice day drive safe. Made alot of money on saturday llike that. All that done at the same time you filled up the car. Fun to remember
Was this the Mike's Carwash downtown close to Hefner Chevrolet? Mike's is still there, though Hefner's has been long gone. Seems like somebody I went to high school with worked at Mike's, but I can't remember who. Whenever some eye-candy comes into work our secret code is to announce "Telelphone, Archie!" Don't know where it originated but you can safely yell it out in the shop without raising suspicions from the uninformed. Used to hang around at a 24hr independant gas-only station where they would still pump the gas for you. If someone just got $2 worth after they finished they'd hang up the nozzle without shutting off the pump. If the next customer at that pump wanted $10 or a fill-up, they'd stick the nozzle in and start pumping with $2.00 already on the dial. $8 worth of gas for the price of $10! Or if a customer needed a quart of oil added, they'd turn the can upside down and plunge the spout into the bottom, dump in the oil and send the customer on his way. Then they'd save the empty can, turn it right side up and put it back in the rack. The next guy that wanted his oil checked, they'd pull the dipstick and maybe he didn't really need any oil. So they'd wipe the stick and reinsert it but not quite all the way and pull it out again and show the customer that it read low. Then they'd grab the empty oil can off the rack and put their oil rag under it, stick the spout into the top and add a quart of air to the customer's engine. Good times, but these guy's made self service look like a pretty good deal!
Yup, I caught the bugger! I won a plaque, with a drawing of the front of a V8 on it. All the pulleys were coins of various denomination, the belts were drawn lines connecting all the coins. The boss was really proud of me that day! I remember there was a half dollar, quarter, dime, and a silver dollar. As I recall, I ended up using the money for gas. Stupid kid!
I can do you one better,(Ithink) I was working at a Union 76 station in 1945, when Union Oil came out with their new oil called "Royal Triton" & it was a deep purple,---Remember???----Gas was 15 cents a gallon---While customers were having their cars greased, we always had to "paint" their tires with black stuff(?)---For a dollar more, remove all spark plugs & clean them, regap, reinstall. Changing a flat tire??-----Now thats another story!!----Fun years------Don
I Remember when I had a box of mint-condition 1918 liberty-head silver dollars. You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in Zeppelins, dropping coins on people, and one day I seen J. D. Rockefeller flying by. So I run of the house with a big washtub and, where are you going? Anyway, about my washtub. I just used it that morning to wash my turkey, which in those days was known as a walking bird. We'd always have walking bird on Thanksgiving with all the trimmings: cranberries, injun eyes, and yams stuffed with gunpowder. Then we'd all watch football, which in those days was called baseball. Thank You Abe Simpson
There's a lot of things from the early days I miss, The old white street lights on a hot summer night. Walking down the highway after school to see what Dad and Grandad were doing in the Royalite Garage. Grabbing a 7cents soda out of the old coke machine which was just a large tub with cold water and a nice paint job -no coin machines in those days. The smell of the garage, all the years of grease and oil and smoke on the walls had a certain aroma that made it the place to be. The familiar 'ding ding' of the air bell as a car drove up. Gas was always a little more expensive way out in the country but then 'way out' was 25 miles. The innocents and kindness of people in those days is probably what is missed the most. People today just don't have any respect for anything, In fact They have a disrespect for you and are encouraged to disrespect you from the get go. Today, anything that young people don't understand is stupid or you are a weirdo. I don't get the tattoos and hoodlum looks that the kids think was the norm in the 50's. They are making their own history based on false images of how they think it really used to be. jmho . .
I remember in high school putting 75 cents worth of gas ,at 30 cents a gallon , in my 80 Yamaha and you drove all week without going on reserve till your next pay day . This was1965
Remember when Jack Webb"the actor" said It was our old friends-Dirty Sludge, Sticky Valve, Gummy Ring and Balckie Carbon-only one thing to do call BARDAHL.
Remember when, about three wars back we called Sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and we called liberty cabbage "super slaw" and back then a suitcase was known as a "Swedish lunch box." Of course, nobody knew that but me. Anyway, long story short, a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling. My story begins in Nineteen dickety two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen our word for "twenty." I chased him down the road but gave up after dickety-six miles. Then after World War Two, it got kinda quiet, 'till Superman challenged FDR to a race around the world. FDR beat him by a furlong, or so the comic books would have you believe. The truth lies somewhere in between. The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it. I say we call Matlock. Thank You Abe Simpson
I worked a Gulf service station in 62 and there was a competitor down the street who would start a price war when his tanks were nearly empty. In those days the dealer paid for gas when it was pumped into his underground tanks. The old man would get prices down to around 13Cents for Gulftane and have his tanks filled at the low price. After he filled his tanks, he would close up and go fishing. When the price came back up, he would open back up and sell at the higher price until he was almost out of gas in his tanks.
This thread brought up some old memries, most of them good ones... Getting yelled at when pumping gas after school. The bloke said 'put a couple in it' so I put in $2 and he only wanted 2 gallons! Running out of 'super' petrol during a strike and pumping hundreds of gallons aross into the empty super tank from the still half full 'standard' tank with the bowser hose fully extended. (Got dreadfully 'drunk' on the fumes that day) Filling the oil bottles from the drum, and filling the 'hotted up' cars with Shell MB115 racing fuel by pouring it direct from 44 gallon drums of the stuff that were stacked up in the back of the service bay. Cheers, Glen.
It was the Mike's by Glenbrook shopping center...used to be full service back then...graduated from North Side High School in '79...everybody worked at the carwash back then
My memory is gas at about a buck a gallon and finding a station just across the state line with gas at 90 cents a gallon. Oil was a buck or so a quart - but came in the same plastic bottles it does now. I could change my own oil and filter for under $10 in the driveway, then hop in and drive 100 miles and have it only cost $10 or so. Including a cup of coffee somewhere. The college I went to they had a rack in the chassis shop which took 5 oil bottles in the top part. You never quite empty them putting them in the car, so this thing you put the bottles in upside down and it dripped into a troth that angled down into a funnel into a sixth oil jug. After a few hundred oil changes you had a spare quart. Starting to sound like a good enough idea to build one myself.
................and what service station didn't have cigarette vending machines? The ones with the smoky grey knobs everyone knew how to jack. Heck, just last night I found out neither my wife or my boss knew what Burma~Shave signs were. And I'm only 43!
Hey, while I'm (slightly) off-topic with stuff found in gas stations, as opposed to the stations themselves, What did the 10-2-4 logo for Dr.Pepper mean? remember that one?
Dr Pepper slogans.... 1920s1930s: "Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2, and 4 o'clock." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Pepper
The Jalopy Journal
