Old gas stations

[LizzieMaine]

W. D. Teague is The Man, even though he was kind of a proto-New Agey space cadet fifty years before such things existed -- his book, "Design This Day," is full of mystical jibbert-jabber about the power of the five-pointed star, etcetera. I suspect he was one of the guys who answered those ads in the back pages of Popular Science promising the Secret Knowledge of the Rosicrucians, A.M.O.R.C.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Clearly some oil companies did not just sell to exclusive dealers?

Would Texaco have sold to that type of retailer?

THose types of stations were pretty common in the 1920s and the earlier part of the 1930s -- a sort of "gas-a-teria" concept. These were independent dealers who worked thru local jobbers, but as gas became a more brand-oriented, heavily-advertised product, the oil companies started to strongly encourage exclusivity among dealers.

I'm looking at our 1962 Texaco contract right now -- a five-year deal running thru 1967 -- and it's interesting that the only clause concerning brand exclusivity requires that no non-Texaco product could be sold under the "Texaco" trademark. Given that we had a big sign out front that said "Texaco" and big red letters on the front of the building that said "Texaco", I'd understand that to mean that we couldn't pump Esso gas. But we did sell Quaker State motor oil right along side the Texaco brands, so I guess exclusivity depended on what you thought you could get away with.

We were also required to meet minimum purchase quotas -- no less than 12,000 gallons a year of Sky Chief, no less than 18,500 gallons a year of FIre Chief, no less than 600 gallons of Texaco and Havoiline motor oil, no less than 300 pounds a year of Texaco greases, and no less than 30 gallons of Texaco PT Anti-Freeze. Those gas gallonge figures come out to about 85 gallons a day, so we weren't exactly considered a high-volume customer. When I was doing the books in the late '70s, we were doing about 150 gallons a day.

 

[Fading Fast]

THose types of stations were pretty common in the 1920s and the earlier part of the 1930s -- a sort of "gas-a-teria" concept. These were independent dealers who worked thru local jobbers, but as gas became a more brand-oriented, heavily-advertised product, the oil companies started to strongly encourage exclusivity among dealers.

I'm looking at our 1962 Texaco contract right now -- a five-year deal running thru 1967 -- and it's interesting that the only clause concerning brand exclusivity requires that no non-Texaco product could be sold under the "Texaco" trademark. Given that we had a big sign out front that said "Texaco" and big red letters on the front of the building that said "Texaco", I'd understand that to mean that we couldn't pump Esso gas. But we did sell Quaker State motor oil right along side the Texaco brands, so I guess exclusivity depended on what you thought you could get away with.

Thank you, good info and, clearly and, perhaps, surprisingly, based on your Quaker State offering, Texaco didn't lock you down like a McDonald's franchise.

From a vague and openly acknowledged imperfect memory, I think Hess was much more one-brand-only as - now that you jarred my memory - many branded stations sold "accessories" from several manufacturers (but only gas from the station's branded name, of course), but not Hess.

I think they truly only sold Hess products - and not much beside gas and a few basics. I can't say I remember "Hess" oil cans, but I can see a display of only one brand of oil in my faint memory (could have been another brand than Hess, but again, it was all one brand whichever it was).

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Had to look him up (I'm embarrassed) - impressive designer of automobiles. It doesn't appear (from Wikipedia) that he branched out to other fields as Loewy and Dreyfus did.

Yeah, he was "Mr. Tail Fin".

Rob

 

[EngProf]

The white car with the Rock Hudson look-a-like in front is a '53 Stude. They were far more streamlined than anything else from that era and were often re-powered with Chevrolet and Chrysler engines to set top-speed records at Bonneville.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Among the Boys' more entertaining efforts in the 1930s was the Atlantic Refining Company's "White Flash Plus" campaign of 1934-36, which got on board the Gay 90s nostalgia fad by featuring three identical mascots with Grover Cleveland moustaches extolling the virtues of their fuel -- a non-leaded regular-grade gasoline with premium-grade performance.

Atlantic ran the campaign in newspapers all along the East Coast to great success -- the cartoons were nearly as popular as the regular syndicated funnies -- and offered souvenir plate toppers featuring the characters at their stations.

The White Flash Plus Boys were even featured on radio for a while, as a singing trio on a variety program starring a rising young comic named Bob Hope.

 

[Fading Fast]

W. D. Teague is The Man, even though he was kind of a proto-New Agey space cadet fifty years before such things existed -- his book, "Design This Day," is full of mystical jibbert-jabber about the power of the five-pointed star, etcetera. I suspect he was one of the guys who answered those ads in the back pages of Popular Science promising the Secret Knowledge of the Rosicrucians, A.M.O.R.C.

I never heard of him and am surprised as Wikipedia lumps him in with the very familiar designers Loewy, Dreyfuss and Bel Geddes. Considering the current vogue of mid-century modern and with Teague (again, according to Wikipedia) being a "critical figure" in its spread, I assume he has a cult following today.

 

[Fading Fast]

The white car with the Rock Hudson look-a-like in front is a '53 Stude. They were far more streamlined than anything else from that era and were often re-powered with Chevrolet and Chrysler engines to set top-speed records at Bonneville.

They really look ahead of their time considering how many early '50s cars still looked like inverted bathtubs.

Not as streamlined as the Kaiser Darrin, but a bit of an echo there:

 

[LizzieMaine]

I never heard of him and am surprised as Wikipedia lumps him in with the very familiar designers Loewy, Dreyfuss and Bel Geddes. Considering the current vogue of mid-century modern and with Teague (again, according to Wikipedia) being a "critical figure" in its spread, I assume he has a cult following today.

Teague was considerably older than the other big names in Industrial Design and died in 1960, so he missed out on the explosion of interest in their work in the 1970s, which probably accounts for his lesser reputation today. But he was, without question, the designer who had the most impact on the American roadside -- all the endless variations on the porcelain-sided oblong-box-with-bays gas station design that continued from the thirties into the sixties were derived from his original Texaco design. It may be the single most influential commercial building design ever devised.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Maybe it didn't make him famous, but IMHO, his legacy is even better: He had an elegant design for a box (try doing that) that still populates our landscape today (in often muddled forms) and that still impacts design study. I could care less if anyone ever knows my name now or after I'm gone, but having left a positive legacy with that broad an impact would be impressive.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here's a Kodachrome slide taken at the end of my street during the Maine Lobster Festival parade in August 1953.

Note the survival of a genuine relic from the early 1930s -- a dual curbside gas pump set right on the sidewalk. At left is a Teague Texaco built just a few years earlier, and which still stands today as a marine-electronics shop swathed in a really ugly coating of two tone blue latex house paint. The Gulf building was demolished in the '80s to make way for a credit union, which remains on the lot today.

Note also the slobby spectators in front of the Texaco. Tuck your shirt in, you bum, don't you know it's The Fifties?

 

[tmal]

Loewy for me. For an unusual look at industrial design look at the International Harvester tractors he designed in the 30/40's - streamlined tractors!

 

[Fading Fast]

Here's a Kodachrome slide taken at the end of my street during the Maine Lobster Festival parade in August 1953.

View attachment 87742
Note the survival of a genuine relic from the early 1930s -- a dual curbside gas pump set right on the sidewalk. At left is a Teague Texaco built just a few years earlier, and which still stands today as a marine-electronics shop swathed in a really ugly coating of two tone blue latex house paint. The Gulf building was demolished in the '80s to make way for a credit union, which remains on the lot today.

Note also the slobby spectators in front of the Texaco. Tuck your shirt in, you bum, don't you know it's The Fifties?

Was that Texaco station a competitor of yours? I can't image your town having two Texaco stations - right / wrong?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The town where I grew up is about thirty miles down Route 1 from where I am now -- the above shot is the end of the street where I've been living the past twenty years.

Here, for comparison, is our station, in a photo taken by my mother with a box Brownie in 1952:

It was built in 1940, and my grandfather - leaning in the doorway -- began working there as an attendant that year. In 1941 he attended the Texaco traning school for station management while still working as an attendant, and in early 1943 he took over as the proprietor. He ran it until his death in 1980.

The building was a very simple wooden-frame structure, built as a variation of the standard Teague plan, but in 1962 it was expanded to include a second service bay, and the entire building was clad in the usual porcelain enamel siding.

It closed in 1981, and we sold it to a convenience store operator that fall. I took the lettering off the building myself, and the red porcelain enamel star hanging over the Marfak Lubrication bay is now hanging in my stairwell.

The building is still standing, but is unrecognizable -- the porcelain was first painted over and then, about ten years ago, it was completely removed and the building resided in wood. A couple of convenience stores and pizza joints have come and gone since then, and the place is now owned by a cabinet maker. But it's still there.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ great photos. Was Gulf more into the wrap-around window on one side of the station building than Texaco? Purely from impression (mainly from this thread), it seems more Gulf stations did that than Texaco.

Also, what inspired the number-of-bays expansion in '62 - business was that good / Texaco pushed it on you / something else?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Gulf went in big for wrap-around windows, but most of the Texacos around here had a pillar at the corner -- I dunno if that was a concession to the climate or what, but as you can see from the photos, ours was definitely the pillar type. It was always a very drafty building -- no insulation at all, heated by a small oil burner in the back, and during the winter a thick layer of ice would form on the inside of the window glass. We also had to leave the faucets running in the restrooms to keep the pipes from freezing overnight.

From all I was told about the renovation, that was the idea of Henry Smith Company, the local Texaco jobber, who owned the building until they sold it to my grandfather and uncle in 1978. In addition to allowing more room for servicing work, the porcelain siding obviated the need to repaint the building every other year. I happened to be driving thru town the day the siding came off, and it had been laid right over the original clapboards -- you could still see a clear outline of the original T E X A C O letters above the door, where new paint had been repeatedly applied around them over the years.

For a long time I had the actual blueprints for the renovation, and I wish I knew where they ended up.

 

[GHT]

The town where I grew up is about thirty miles down Route 1 from where I am now -- the above shot is the end of the street where I've been living the past twenty years.

Here, for comparison, is our station, in a photo taken by my mother with a box Brownie in 1952:

View attachment 87781
It was built in 1940, and my grandfather - leaning in the doorway -- began working there as an attendant that year. In 1941 he attended the Texaco traning school for station management while still working as an attendant, and in early 1943 he took over as the proprietor. He ran it until his death in 1980.

The building was a very simple wooden-frame structure, built as a variation of the standard Teague plan, but in 1962 it was expanded to include a second service bay, and the entire building was clad in the usual porcelain enamel siding.

View attachment 87782

It closed in 1981, and we sold it to a convenience store operator that fall. I took the lettering off the building myself, and the red porcelain enamel star hanging over the Marfak Lubrication bay is now hanging in my stairwell.

The building is still standing, but is unrecognizable -- the porcelain was first painted over and then, about ten years ago, it was completely removed and the building resided in wood. A couple of convenience stores and pizza joints have come and gone since then, and the place is now owned by a cabinet maker. But it's still there.

What a great story Lizzie, and I'm so glad that the building remains today. Small businesses that no longer trade in our country always fall to corporate vandalism in that the building will be demolished to be replaced by an ugly, nondescript apartment block. The homes inside will be so small that it's all but impossible to get the furniture in. But those homes will sell for a king's ransom.

I've posted this previously but it's worth another airing. This is a garage that went into disrepair following closure, saved from the wrecking ball by a far sighted couple who transformed it into their home. So much easier on the eye than some slab sided, grotesque apartment block.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Taunton, Massachusetts, 1940. Another good example of a wood-frame varation of the Teague Texaco, this one with two bays. The paint job, however, is not quite regulation -- the door frames and the bottom section below the windows should be dark green.

The presence of outboard motors and lawn mowers out front and a washing machine in one of the service bays isn't as odd as it might seem -- many gas stations in the Era handled a secondary line of hardware, usually carrying the brand name of a tire company. Both Firestone and B. F. Goodrich had full lines of non-automotive merchandise which could be ordered thru their dealers -- bicycles, radios, appliances, you name it. My mother still has her first bicycle, which she got in 1948 thru our station's B. F. Goodrich hardware catalog.

 

[GHT]

The presence of outboard motors and lawn mowers out front and a washing machine in one of the service bays isn't as odd as it might seem -- many gas stations in the Era handled a secondary line of hardware, usually carrying the brand name of a tire company. Both Firestone and B. F. Goodrich had full lines of non-automotive merchandise which could be ordered thru their dealers -- bicycles, radios, appliances, you name it. My mother still has her first bicycle, which she got in 1948 thru our station's B. F. Goodrich hardware catalog.

Frigidaire is the US consumer and commercial home appliances brand subsidiary of European parent company Electrolux. ... From 1919 to 1979, the company was owned by General Motors.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

What a great story Lizzie, and I'm so glad that the building remains today. Small businesses that no longer trade in our country always fall to corporate vandalism in that the building will be demolished to be replaced by an ugly, nondescript apartment block. The homes inside will be so small that it's all but impossible to get the furniture in. But those homes will sell for a king's ransom.

I've posted this previously but it's worth another airing. This is a garage that went into disrepair following closure, saved from the wrecking ball by a far sighted couple who transformed it into their home. So much easier on the eye than some slab sided, grotesque apartment block.


View attachment 87785 View attachment 87786 View attachment 87787 View attachment 87788 View attachment 87789

My dream has always been to buy and convert one of those Tudor-style Pure Oil stations into a home; I have found several that could be candidates in various Florida cities, but alas, all of them are typically situated in the not-so-desirable urban core, and not on a picturesque wooded lot in the suburbs or in the countryside, which I would prefer.

Rob