Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
If you’re old enough to remember this jingle, “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star…the big, bright Texaco star.” Then you remember when service stations were just that, stations that offered service.
They were polar opposites of the self-serve gas pumps outside your local convenience store. When you drove up, you crossed a cable that rang a bell inside the station and out ran the attendant who asked you what octane you wanted to fill your car with. He asked how many gallons, or if you wanted to fill up completely.
How many times today does anyone pump just a few gallons rather than filling up entirely? That might be a poor question, since some people fill just a few gallons in the forlorn hope that prices will drop. Not in Riverton, friends.
Gas stations once gave away merchandise if you filled up with more than 10 gallons.
Steak knives were popular items, but so were dishes, towels, mugs, cups and glasses. In larger cities with professional franchises, loyal customers could get full sets of player glasses.
The Pittsburgh Steelers and Boston Red Sox were masters of this. Antique shops in both cities are full of these gems from five and six decades ago.
As a kid, my friends and I loved the neighborhood gas station in Fairfield, California.
It was a Union 76 station, the one with the big orange ball. For years, their franchise giveaway was a bright, foam orange 76 ball that fit on your antenna. I had a half-dozen or so of them, but Dad would never put one on the 62 Nova. Standards, I guess.
The Union 76 had a small waiting area where people sat while they had their tires rotated, oil changed or any of dozens of other routine maintenance procedures. The little office had a Coke machine that dispensed six-ounce bottles. “Little old lady, Cokes,” my dad always said.
There was a candy and a cigarette machine on one wall as well. We’d drop a quarter in for a Snickers bar once in a while and watch some of the older kids walk in and pick up a pack of Camels or Lucky Strikes. Amazing by today’s controlling standards, but since every kid in the neighborhood had a father who had served in World War II or Korea, those were the brands their old man learned to smoke in the service.
It was a different time.
During my fourth-grade year, the Union 76 station shut down for a few months. By the spring, it became a 7-11. The 7-11 changed the shopping habits of the gang of 11-year-old hoodlums I ran with.
We discovered Slurpees. The Fairfield 7-11 across the diagonal corner from David A. Weir Elementary that we called home sold both cherry and Coke Slurpees. It didn’t take long for my group of future rocket scientists to discover that if you mixed a few shots from each into one cup, you created a (drum roll please) cherry Coke.
It was exhilarating for a group of kids who didn’t get out much beyond three blocks from home.
The farther away these memories get in time, the more they resemble black-and-white episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.
When Opie and his buddies rolled into Wally’s Service Station, they always rolled over the cable to ring the bell inside. Out came Gomer (before he joined the U.S. Marine Corps) or Goober. The older fellows always had a story and a smile for the boys as they sidled up to buy a cold drink from the metal cooler with the bottle opener on one end.
We lived that experience. A couple of generations did.
Was it a better time? That’s debatable, but it was surely different than the coddled, bubble-wrapped, constantly monitored children of today.
Maybe it’s better now. I didn’t have a single friend growing up who didn’t spend time in a cast. How many kids do you see wearing a cast today?
We moved 40 miles north to Mather Air Force Base following fifth grade, and the world expanded. Mather was an air base set in a huge open area of undisturbed Northern California real estate. There were lakes, ponds, streams, and ravines with abandoned towers, view platforms, and ancient military wreckage strewn everywhere.
It was a wonderland for a young teenage boy.
The local station two blocks south of our concrete block house in NCO married quarters had gas pumps and a convenience store. For a quarter, I could fill a one-gallon gas can with regular and get a can of cold Shasta.
The Shasta cola wasn’t great compared to Coke or Pepsi, but the orange and grape soda rocked.
Gas was 18 cents a gallon, and pop was just seven cents.
I’d fill up the can, strap it to the front carrier on my Murray Red Flyer, make sure the lawn mower was tilted so it rolled on just two wheels, and I rode off, drinking a pop and riding to my regular lawn mowing route on Saturdays during the school year and six days a week during the summer.
At $1.50 to $2.00 per lawn, I made a lot of cash while wearing out my dad’s push mower. In later years, he told me he never said anything about it because he was glad to see me making money with a job I’d created on my own.
The days of the service station are gone forever. We now slide in a credit card, push a few buttons, grab the hose and pump our own fuel.
No one checks the air pressure in the tires, the oil, the coolant, or washes the windows while they fill your tank.
America is a different place today. Somehow a little colder, a lot more mercenary, and far removed from the days of Opie, Barney and Andy.
But those of us who have made a few dozen trips around the sun remember the simpler times.
It wasn’t a better world, but it was a better childhood than children who spend their days looking at a screen experience. It came with just enough risk to make it exciting, but around us was a safety net of mothers who knew exactly what we were doing and weren’t afraid to call each other or line out a kid who wasn’t their own.
And you got S&H Green Stamps, free road maps and steak knives to boot.