Old gas stations

[BlueTrain]

I was just leafing through a few pages of this thread. Lots of interesting photos that give me totally opposite impressions of the past--even as I actually remember it! Of course, it doesn't follow that the way I remember it was the was it really was.

These impressions are not entirely of gas stations but all the photos of old gas stations are sufficient reminders, at least of the looks. My first memory was of chilly temperatures, bare streets, bare trees, too, a cluttered and dirty gas station with employees that were also dirty. The paint was peeling or worn off of everything and few things had a shine except from constant use. Everything else had a film of greasy dust. There were shop windows that were closed and everything on the block looked old and faded. There were faint painted signs on the sides of old brick building that told you that at one time such and such business that you recognized used to occupy the building but in your own memory had always been somewhere else in town and, chances were, still on the same street. That was then. Now there are two buildings in town with such signs but the business is long gone.

The other impression was of a clean and shiny establishment with everything neatly organized and the weather was always perfect, too. Oddly enough, it could be the same town but somewhere else, probably out near the new interstate or (at the time) near the new turnpike. The employees looked a little younger and a little more cheerful but somehow less familiar than the older places. And it didn't have that oily smell that the old place did everywhere, even in the less than perfectly clean restroom. But the gasoline was no different as far as you could tell. But your uncle owned the station as well as the diner next door and the sawmill just outside of town, so that's where your father always went. In fact, that uncle was the businessman of the family but nevertheless wore bib overalls everywhere he went. And he liked to drink too much and his face showed it. His life didn't end well.

But you have no memory at all of the brand of gasoline these places sold.

 

[2jakes]

^^^^
My earliest recollections was the colors and smells
of not only gas stations but the local grocery stores.

When I learned to read, I realized that the huge red demon
with wings was Mobil.
The tangerine round sign was Gulf.
The rainbow of colors on the old faded wooden walls at
the local “mom & pop” stores were porcelain signs promoting
bread, soft drinks or beer & cigarettes.

When I ride my bike sometimes I go through the back
alley where the trash cans are located.
At times some smells remind me of my old
neighborhood.
I don’t remember the cold or the heat as much.
Perhaps I may have blocked it out!
I was 8 when I went to my first summer camp
for one week.
I was miserable and very homesick.
Other kids seem to be having a great time.
Today, I would have had a grand time.
But back then, it was just the opposite.
Mostly because of the negative mental baggage
I brought with me on that trip.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There were two specific stations in my town that are still burned in my memory -- one was ours, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. When my mother had to do errands, she'd park me there and I'd sit in the office reading "Super Service Station" or "The Texaco Dealer" and drinking Cokes until she came back after me. When I was small, I'd pester my grandfather or my uncle until they gave me a ride on the lift -- we had the full drive-on type of rack, and you could stand on it and get hoisted seven feet off the ground. A big thrill when you're four or five years old. Other times I'd snap rubber bands at the flies circling around the empty soda bottles -- there was always a cloud of flies, and many of them ended up gummed into the syrup puddled at the bottom of the bottles.

The smell of the place was a melange of petroleum, wet concrete, and cheap pipe smoke, and the walls were yellow with twenty years' worth of nicotine. The merchandise on the shelves tended to be old and random -- containers of Camel tube patches and Solder-Seal radiator powder, stuff like that. Occasionally someone would buy something, but mostly it just stood there bleaching in the sun and gathering dust. Some of that junk was still there when I cleaned the place out after we sold the building.

The other station I remember is an Esso that stood directly in front of the house where I lived from age two to age five. It was the same kind of place as our own, but because it was a different brand, I thought it was like a different denomination of church, and I wondered what kind of weird things went on inside. Out of loyalty I never went in, but I liked to sneak down to the edge of the driveway and look thru the windows into their grease room, and once I grabbed an Esso doorjamb oil-change sticker that had fallen on the ground and kept it hidden in a drawer like it was an apostate text.

 

[2jakes]

 

[Ghostsoldier]

1943, Miss Frances Heisler, garage attendant at the Atlantic Refining Company garage.

Rob

 

[2jakes]

^^^^
She needs a head scarf like our Lizzie!

Although she has that look that tells me...
"you don’t want to mess with me, jake!”

 

[BlueTrain]

It's incredible the difference color makes. I don't seem to have any vivid recollections of colors from when I was little, meaning through high school, with a few minor exceptions. But when thinking of almost anything from before the 1950s, I usually think of it in black and white, because that what most of the photos were. Things that would show up like a sore thumb in a color image, like red, scarcely show up at all in black & white.

I also note that in virtually all photos of working women, like in war production plants or in the photo above, the women will invariably be wearing contemporary casual shoes, almost never boots except in inclement weather or in mud.

I also take it that the automatic cut-offs on a gas pump are of relatively recent origin.

 

[2jakes]

It's incredible the difference color makes. I don't seem to have any vivid recollections of colors from when I was little, meaning through high school, with a few minor exceptions. But when thinking of almost anything from before the 1950s, I usually think of it in black and white, because that what most of the photos were. Things that would show up like a sore thumb in a color image, like red, scarcely show up at all in black & white.

I mentioned color because that is what I recall.
I’m referring to the period before school.
The written word had no meaning.
Sight, sound and smell was everything.
Some see this as an old black and white photo.

I see more.
The color of my dad's shoes, brown striped pants,
the odor of Bugler, tobacco stains on his fingers and
the sweat from a day's work. My mom’s inside preparing
dinner, listening to Glenn Miller on a tiny radio on top of
the icebox. (yep, a real icebox)
Those are my favorite dark green pants I’m wearing.
That tin tub hanging on the wall is our washing machine.
It is 1948 in the fall, but the sun was shining so nice so
we sat on the back kitchen steps. My dad is opening a
stick of gum for my sister. I can hear my mom telling him
to wait until after supper.
My uncle David took the photo with the family Kodak.
The colors have faded, but not the memories.
I make it a point to never forget.

 

[2jakes]

Colorful window display.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most women war workers wore casual civilian shoes simply because they were more comfortable than men's work shoes or boots, or the sort of farm boots that were sold in women's sizes. Even the Army had a hard time coming up with a work shoe that was comfortable for women to wear for long periods of time because it took a while for them to understand that simply sizing a shoe designed for men into women's sizes isn't going to cut it.

Sister Frances there is wearing a very popular type of cheap rubber-soled "playshoe" that was widely sold in 1941-42, while her friend has a really lived-in pair of loafers. Saddles, which were originally designed as an athletic shoe, were also very popular footwear for blue-collar women during the war.

As for automatic shut-off valves on pumps, they were invented in the late thirties but like a lot of innovations of that time they didn't really become widely used until after the war.

As for color, pretty much everything that could be painted around our place was painted with dark green Devoe enamel, because that's what Texaco issued for painting the woodwork at the station. Many quarts of that paint found their way home, and I've still got some shelving here painted with it.

 

[Stearmen]

It's incredible the difference color makes. I don't seem to have any vivid recollections of colors from when I was little, meaning through high school, with a few minor exceptions. But when thinking of almost anything from before the 1950s, I usually think of it in black and white, because that what most of the photos were. Things that would show up like a sore thumb in a color image, like red, scarcely show up at all in black & white.

I also note that in virtually all photos of working women, like in war production plants or in the photo above, the women will invariably be wearing contemporary casual shoes, almost never boots except in inclement weather or in mud.

I also take it that the automatic cut-offs on a gas pump are of relatively recent origin.

That's interesting, most people seem to be the other way round. During the 50th anniversary of JFK assassination, I asked a lot of people my age and older, what color was the flag on his coffin? Invariably they would say, "red, white and blue." I would say, so your family was rich and had a color TV? They would say, "no we did not get color until the 70s!" Then it would dawn on them, they have seen it so may times since then, in color that you must concentrate to see it in B&W! Maybe we were lucky that Apollo 11s color camera broke, it will for ever more be just the way we saw it on our grainy B&W sets.

 

[BlueTrain]

While colors generally don't bring back any memories, smells, good and bad, do. My late father-in-law's garage/shop (it was an enclosed garage with an overhead garage door that was full of tools) had a certain oily aroma that's a little hard to pin down, since it didn't exactly smell simply like motor oil. It was mixed in with all sorts of paints, solvents, machines, dirt, scrap wood and the like. And since some of that stuff migrated to our garage, now it smells the same way. It's not exactly a bad smell, nor is it exactly a good smell, but after ten minutes, you don't notice it anyway.

There are also a few sounds that remind me of something from my childhood. One is the sound of trains. Ours was a railroad town and I could lie in bed and hear the sounds of trains starting up, the rumble of them passing along or the sound of a whistle. I've ridden trains in Europe (that's how I got to Berlin) and the whistles over there were different, almost a scream. I can still hear the sound of trains where I live now, although they're more distant. They were only about three blocks away from where we lived my hometown. My grandfather worked for the railroad and walked to work. He walked home from work in the rain one day and caught pneumonia and died in 1943 or 1944. Or at least that's what I was told.

It's also funny what you remember. One sound in particular was the sound of metal handles on a piece of galvanized playground equipment at the grade school I attended. You held onto the handles at the end of a chain and swung around, the chains being attached to a swiveling ring at the top of a large metal pole. When the handles hit the pole, it made a very particular sound, a bell-like ringing sound. Well, one of the metal posts in the lobby here at work that holds up the balcony make exactly the same sound when you rap it with a knuckle. Or at least that's what I think of when I do that.

 

[David Conwill]

Saddles, which were originally designed as an athletic shoe, were also very popular footwear for blue-collar women during the war.

My great-grandfather, a decorative plasterer, also favored saddle shoes for work. I've always thought of it as the '30s-'50s equivalent of wearing sneakers.

 

[2jakes]

My great-grandfather, a decorative plasterer, also favored saddle shoes for work. I've always thought of it as the '30s-'50s equivalent of wearing sneakers.

I wear tennis sneakers for support & comfort on the court.
Off the court, it's saddle shoes!

 

[BlueTrain]

I think sneakers were popular as casual footwear as far back as the 1940s, by which I mean just casual and not particularly fashionable. Huntz Hall, whose photo is on my bulletin board here at work (along with his son, an Episcopal priest), usually wore sneakers in their movies. Thor Heyerdahl also wore them as did Sasha Seimel, a somewhat famous hunter in South America.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Sneakers were widely worn in the 1930s by certain types of "sporty" young men, but much less so by young women. Women's sneakers were around, but were mostly worn for athletic purposes -- they didn't really catch on as casual everyday footwear for women until the war years, when they were exempt from shoe rationing. They were produced only in limited quantities for the civilian market, but what sneakers were available got snapped up fast. Keds put out a whole line of ration-exempt women's playshoes that really caught on with the public -- they were cheap and flimsy, which is why very few have survived to the present day, but in their time they were highly popular.

Sneakers were frowned upon in gas stations, of course. The uppers stained badly from oil, and the rubber soles were attacked by it as well. Plus they offered no protection whatever from impact.

Texaco had an "official authorized uniform shoe" in its catalogs, a moccasin-toe oxford with a steel shank and an inner-steel toe cap, with an oil and acid proof sole, and a polished forest-green leather upper. My grandfather wouldn't have been caught dead wearing any kind of green shoes, and instead wore heavy, lumpy, unpolished no-brand black work shoes with his uniforms. We called them his "Frankenstein Shoes."

 

[BlueTrain]

Weren't sneakers described as bad for the feet? Either because they had rubber soles or because they didn't offer proper support? Sneakers were on issue in the British Army, where they were called "canvas shoes" (shoes, canvas) and which now would be called trainers. American soldiers are now required to buy track shoes in the army (not issued), something we didn't have when I was in the army.

I also remember there was a kind of canvas shoe available at least in the 1950s and probably later that men might wear to go fishing or for working around the house. The ones I remember seeing were blue. But they weren't sneakers and had a regular sole with a heel, although it was a composition or rubber sole. They were undoubtedly inexpensive as well as cheap. My father never wore them but then, he never went fishing.

 

[2jakes]

U.S. KEDS 1949

1940s US Royal Army Military sneakers

50s US KEDS available on ebay for only $799 plus shipping.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[BlueTrain]

Those Keds were what I was thinking of. My uncle would have worn white socks. Except when he was at work, he otherwise wore slip-on Romeo shoes, still available.