Here is a couple of postcards from the Hat 'n Boots station in Seattle. It's closed now, and I think being moved, or has been moved. We used to beg my Dad to go there for gas as a kid. One pic is from the' 50s and one from the looks like mid'70s.

 

Great pics!!!

thanks for sharing

Bobby

 

The white LTD (it's not an LTD II!) to the right is a 1975/78 model, the Torino is a 1974/76 model.

 

I couldn't really see the back bumper on the Torino. In '73, didn't they have the big bumper on the front only?

 

Yes.

1973's have the "10 MPH" front bumper, 1974 and later cars have the 10 MPH bumper on the front, "5 MPH" bumper on the rear.

So, the Torino could be a 1973/76.

Someone is bound to ask, so... What's all this malarky about these bumpers?

New Fed Safety Laws said the 1973 (and later) front bumpers had to absorb a 10 mile an hour collision, so the front brackets (Ford called 'em isolators), slowly collapsed when hit.

The 1974 (and later) rear bumpers had to absorb a 5 mile an hour collision.

The isolators for these bumpers weighed a ton, and prolly weighed more than the bumpers themselves!

And...there was a heavy metal re-inforcement plate behind both bumpers. it weighed a ton, too.

 

Along with all that weight... they were just plain ole UGLY too.

 

Yea I can remember when I started driving in Southern California in 1966. You could get gas for 27.9 cents a gallon or 5 gallons for a dollar.

 

my 54 ford back in 1964 would only run on the chevron white tank. about
.35 cents a gallon. got 8 miles to the gallon. could just make L.A from san
diego

 

Yeah, I know. I had to remove the bumper from my '74 Gran Torino.

The hood is so long and the engine sits so far back, I had to remove the bumper, grille, header panel, radiator and radiator support just to get my cherry picker close enough to the engine to lift it out!

 

I worked at a Zepher station for a year or better after H.S. graduation in '71-'72 during one of our local gas wars, .27.9-29.9. Two of us just about had to run to keep up with cars & trucks lined up for a block for hours on end.
I would fill 5 gallon cans for my 68 Torino "on the book" because I never could get it in line to fill it up. On payday our boss gave us a 10% break on our bill!
We saw dozens of GTO's. Cleveland Mustangs, Roadrunners,396 Chevelles, and once even a Cobra!! There were a lot of street wars back then and I usually got the scoop on where and when these would happen. Couldn't wait to get off at 10pm
just to watch Also wish I had a camera back then. but the memories are still with me..

 

Judging by the other prices here, must have been a gas war, or my poor brain has lost it over the last almost 40 years. It very well might have been 29.9 instead of 19.9, and 31.9 instead of 21.9. Or, the fact that the owner built/bought a brand new Gulf station on the other side of town. The only way Gulf would let him do it, was if he opened up the old decrepit station on the south side of town, that had been closed a long time. I was initially hired just to keep it open 8 hours a day, he really didn't care if it sold gas at all, because the other station was brand new, state of the art, with 3 service bays, and ours was REALLY old and nasty, basically a two-bay, but Model T-wide. Well, I started doing oil changes, and minor stuff, pretty soon had two more pump jocks working, and hired a full-time mechanic. Soon, we were doing almost the same business, as the new station! So, the crew came in and painted everything, made it look nice, and it was a service station again. I was only 18, right out of high school. Of course, that's where I got to drive my first Ford truck. A 1951, can't remember for sure, but probably an F2, seems it was express bed. For a 20 year old truck, it was badly rusted out, I remember you could rest your feet on the frame, while driving! Plus, the owner wouldn't put a penny into it, and the equalizer for the clutch was missing, so you had to start the truck in compound low, then shift up and down, without a clutch! Really taught me how to drive a stick, the hard way. Thankfully, it WAS out in the desert, so you could usually get by with just going down to 2nd, chortling through the stop. If you hit one of the few lights in town, you'd just kill it, then start out again. Lot's of fun times in that truck!I remember the hardest part was going down from 2nd to 1st. Almost impossible, but could be done! But man, you had to REALLY wind out the motor to match gears, at almost 0 speed.

ah, the fond memories. Sure beat the Jack in the Box memories!!

R

 

Does anyone know if CALSO OIL is still around? Anyone have a sign? Bill

 

It's a small pic but is this it? It looks like it's Chevron related.

 

My best memory of the time I helped at my dad's garage was that I ate pizza for supper almost every night during the summer. My dad was too busy to stop for lunch so he'd tell me if we'd skip lunch he'd buy a pizza for supper. All I had to do was call the pizza joint, tell them who it was, no need to tell them what we wanted, and forty-five minutes later the beat up yellow Chevelle would show up with the pizza.

The last garage my dad had was an ancient old Mobil station, I think, it had the oriental Pagoda roof on it. Before we moved in we had to clean at least an inch of hardened gunk off of the floor in the garage left by the previous tenants, a motor cycle shop. The place was in two parts, the office, which had the oriental top, that had a basement that led out to the old oil changing pit and the two stall garage, which was a little newer, that had an ancient hoist that would raise up to about five feet and then jump up the rest of the way, pretty interesting to watch a car jump two feet up into the air. My dad had the landlord yank it out ASAP because it was useless. Also, right after we moved in my dad dicided the office roof needed to be repainted so he scaled the roof only to have the old paint fail and act as a lubricant under his feet. He had tied a rope to the top of the roof and his waist so he didn't fall off but it took a half hour for his friend to stop laughing, watching my dad squirm around the roof so he could help get him down.

Here is a current picture of the place I got off of Google maps. It's a used car lot now:





Man, those were the days. Again, probably not as great as I remember them but I would give almost anything to spend that time with my dad again.

 

My sorta-funniest moments at the Gulf station, was the owner's wife - she was a devout alcoholic, and would have bourbon in her coffee, when we opened at 7:00 am. One day, I'd hired a new pump jock, and he was running around trying very hard. Well, he forgot to pull the nozzle out of a car, and let them drive away. The hose stretched a bit, before it broke, spraying gas all over. I ran to hit the emergency stop, and when I turned around, the owner's wife had pee'd her pants, and was standing in a big puddle. She wasn't even embarrassed, just looked at me and said "So? What about it??"