Old gas stations

[2jakes]

“It’s yer move!”

Flypaper hanging from the ceiling!

 

[David Conwill]

Really, I meant the social equivalent of sneakers today, not that sneakers didn't exist. My grandfather played basketball in college in 1937-'38 and certainly wore canvas and rubber sneakers for that, though I can't recall him wearing tennis shoes otherwise.

To get (slightly) back on topic, I have a wonderful image of a Detroit-area teenager working on a Model T at (I think) the Greenfield Village School in 1934. Notice his tennis shoes.

 

[Fading Fast]

Flypaper hanging from the ceiling!

From that picture, I want the desk, the chair, the fan, the clock, the phone (!), the sliding glass cabinets (and everything in them), the jars on top of the bottom ones, the oil cans, the radio, the wood floor, the bead-board ceiling, the Coke icebox, the flag and Mobil Oil sign - but not much else

 

[2jakes]

From that picture, I want the desk, the chair, the fan, the clock, the phone (!), the sliding glass cabinets (and everything in them), the jars on top of the bottom ones, the oil cans, the radio, the wood floor, the bead-board ceiling, the Coke icebox, the flag and Mobil Oil sign - but not much else

From this picture, I want the roll top desk, book shelf, and swivel chair...
including red and her steno pad.

 

[Fading Fast]

From this picture, I want the roll top desk, book shelf, and swivel chair...
including red and her steno pad.

I want everything including the inset handles on the double hung wood windows (and the double hung wood windows). And she has to be a model - skin like that doesn't show up accidentally too often.

 

[BlueTrain]

Ten or twelve-foot ceiling, nothing electrical in sight (probably a ceiling light, though), spittoon in the corner next to a wastepaper basket that's really a basket, everything made of beautiful oak, including, apparently, part of the wall, desktop fashionably cluttered. The lady's complexion doesn't look that special to me, by the way, no offense. But after all, she's a redhead.

 

[Fading Fast]

Oh I don’t know about that. My lady friends on the forum are all gorgeous.
Also, red here is not wearing heavy make-up.

What do I know - ram-rod straight posture, mountain of hair, alabaster skin and the generally staged feel of it says model to me - but I sincerely repeat, what do I know, I'm just guessing.

 

[2jakes]

What do I know - ram-rod straight posture, mountain of hair, alabaster skin and the generally staged feel of it says model to me - but I sincerely repeat, what do I know, I'm just guessing.

You just described images of folks from a certain time period.
I have albums of my grandparents with their friends when they were young
that looked like red. That was the way they dressed with hardly much makeup.
Even in her senior years, my grandmother kept her hair long and
would bundled it up somehow with a hair comb to keep it in place.
The men did not wear wrist watches until Valentino .
Eventually everyone else followed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That ramrod posture is an artifact of the photographic technology of the times. No film existed prior to the 1930s that was fast enough to allow for "casual" indoor photography, so all indoor photos taken prior to that time required copious flash light and stiff, motionless subjects. Hence those rigid, dignified relatives that scowl from family albums. The photos may suggest otherwise, but be assured, ordinary people a century ago slouched, grinned, picked their noses, and engaged in the same kind of fidgety behavior that we do today.

The magnesium flash powder used in the early 20th Century also tended to wash out facial features, which had the convenient effect of masking complexion defects. If that wasn't enough for the challenge at hand, it was not unknown for photographers to shoot thru a gauze screen or even smear a bit of Vaseline on the lens to conceal the weathered, leathery faces of particularly shopworn subjects.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, generally speaking, tanned skin was hardly fashionable at the turn of the century, and judging from the way some people are dressed when they're out walking around the neighborhood where I live, it still isn't among some people. It wasn't so much a matter of the complexion but rather because a tan meant you worked outside and that wasn't a desirable image to project. And contrary to what Miss Lizzie suggests, some people maintained a "correct" posture when in public. It might be a good habit to cultivate even now. There was also the matter of corsets and other foundation garments and unmentionables that contributed to not only good posture but a small waist. While other bodily features may have been disguised or perhaps supplemented, a small waist was emphasized and assisted by tight clothing. It isn't that apparent in the young lady, though, and dress reformers considered it unhealthy.

Every photographic image is to some extent staged. Even the presence of a camera will tend to alter people's behavior.

 

[EngProf]

That ramrod posture is an artifact of the photographic technology of the times. No film existed prior to the 1930s that was fast enough to allow for "casual" indoor photography, so all indoor photos taken prior to that time required copious flash light and stiff, motionless subjects. Hence those rigid, dignified relatives that scowl from family albums. The photos may suggest otherwise, but be assured, ordinary people a century ago slouched, grinned, picked their noses, and engaged in the same kind of fidgety behavior that we do today.

The magnesium flash powder used in the early 20th Century also tended to wash out facial features, which had the convenient effect of masking complexion defects. If that wasn't enough for the challenge at hand, it was not unknown for photographers to shoot thru a gauze screen or even smear a bit of Vaseline on the lens to conceal the weathered, leathery faces of particularly shopworn subjects.

The "ASA" rating on original Kodachrome film (pre-WWII) was roughly ASA 8-10. That is *extremely* slow, which is why it took so much light to get a color image (still or movie).
(The America Standards Association (ASA) film rating system was promulgated in late 1943 - what we now call ISO.)

One consequence of the slow early color film available during WWII is that there is more Pacific Theater color film and images than from the European Theater. The Marines in particular used a lot of 16mm Kodachrome. (It's bright and sunny in the Pacific...)
Black and white film of approximately ASA 200 was available by WWII so indoor and bad weather filming was possible.

Speaking of changing facial tones, the early 20th century (and 1800's) B&W film was orthochromatic and could only pick up blue light. That significantly changes the tonality of both people and things.
Flash bulbs, instead of the semi-explosive powders, started coming in during the very late 1920's and were fairly commonly used by the 1930's. This made indoor candid photos for news or whatever much easier. You used a different bulb color for B&W (clear) or color film (blue) to match the sensitivity of the different film types.

As for the picture of the redhead and the guy in the office, I think it's a well-done "re-creation" at a later date. Look at the shadows and highlights and where they fall. It fits the natural lighting so well that either it was done later with faster film, or was set up by some VERY good photographers and lighting technicians in an earlier time. Possible, but it looks too natural to be set-up/fake lighting...

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was leaning toward suspecting a recreation myself, until I noticed the greasy dust on the floor. I don't think any set dresser would go to trouble of finding a petroleum-based floor wax and applying it to the wood and then letting it accumulate just enough dust to create that scuffy sheen that's visible in the picture.

Floor waxes and polishes were another product commonly sold in gas stations, just to stay on topic.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Lol...I just thought that it was a colorized B&W photo.

Rob

 

[2jakes]

Lol...I just thought that it was a colorized B&W photo.

Rob

Below is a Kodachrome transparency by the Office of War Information
located in the Shorpy Archives. The majority of the images are b&w
although there is a section of large-format color transparencies including
Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Anschochrome.

There is also a section of “colorized b&w photos" made by members
belonging to this site.


October 1942.

 

[BlueTrain]

She has a lunch pail exactly like my father used. There's nothing coming out of the thermos but obviously it's a posed photo. Virtually all are, anyway.

I worked in photofinishing for about twenty years. One of our vendors owned a glass negative of a post-war photo of Lee. The plant manager had a print made from it and it was remarkable in the level of detail and the sharpness. It would have been a large format photo, something that may still be in use. It was typically used in news cameras with single negatives (not roll film, that is). I believe the Playboy foldout was made with a large format camera. All of that stuff is mostly obsolete today, even to include the Playboy foldout.

The photo of the men playing checkers shows a surprising amount of racial mixing, back when there were only two races (except where that wasn't true). The two boys (it looks like there's another boy behind the checker player with the dark hat) could easily be any boy from my childhood hanging around the gas station a block away. The photo also captures the lazy days of summer with long, hot afternoons with nothing to do (for boys and old men, anyway). No such thing as playdates or electronic games, no television, no money for a movie show except maybe once a week, no one worried about you when you left the house to roam around. Not a care in the world but there's nothing to do.

 

[Fading Fast]

I was leaning toward suspecting a recreation myself, until I noticed the greasy dust on the floor. I don't think any set dresser would go to trouble of finding a petroleum-based floor wax and applying it to the wood and then letting it accumulate just enough dust to create that scuffy sheen that's visible in the picture.

Floor waxes and polishes were another product commonly sold in gas stations, just to stay on topic.

As usual, I have neither your detailed knowledge nor eye for exacting detail, but that picture feels staged to me with those two being models / actors chosen to look the part.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It could also be a setup with models done in 1903, perhaps half a stereopticon slide -- a part of a spicy series about "What Went On In the Office After Closing Time." And color photography did exist in the early years of the 20th Century -- as any reader of old National Geographics will recall, the "Autochrome" process found limited use after its invention in 1903, a process using dyed grains of potato starch to achieve its effects. The colors were rather muted and grainy, and this is definitely not an Autochrome. It's computer-colorized B&W.

This, however, is not a recreation --

This is the Shell Type A "Cracker-Box" Service Station, introduced in 1915 as the first standardized, pre-fabricated gas station building style in the US. They were basically steel panels made up of "Factory Sash" window panes bolted together on a small concrete pad, with the canopy integrated structurally into the building's roof panel. Shell built hundreds of these all along the West Coast from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, with the idea that if a location flopped, the building could be dismantled in a morning and moved to a new site before sunset. Although they were rather flimsy buildings, and were not suited to locations with other than mild climates, some of them survived for a very long time. When I lived on De La Vina Street in Santa Barbara in the early 1980s, an original Shell Type A, which would have been at least fifty years old at that point, was still in use as a body shop a block up from my apartment.

 

[BlueTrain]

I--no, WE, are--are astonished that you once lived in California!

The dusty waxed floor (looks more scuffed than dusty to me) reminds me of the schools that I went to, especially the older buildings built well before WWII. I even went to the same school where my mother graduated high school in 1932. In the old schools, the floors were oiled hardwood. At least that's the way they were described. They weren't waxed or mopped at all but instead, the janitor spread something that looked like sawdust and called "sweeping compound." Then swept it up. That was how clean it was.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I went to California when I was 20 on a Greyhound bus, seeking to escape certain domestic unpleasantness. It was as far away as I could get without swimming, and I can't swim.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob