2025, Automotive, History, Uncategorized

Service-less Station

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The very first night after I got my license, my mother gave me the keys to her Volkswagen bug so I could go out to a party.  As I was leaving the house, she handed me a five-dollar bill and said I should get gas.  I headed up to the service station nearest to our house (in the rain).  When I pulled in, the attendant came out; he had on a plastic poncho and his hat had a plastic protector on it. 

I felt so grown up as I rolled down the window and said “Fill it up or $5.00, whichever comes first.”  Then, to my utter dismay and embarrassment, the attendant started to laugh.  Standing there in the rain, he laughed HARD.  My confusion must have shown on my face because he said “Even if the gas tank were bone dry, you could never get $5 of gas into it.”   These days, I would laugh along with him and maybe explain that I had just gotten my license, but back then at the tender age of 16, I was absolutely mortified.  Every time I ever had to go to that station again, I crossed my fingers that a different attendant would come out. 

Last week when I stopped for gas, I was hoping to clean off my car a bit… it’s dirty and the timing hasn’t been right for a carwash in the driveway.  I wasn’t holding my breath when I checked the squeegee holders and it was a good thing.  None of the containers had any water in them; this is so common that when I do find water I’m always surprised.

It got me to thinking about how much has changed since my $5 mortification.  No attendants to pump the gas or to check under the hood or to top off your oil or to clean your windshields or to take your payment.  No water in the windshield cleaner containers and even if you find water, you might not find a squeegee.  If you’re lucky enough to find water and a squeegee, you have to hold your breath that the squeegee is actually whole and not coming apart.  And then there’s the price.  Gas was 37₵ that night in the rain.  These days the most economical gas near me is at my local Pump n Munch.  Last time I filled up, it was $2.79. 

As I started writing this, YA was looking over my shoulder.  “What’s a service station?” she asked and I thought… perfect.  We are so removed from the service we used to get that the younger generation doesn’t even recognize the phrase!

Do you remember the first time you pumped your own gas?

24 thoughts on “Service-less Station”

  1. I don’t remember the first time I pumped my own gas but I can recall when gas was 26 cents a gallon.

    I’ve recounted here my experience working as a gas station attendant at night in the middle of winter. We attendants were mostly young students. The manager would show up at the end of our shift to reconcile the night’s take and invariably he would announce it was short— way too often for that to be true. So the manager was skimming a couple of dollars from our already meager pay.

    As a defense, the attendants devised ways of skimming from the customers. One way was to pump gas from the furthest back pump, the one the driver couldn’t read without getting out of the car, and remember it was mid-winter at a time when winters were actually wintery. Then we would pad the amount of the fill we reported to the driver. Another gambit was to encourage the driver to add a can of Heet fuel additive to the gas. At the time, Heet came in a can with a bottlecap top, as beer cans once were. We would carefully pop the top and, initially at least, pour the additive into the tank. When that driver left, we would carefully replace the cap on the empty can and for the rest of the night any Heet adding would be pantomime.

    Of course I can’t condone our devices but it was, as I said, defensive on our part. There were downsides to the service at service stations.

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  3. It took me a while to get it, VS – what year was this? do you remember what the price/gal. would have been? (I was told there would be no math.)

    First time had to be when I got my VW bug, which was 1972. I do remember driving, solo, from Calif. to Iowa… as I was washing the windshield, a older man traveling with his wife said he admired that I (a girl!) was doing my own gas. I said “Who else is going to do it?”

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  4. My dad owned a combination car wash, coffee shop, Uhaul franchise. and gas station. I believe I was in grade school when he taught me how to fill up our car with gas. He was always teaching me things like that, and how to use tools and fix things. He got rid of the gas pumps after about 10 years and focused on the other parts of the business.

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    1. Would have been at Anselm’s service station, which had two service bays both usually had a car up on the hoist. He and my father were brothers of the oily cloth. His station had junk all around the side and back. It was Standard brand. He would cut the ends off of oil cans, spot weld about ten together end to end and let the residual oil slowly drip into a pail at the bottom of a drum he had set up for the purpose. The oil he would use in his repair work, not in engines. He would give my father some during haying season to use to oil machinery. I think I paid about 23 cents a gallon that day.

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  7. I started a comment, got distracted, and lost it. Oh well.

    I don’t remember clearly the first time I pumped gas. My dad might have asked me to fill the lawnmower gas tank or the boat gas tank while he went in to pay (or smoke and chat with someone). I couldn’t lift the boat gas tank, so he’d lift it in for me when he returned.

    I do remember gas prices being around .40 per gallon. It was around .50 to .60 per gallon when I got my drivers license in 1976, followed by the gas lines of the late ‘70s when gas prices soared. We thought .50/gallon was a lot, then it went over a dollar in 1980.

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  8. WP is being mean to me again today. It keeps logging me out. When I log back in, it takes me to a weird screen and I have to go back, and back to get back to the blog. Then I might or might not be logged out again.

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  9. When my brother went away to the Army in 1968, I was 16. I got my license and his car. I was crazy about all things “car”. That meant learning how to use the gas pump, even at the service station where gas was pumped “for you”.
    The next summer I went to the beach with a girlfriend and some of her acquaintances (whom I didn’t know). On the way back the car (not mine) stopped to fill up the tank. I watched as the 2 guys filled it themselves with eyes trained on the person in the station. When it was nearly full, they tripped the pump back to zero, put in the final few gallons, and then paid for only them. I hadn’t been part of that bit of larceny, but rode home on the stolen gas, feeling like a thief. I’m glad that it soon became MY turn to go to the army and to never have to mess with those guys again.

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    1. I, too, can recall when gas was 26 cents a gallon. Of course, my hourly pay at the time was $1.25, and our monthly rent for our fully furnished basement apartment was $62.50. The year was 1965, and the place was Cheyenne, Wyoming.

      I was late to driving and car ownership. My parent’s didn’t have a car when I was growing up. We bicycled everywhere, so I had little experience with gas or service stations prior to arriving in the US.

      I do recall being impressed with the various service stations along I-80 on our drive from Long Island to Cheyenne. I especially remember one in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska.

      It was a Sunday afternoon, and our car, a 1963 VW beetle, stuffed to the gills with luggage and wedding presents pulled into a desolate service station with two pumps. Nothing but prairie and tumbleweed as far as you could see.

      One wedding present, a potted miniature orange tree with a handful of oranges on it, had been nestled between my legs in the passenger seat the entire trip. The young man who was cleaning the windows of our car spotted the tree and motioned to his buddies who were hanging out inside the station to come take a look. Soon there were five or six young men peering in through the windows at the orange tree between my legs. When something as exotic as a miniature orange tree shows up at a rural Nebraska gas station on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter, it’s something you don’t want to miss, I guess. Wasband, insanely jealous as he was, blamed and berated me the rest of the way to Cheyenne.

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  11. A cool, rainy day here. We need the rain, it’s nice! And, so far, not too hard of a rain. Well over an inch.

    We used to fill the cars from the gas barrel at home. Maybe late 70’s or early 80’s the tax rules changed and if it was purchased as ‘farm gas’, it had to only be used for gas. Sometimes we cheated, but mostly that’s when we started buying gas in town. And I remember being dressed for a prom (or something wearing a tux) and going to the last ‘full service’ station in town to have the guy pump gas for me.
    And when cars went to unleaded the tank inlet pipe got smaller, the nozzle at home wouldn’t fit anymore. But if you slipped a milking inflation over it, then it would fit. Every now and then I still had to add a few gallons. I haven’t done that in years. We still have a gas barrel for the lawnmower, chainsaws, ATV, Gator, Swather, and two tractors take gasoline. The other two tractors are diesel. And the truck. As I’ve said, farm diesel is dyed red and is not to be used in over the road vehicles. Getting caught with that is a big fine.

    Does YA know how to use a rotary phone?? Or crank down a car window? 🙂

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    1. Truckers coming down from Canada in the 70’s expected to be able to buy diesel before Duluth. They could not. 3 ran out near me. So I bought them #1 heating oil, same as diesel, also illegal to use.

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    2. I’m pretty sure it would take her a bit to get the rotary phone, although the car window would be OK… she grew up riding around in my old cars, which still had crank windows!

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  12. My father schooled me so hard that I only used our farm gas once when I did not think I would have enough to get to Anselm’s. He was pipelining in Michigan and mother and I were running the farm while both work full time. I lost track of the gas in my 1949 Ford.

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  13. I remember pumping gas into 5 gallon gas cans for my Dad. Quite a savings during “gas wars” which have become less frequent. It’s only been a few years since I stopped that type of “fill ‘er up” mainly because of storage issues.

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