Living with my grandfather as a young kid was always an interesting thing. Ken was a product of the Great Depression, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, a high-ranking officer, and had a mind as clear as a bell until the end. I’m a product of the early 1980s, born to young parents, left unsupervised and told to figure things out often. I was his shadow…he drove the car, so I learned how to drive the car. He was a HAM radio operator, so I figured out how to run his equipment and one night actually stood in for him when he was in the hospital…which was a kind gesture and all, but just like the Mustang II incident, got me a strong lecture about the legalities of things and why a five-year-old wasn’t allowed to do what the adults did.
We would often drive around on Sunday afternoons after church, and every time we would stop at the Conoco station on the corner of Fillmore Avenue and Hancock Avenue before driving back up to the house, he would give me the same speech about how gas stations had changed so much over the years, usually while casting a sidelong glance at the greasy wrench who was trying to breathe some kind of life into ragged old street machine that was barely hanging onto life. As a kid, I thought he was full of it. I had seen the “full service” stations, but from what I could tell all they did was pump your fuel for you, the end.
Well, here’s a neat look into the past of a full service setup circa 1957, complete with a droptop Chevy in Calypso Cream paint, getting checked on with a beauty of the time at the wheel. I doubt the reality was this clean and non-threatening, but if you wanted to see what would happen if a Jiffy Lube and a Kum & Go were combined, here’s a look into the past.
Thought at first this was later, as mom and dad’s Gulf station had a crank style air machine… Dial in the pressure and a bell rung until the pressure was reached. Gas was only 26.9 per gallon, and the tanker driver smoked a cigarette while the fuel pumped. But, that was rural northeast Ohio in the mid-’60’s, and then I spotted the Cali plates. I got it now…