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1. 

   baslim_the_begger said, 2 months ago

   Now tell him that gasoline was only 25 cents a gallon. He’ll be rolling on the ground, laughing.

2. 

   pouncingtiger said, 2 months ago

   The times have most definitely changed. :-(

3. 

   Johanan Rakkav said, 2 months ago

   Notice how Perfessor has parked on the wrong side of the pump.

4. 

   BigChiefDesoto said, 2 months ago

   He better put ethyl in that. It’s also got a 325 horsepower 10 to 1 compression engine in it. It’ll just barely run on the best junk they sell for gasoline nowadays! It’ll also carry an eight foot Christmas tree in the trunk with the lid closed WITHOUT damaging the tree. I know, I’ve done it many times carrying the Christmas tree home from the tree farms around the San Francisco Bay Area!

5. 

   SchmoozeMinkey said, 2 months ago

   Yup, Signal Gasoline was 25 cents per gallon at the corner gas station back when I was a kid. Now the gangs sell drugs at that intersection, a block from the elementary school. And there’s a church there, too. The high school’s hotshot football coach just got fired this week for alleged molestation. Yes, times have changed.

6. 

   ladyfingers86 said, 2 months ago

   Before the Recession, if someone was told about gasoline costing only 25 cents a gallon, he/she wouldn’t be believed. Those were the days before OPEC gained control of the gas/oil industry. I remember when gas was 75 cents a gallon and putting two dollars worth (I couldn’t afford to fill ‘er up then). When gas prices hit over $4 a gallon, I was happy to take the bus!

7. 

   Richard said, 2 months ago

   Ahhh, I miss the smell of leaded gas.

8. 

   dkram said, 2 months ago

   I remember when $5.00 of gas would fill the tank on a large car.
   Loved the 60s.

   ^.^

9. 

   Susan001 said, 2 months ago

   When we were kids, my older brother would collect road maps from every gas station we stopped at.
   Drove our mother crazy! LOL
   (Me–I collected bottle caps from the vending machines.)

10. 

    jrbj said, 2 months ago

    I remember full service gas stations and 25 cent gas. Usually, there was a garage there too and we’d take the car in for service and repairs to the same station we got gas at. Everyone in the neighborhood went there and you could depend on good work for a reasonable price. Now, one hour of labor is more than what you’d spend a whole year for service and repairs in those days. Oh yeah, I miss those days a lot.

11. 

    Yukoneric said, 2 months ago

    At an archery tournament in college I won a prize of $5.00 worth of gas. It wouldn’t all fit in the tank! I worked at a station in the 70’s and my sole job was to “take care of the little old ladies” I did the “full” service; even brought the credit card thingy out to the car for the customer to sign.

12. 

    Lewreader said, 2 months ago

    I earned $1.35 an hour plus 5 cents per can of oil sold. You bet I looked under your hood. A tip every now and then would have been appreciated

13. 

    Josh 1360 said, 2 months ago

    Hey, I lived those days. This generation of “they were so last week” will never understand our time.

14. 

    BC13 said, 2 months ago

    And the oil companies were making good profits back then when there were full-service. Now it’s just plain highway robbery.

15. 

    EarlWash said, 2 months ago

    Hey, Susan001, yup, pop bottle caps with removable cork gaskets, The kid wearing the most bottle caps on his shirt was king of the block.

16. 

    skyyekat said, 2 months ago

    Yes, and most stations where I grew up gave away sets of glassware and or “stamps”–as in S&H Green Stamps and Top Value I think were the other ones. Oh, heck my memory eludes me. Or to put it another way–the old gray mare …
    Maybe that’s what we need now–get the real horses back on the road for a while. Good benefits there. Grain’s plenty. Free fertilizer. Maybe traveling a little slower would give us all a chance to really think …

17. 

    BigChiefDesoto said, 2 months ago

    And, speaking of putting Skyler through college, tell him that he could have gone to UC Berkeley for $69 a semester! NO that’s NOT $69 a unit, that’s $69 TOTAL for the semester! BOY have we gone down hill since then!!

18. 

    PatPiano said, 2 months ago

    I lived in way back in the “Dark Ages” when the mimimum wage was .75 an hour, raised to 1.19 the next year!

    Gas was 19 cents a gallon in San Jose and I could fill up my little Volkswagen for 3 dollars….ah, those were the days!

19. 

    Doctor Toon said, 2 months ago

    My first job was gas jockey at my dads service station.
    I was 13 years old, it was 1975.
    He paid me 50 cents an hour and bought my breakfast and lunch.
    Worked a 10 hour day and made 5 bucks.
    That was good money for a kid in those days.

20. 

    jimpow said, 2 months ago

    When I was stationed at Ft. Bliss in El Paso in 1962, I drove a 1959 Austin Healey Sprite. My gas guage was broken, but I never ran out of gas because I knew could get 100 miles on a $1.00 of gas. A penny a mile.

    Twenty years later I had a Chevy with a 400 cu in engine. Got 10 mpg. Luckly my round trip to work and back was only 10 miles. A gallon a day. I think gas was about 80 cents a gallon.

21. 

    jtpozenel said, 2 months ago

    I worked night shift in a gas station in 1968. Gas was around 30 cents. No self-serv at all back then. Checked oil, washed windshields, gave out Coke glasses and stamps (I think they were “Top Value” stamps.) The Sunoco station down the street used to give little cardboard “game pieces” that you opened to see if you won money (usually a dollar or two.) A friend of mine worked there and would give me hands full of them and we would go out cruising for the evening on the “winnings” (he was fired.)

22. 

    Richard said, 2 months ago

    And all night gas stations did not get robbed as often, it was rare, also a person could hang out there too.

23. 

    Ushindi said, 2 months ago

    A bunch of old people here…lol. I still have the commemorative drinking glass I got free from a Chevron station showing the moon landing. I also got my very first hatchet and hunting knife set as a kid with a book of S&H green stamps my folks gave me. Boy, was that neat. Shooting marbles, making slingshots and inner-tube guns (inner-tubes?), swimming in the creek (had to wait an hour after eating, or you get cramps and drown - every mother knew THAT)….I quit, I’m getting depressed.

24. 

    puddleglum1066 said, 2 months ago

    If you filled up on Sunday (with Purple Martin Ethyl), you had your choice of glassware or a free Sunday paper… of which you could choose from three, each of which was a good two inches thick stack of newsprint… and each of which included a comic section of a dozen pages, strips drawn beautifully and printed big… Ah, don’t get the old man started.

    The best thing about full-service gas, though, was our ‘56 Chevy, with the filler hidden behind the left taillight (you had to turn a piece of chrome on the light, and it would then swing open to expose the filler). By the early ’60s, none of the pump jockeys knew where it was, and it was great fun to watch them walking around, looking at both back fenders, pulling on the license plate, and finally coming up to ask where the heck the gas went in… all for three bucks worth of gas!

25. 

    smoothpate said, 2 months ago

    Boy are you guys bringing back memories!!!! Service station attendants, “Mechanics on Duty”, trading stamps, giveaways, free maps, displays out in front of the stations for tires, batteries, CANS of oil, and windshield wipers, plus I remember when the object of a “gas war” was to have the LOWEST price on a gallon of gas. The lowest I remember was 23.9/gallon.

    We use to collect glasses from the local Marathon stations. Our set of Apollo space program glasses and decanters were a victim of a move but I still have a few BC glasses, dishes, and a cookie jar. In 1972, the local Standard station gave out lapel buttons (with a minimum 8 gallon purchase) with slogans from previous presidential elections. I also remember that Gulf stations had an agreement with Holiday Inn where their stations were located next to Holiday Inns and if you paid for your stay at a Holiday Inn with your Gulf card you received a discount.

    BTW jimpow, my first car was a ‘73 Caprice coupe with a 400 engine and like yours got 10 mpg in town but a whopping 15mpg on the road. It cost about $20 to fill it up, but you could comfortably seat six people and probably fit another six in the trunk!!!!

26. 

    shermscott said, 2 months ago

    My first car was a 55 Mercury Monterey. 12 mpg from that old 292 that I rebuilt myself. You could get real auto parts from Sears, along with the tools, though I preferred Penney’s and Ward’s tools. Gas was generally 30 cents, but you could often fight it for 19 during a gas war. Once I even found it at 10 cents.

27. 

    OldHipster said, 2 months ago

    What you never did was stop at a lonely gas station. Those slick attendants would somehow show you that you needed oil, could prove it by showing you the dipstick, assure you that you better replace that belt because it is about ready to snap 20 miles down the road, leaving you in the middle of the hot desert, jab an ice pick in your radiator and tell you that your radiator has a BAD leak and will leave you stranded down the road about 20 miles, and even jab your tire and if they could a spare tire and wind up selling you two new tires (they’re on sale today!!) or you might blow one out 20 miles down the road and be stranded in the hot desert. Never, never, NEVER, leave your car alone among these slicker attendents, or you’d spend a load of money to get just gas, which, being at a lonely desert gas station, would be trice as high, and more, as your local friendly neighborhood station!

28. 

    Richard said, 2 months ago

    And while they gave us that free stuff they buttered up congress to pass the rules that benifitted the oil companies and congress sold us out.

29. 

    artybee said, 2 months ago

    My best friend’s dad used to run a Texaco station, and I used to do all that stuff the perfesser mentioned for free just for fun.

    Remember when air was free? Now if you can find a station with air at all, it costs 50 cents! Boooooo!

30. 

    NyukNyuk2000 said, 2 months ago

    Sadly , the days of gas station attendants and gas stations giving away free stuff were way befor my time. At least I’m not clueless like Skyler.

31. 

    cholldekkgher stenst... said, 2 months ago

    And now we gotta pump in the gas OURSELVES, while the foreigner in the turban who speaks at best broken english takes your money behind the bullet-proof glass enclosure and then argues with you when you want change.

32. 

    jtpozenel said, 2 months ago

    OldHipster I remember my father having his oil checked on the Ohio turnpike by the attendant and being told he was a quart low. He even brought the dipstick right up to the driver’s window. We could see pretty well under the hood from inside the car, and I noticed that when he put the oil in, he had a rag holding the bottom of the can.

    Years later I heard that attendants would not put the dipstick in all the way when they checked it so it would appear low. Then they would have oil cans that had been previously emptied from the bottom, with the spout mounted on the top. The rag was used to hide the hole on the bottom when they “emptied” the can into the filler hole. Sure enough, when they checked the oil afterward, the level was just fine. A can of oil was pretty cheap back then, but working the night shift on a busy turnpike could be very lucrative.

33. 

    treBsdrawkcaB said, 2 months ago

    GOSH, there’s a lot of old people who write TONS of memories about how it used to be! Cassatt & Brookins REALLY struck a chord with everyone on this one!

    …And I’m no different… Yes, I remember $0.35 / gallon gas, gas station attendants that did it all for you and getting “stuff” like drinking glasses, Blue Chip Stamps or Green Stamps, STP Stickers or stickers for other automotive products. Yes, the Oil companies did great business then until OPEC decided to gang rape the United States.