Author: irememberjfk_l6fq3c

As we drive past gas station signs that advertise prices per gallon that far exceed the hourly rates of our first jobs, we Boomers find ourselves looking longingly into our memory banks for the regular phenomenon that was experienced in the mid 1960’s: the gas war.

Gas station owners hate high gas prices as much as the rest of us. The only sure winners when prices achieve record highs are the owners of the basic asset: crude oil.

We get angry when Exxon posts high profits, but if they were posting losses, then it would have a deleterious effect on the economy and anyone who owns mutual fund shares.

At this point, I would like to state that I am no fan of Exxon, or any other gasoline producer. I suspect corruption is rampant at high levels within each corporation, and millions or billions of dollars of funds are finding their way into rich people’s pockets illicitly. But I digress. This is supposed to be about nostalgia.

The fact is that with the much more stable prices of crude oil and gasoline in the 1960’s, gas station owners were able to have gas wars amongst each other that would bring huge grins to the faces of our fathers, as they filled their big cars with gas that might be as much as 20% cheaper than it was the day before.

The gas station owners were making good livings selling fuel at 30 cents a gallon. They could afford the luxury of dropping prices periodically by such a margin for short periods of time. They would either break even, or still manage to turn a small profit. The station owners would frequently hold such wars with mutual agreement.

Unfortunately, the profit margin per gallon remains about the same today for station owners as it did in 1965. I’m not talking percentage, I’m talking cents per gallon! Ergo, gas wars are no more. When a station is selling gas three cents a gallon cheaper than the one down the street, THAT’s a modern-day gas war.

Sure, gas prices make us angry. But it’s not the gas station’s fault. When was the last time you saw a gas station that wasn’t also a convenience store? Selling two aspirin for a dollar or more is how they make a profit, not by selling regular gasoline for three bucks a gallon.

But we Boomer kids still have fond memories of when those signs would go up at local stations that would put our parents in such a cheery frame of mind for a week or two: GAS WAR.

In the 60’s and 70’s before the Oil Crisis, gas stations would offer you cool stuff free for filling ‘er up at their places of business.

That seems strange today. Most of the time, you pay at the pump with a credit card and never see a human. Or perhaps you walk up and pay (in advance) some surly guy behind bulletproof glass.

There’s not a whole lot of hope that he’s going to give you a free dinner plate for filling up.

But go back to the 1960’s and earlier, and service stations (as they were known) tried hard to get your business. In fact, they bent over backwards.

In addition to doing all of the work of filling your car, checking your oil, and making sure your tires had sufficient air, they would give you a gift out of sheer gratitude that you honored them by purchasing their gasoline.

I guess times have changed just a tad.

I remember most of the giveaways being dishes and glasses. And they weren’t bearing the name of the station or oil company that provided them, either. These were completely generic items that you could set out for company without them ever knowing that you obtained them free of charge, well NEARLY so.

The stations that offered these tantalizing baubles usually charged two or three more cents a gallon than the ones who MERELY filled your car and checked your oil and tires.

Hey, that was quite a difference when gas was less than 30 cents a gallon.

But it was nice being viewed with gratitude when we pulled in for a fill up, instead of being glared at.

You could always tell which homes on the street had at least three kids living there: look for a fake-wooden-sided station wagon parked out front.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the station wagon got its start. The Ford Model T resembled a station wagon in its most basic form. However, the tiny vehicle could only hold four comfortably.

In 1923, Star (a division of Durant Motors) began marketing a larger factory-built station wagon. The wagon body was made from wood.

As the decades progressed, station wagons became a common sight on American highways. The Pontiac Woodie was one of the most famous, with wooden side frames melded into a steel body. Many a California surf bum drove a restored (or not) Woodie in the 60’s.

But the wood was a pain to maintain. Screws needed tightening, varnish needed periodic stripping and recoating, and the expanding and contracting lumber caused all sorts of sealing headaches.

So in 1935, Chevrolet introduced the all-steel Suburban.

But it was expensive, and sales were slow. It was considered a work vehicle, not a family-mobile. It wasn’t until after WWII ended that all-steel station wagons finally became cheap enough to produce to be successful.

Add to that the Baby Boom, and automobile manufacturers began cranking out station wagons in unheard-of numbers by the 1950’s. And most of them featured fake wood sides that brought back memories of genuine woodies.

By 1957, the wagons were common on American roads.

And most of them were full of Boomer kids.

By the 1960’s, station wagons were so common that they seemed to outnumber sedans. Wagons were a ubiquitous sight on American roadways right up until the late 1980’s.

In 1984, Chrysler/Plymouth introduced the minivan. The death knell for station wagons was sounded.

Minivans allowed multiple passengers to enter the vehicle without dropping (or swinging) the tailgate. In fact, they could almost stand up! The different paradigms were an instant success, and soon practically every automaker, US and otherwise, were cranking out minivans and selling them as fast as they could make them.

Wagons continued to be manufactured, but their numbers fell each year.

In 1996, Chevrolet and Buick made their last station wagons.

We Boomer kids have fond memories of the spacious back ends of station wagons, big enough to set up miniature battlefields or road racing ovals on long vacation drives. You could also stretch WAY out and take a nap, too.

I had a 1990 Ford Taurus wagon with side-facing seats that popped up in the back area, allowing seven or eight to travel in the mid-sized vehicle! A major engineering accomplishment, to say the least. My young children loved getting to sit in the back.

Wagons are still manufactured by a few overseas car companies, and in 2005, the Dodge Magnum wagon was introduced. But long gone are the days when fake-wooden-sided wagons sat in front of many homes.

Today’s I remember JFK remembrance is the result of a conversation which took place between a coworker and myself earlier this week.

My buddy John Sorrells walked in, threw an object on my desk, and said “okay, nostalgia expert, what’s this?”

Without hesitation I said “Why, that’s a curb feeler.” John was impressed, but hey, I AM the nostalgia expert.

Curb feelers made their debut sometime in the early 50’s as an accessory added to luxury cars by Detroit. However, they were inexpensive add-ons for anyone who wanted to protect their tires from the unforgiving concrete that made up street curbs. This was particularly the case if one had big whitewalls on their sweet ride.

Whitewall tires weren’t really invented in as much as they were simply the original tires. In the automobile’s heyday of the Model T, tires were made of light-colored rubber. The rubber didn’t wear so well, so eventually, more carbon black was added to the tread area. This made for tires which were black around the circumference, but white on the sidewalls. As the entire tire began to be manufactured out of higher carbon-black rubber, consumers clamored for the look of their father’s tires. Thus, sidewalls were pigmented with a wide white stripe.

As the 50’s became the 60’s, the size of the whitewall began to shrink. By 1969, it was a narrow strip perhaps 1/2″ wide, often accompanied by a similar-sized red strip. Nowadays, of course, the whitewall is nearly extinct, as are so many of the things we remember.

Another disappearing accessory our fathers might have favored was the dashboard compass. Ever the focused navigators, our fathers wanted to know which way true north was. Perhaps they may have navigated B-24’s a few years earlier. Whatever the case, many a roomy sedan had a floating spherical compass mounted securely on the dash.

A 1954 ad had this to say about the trusty device: You can count on this pretested instrument, used by the armed forces, to tell you exactly where you’re headed. Used in the car, it’s a dependable companion for any motorist. Attaches with suction cup to dash or windshield. No getting lost with one of these predecessors to the GPS!

Another accessory our fathers may have preferred was the exterior window shades that kept the sun at bay.

My own father had a brand-new 1974 Audi and obtained his shades straight from the dealership. Made of shiny chrome, they clipped inside the topmost groove that contained the window. They might not have blocked a tremendous amount of sun, but look sharp they did.

Another accessory frequently spotted in Impalas and Fury’s of the 60’s was a console organizer designed to sit on the hump between the driver and passenger in front of the bench seat. The ones I remember had heavy bean bag “wings” that draped over the hump, with a box of sorts anchored to the top, where you could store drinks, road maps, ice scrapers, or any other gewgaws small enough to fit. There was a tremendous amount of unused room up there that the organizer put

to good use. in fact, I may have been able to fit my gorgeous little 1992 Tercel that I drive to work into one of those puppies!

My dad never had a steering wheel knob, but I can recall more than one pickup of my childhood sporting them. Why pickups? I don’t know. I’ll bet many of you recall them attached to steering wheels of basic four-door land boats, but I remember spotting two or three, all in 1950’s-era Ford and Chevy pickups. Perhaps they were a factory accessory? I’m not sure. All I know is that one could really whip a steering wheel back and forth with one of those gizmos.

My own dad was obsessed with gas mileage long before the fuel crisis, and thus purchased many an attachment designed to get the very last foot out of a gallon of gas. I remember one weird device called a “Pacer Magnum” that was designed to sit on an eight-cylinder distributor cap. It consisted of little cylinders about two inches long that plugged into the holes on the distributor, and were hollow on top so the spark plugs could plug into them. There were joined together by a wire, making the whole thing look like a string of firecrackers. Did it increase mileage? Apparently not. He never bought another one.

Our fathers loved their cars. I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of accessories that were lavished upon them. So how about you, readers? What little extras can you recall that your own parents purchasing to trick out their rides?

It was a thick, clear plastic material that had raised triangular bumps all over it (I guess to provide traction for the slippery stuff), or also seen smooth, as in the picture. It was seen on automobile seats, couches, chairs, and nearly anything else that could possibly come into contact with the human derrière.

In the 1960’s, it was everywhere.

I remember my parents taking one of their biannually-bought new Plymouths in to have this stuff put on the spacious bench seats. When mom and I went to pick up the car, we had to drive with the windows down due to the endless square yards of extremely redolent new plastic wrap.

The polyethylene artificial epidermis was ice cold in the winter, blazing hot in the summer, and quite uncomfortable to bare skin in any weather. However, it kept the upholstery, cocooned a millimeter or so beneath its surface, immaculate.

I’m still not sure why my parents would go to all that trouble to protect the already plastic seats of a car they were going to trade in in a couple of years anyway. But at least they resisted the temptation to cover the couch.

We had friends we would frequently visit in my hometown who had their furniture encased in this stuff. And while the couch no doubt looked the way it did when new, you couldn’t tell, as the plastic wrap provided a diffused view of the original upholstery.

Perhaps it was installed as a safeguard against guests who might stay too late.

Anyhow, one of the memories we enjoy as Baby Boomers was vast square footage of upholstery safely wrapped in clear plastic coverings.

We Boomer kids spent a lot of time on the road. In our family, my grandparents lived 400 miles to the north and to the south, so we usually traveled every year to see them. Additionally, we managed to take some great vacations. In 1967, we drove up to Montreal for Expo 67, coming back home through upstate New York, where I saw Niagra Falls. And the next year, we drove down to Miami, Florida.

Dad would get on the interstate and drive 70 miles an hour to get to the grandparents’ homes. But when we went on vacation, we would set out at a much more relaxed pace, stopping along the way to take pictures and check out big, funky roadside attractions. We never had reservations at hotels. Generally, towards the end of the day, we would pull in to a little motel with a vacancy sign turned on.

It was a great, relaxing way to travel.

The big objects were everywhere. A restaurant would put up a big tepee. A gas station would have a huge dinosaur. A motel would have a VW Bug on huge tires. And kids would eat it up.

Sometimes, an object would be so outrageous that my parents would have to stop and take a picture of me standing in front of it. That was good news for the restaurant owner, because we would usually go inside and get something to eat afterwards. Mission accomplished, in his book.

Giant Paul Bunyans were seen everywhere (and still are). They are known as “Muffler Men,” because so many of them are in proximity to muffler shops. Many more of them are holding giant tires. I’ll give you three guesses as to what sort of shop THEY are standing in front of.

Historic Route 66 still has many huge attractions along its route. Who hasn’t passed by the giant blue whale which is built on a former swimming pond in Catoosa, Oklahoma and wasn’t awed by its size and sheer blueness?

On that 1968 vacation, we took small highways all the way to Florida and up and down its length. We stayed in little motels in towns like St. Augustine, Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral. If the beach was nice, we might stay a couple of days before moving on. Then, a giant alligator would beckon us to stop and see what was in the cage alongside the gas station (and fill up the car, of course).

The wonderful thing about these giant objects is that they are probably still sitting right where they were when you saw them as a child. They are usually made of long-lasting stuff like steel, concrete, or fiberglass. Even though the establishment that erected the giant arrow, cowboy, tyrannosaurus, or whatever might be long out of business, the big customer attractor still stands there, dutifully getting people’s attention.

So why not take a leisurely drive across the country and revisit the small towns you passed through as a child. Odds are that the giant Paul Bunyan you remember so well is still standing there next to a gas station that may or may not be open for business.