Guys,
As a kid, I worked part time at a gas station. My dad said it would do
me good to get grease under my fingernails. It took 30 years to find out he
was right.
The station had a side business cleaning up cars for used car lots. One
day there was a beautiful leaf green Bugeye sitting in the bay for me to work
on. It was maybe a year old. Used car. That`s the one that hooked me.
In those days the kid got to do the Simonize by hand.
Did you ever use old-fashioned Simonize? The can was yellow. Weighed
easily a full pound. Wax on-wax off. I sweated like a lumberjack in August.
At 75 cents an hour.
Add that to the grease under the nails lesson learned.
Anyway, as I recall, gas was 28 cents a gallon, expertly pumped by yours
truly holding the nozzle with a rag nearly as black as my hands but not so
black as my coveralls. Somewhere under the grime, the coveralls were grey with
pinstripes. I didn`t deserve having my name on them like the regulars did. As
far as anybody there was concerned, I was merely "the kid."
I would also check under the hood and the tires and clean the windshield.
Every now and then some SOB wanted the spare checked. As luck would have it,
the spare was always under a pile of junk that had to be taken out and put
back.
Once there was a dead dog in the trunk. Runover, looked like, but I
kept my mouth shut.
All that for a lousey buck`s worth of gas and 75 cents an hour.
Anyway, my friends would come in near closing time and want to lift the
hose to get that extra quart or so in there. Mainly they drove those black
primered 49-50 flathead Fords we talked about. Some had daddy`s car, a Dodge
or Nash. Nothing to be caught dead in unless it was the best you could do on a
Saturday night.
Nobody filled it up. Their gas bill was seldom over 50 cents. You could
go a long way on under two gallons in those days.
Frank, the owner, said if he ever caught me cheating the hose, he`d
fire me sure. He`d stand there watching from the window.
I eventually did get canned, but not for shaking the hose. Something
about stripping the lug bolts on some old geezers Pontiac.
Bert
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