A summer job, a girlfriend with a white convertible and clouds of war on a teenager's horizon. The summer of '67.
A summer job, a girlfriend with a white convertible and clouds of war on a teenager's horizon. The summer of '67.
Summer of 67
Short commute that summer of ‘67. The J and L Gas station sat right across Church Street, US Highway 34, from the two-story white frame house we’d called home for a year.
Fresh out of high school, bound for the University of Illinois on a full-ride scholarship in the fall, I left bagging groceries part-time at Art’s Supermarket in downtown Sandwich at $1.25 an hour for the full-time summer gig pumping gasoline at the J and L for $1.65 an hour.
Great job for a teen age boy. There were two kinds of gas stations then. Full service and cheapie’s that only pumped gas. Full service meant they had a mechanic on duty and performed auto maintenance up to and including engine overhauls, sold tires, installed mufflers, all the while pumping gasoline, washing windshields and checking tire pressure.
Cheapies on the other hand only sold gas and cigarettes. Service limited to checking oil and putting the occasional quart in, checking and filling the radiators, as well as checking tire pressure if requested.
Unwritten rules prevailed. Two bucks worth of gas got you a windshield wash. A buck’s worth windshield washed only if you asked. Unless you were a young attractive woman in which case any purchase amount necessitated a window wash, highly polishing the driver’s side in order to check out the legs.
Uniform consisted of heavy duty thick cotton, white short sleeved shirt with J and L patch on the chest above the generous sized pocket stuffed with a wad of bills and a silvery chrome tire pressure gauge. Pack of Marlboros in the other shirt pocket. Jeans bedecked with a chrome coin changer hanging from the belt. A pair of Dad’s old steel toed work shoes from Caterpillar, so when you got gasoline or oil on them it didn’t matter. They gave great support for an eight hour shift spent mostly on your feet while walking from station to pumps and back.
No pump your own, unless you had worked there. Virtually all cash. The station accepted Mastercard but few people had them and fewer still used them for gasoline purchases. We had a couple of accounts for business people who carried a balance which they came in and paid off monthly, but only because the owner/manager, Bob Sigrist, knew them well and allowed them to do so. Everyone else paid cash.
No such thing as unleaded. Fully leaded premium or regular. Only the few higher end Oldsmobiles, Buicks or high performance Mustangs or Camaros took the premium that cost 38 cents per gallon while the fully leaded regular was 35 cents.
We didn’t get many of the premium using cars. Their owners took them to the Sinclair next door or down the street to the Standard. They weren’t about to use that disdainfully sneered at “cheap gas”. Nope, it wasn’t a Buick kind of place, unless it was a ten-year-old Buick that pulled in for a “buck’s worth and a quart of bulk oil”. Bulk oil came in 55 gallon drums which you accessed with a hand pump, filling a quart jar with steel spout screwed on the top. Bulk oil was for the beaters that burned a quart with every dollars worth of gas.
We knew our customers. Once you’d worked there a few weeks you knew the “two bucks regular and a pack of Marlboros” customer from the “fill ‘er up regular and check the tires” to the “gimme a buck’s worth” as they headed to the Pepsi machine. Then we had the regulars who’d slip into the men’s room with a pocket full of quarters and sheepishly emerge, a few minutes later, pockets lighter, after the clacking noise of the condom machine dispensing its product. The multiple purchase condom consumers were mostly, to my young eyes, older married guys, that is in their 30’s and 40’s, while the single use purchasers tended to be guys more my age, late teens and early twenties. Birth control pills had just come on the market and weren’t in common use yet, which probably explains why my high school class started with 120 students evenly divided between boys and girls, sixty each, yet only 75 graduated, forty boys and thirty-five girls.
Abortion was illegal then so when a girl disappeared midway through the school year “to go live with her aunt”, we all knew she was pregnant and wouldn’t be back until after the baby was placed for adoption. The alternative? Dropping out of school and marrying the boy, who most likely went to work in one of the factories in Aurora. Girls who married didn’t come back to school. Motherhood in high school wasn’t acceptable. Nor was pregnancy. Once a girl began to show she left school. After all it might be contagious.
We knew our customers preferences in cigarettes , too. Teddy Fritch’s dad, who drove a big old hemi-enginned Chrysler that took premium fuel, was our only Chesterfield, non-filter smoker, but we stocked them because he bought a couple packs most every day. Then the State Farm insurance agent, with the charge account, who invariably pulled up at the far lane, rather than the lane closest to the white cinder block station, and demanded a pack of menthol Newports.
Mike Saunders dad, who only worked weekends at the J and L, after his forty hours in the All Steel factory, refused to walk out to the far lane for him. He beckoned him in to the closest lane for service. Old man Saunders, he had to be at least in his late forties, explained to me: “That sunnavbitch had me walk all the way out to that far lane in the rain to ask for a five cent pack of gum! Bullshit!” Old man Saunders always had the biggest fake smile on his face as he gestured for the white shirt wearing insurance agent to pull in to the closer aisle. Me? I’d just carry out his pack of Newports, pump the dollar or two of gas into his Dodge sedan and add it to the ongoing tally in the 3x5 index card box on the steel shelf next to the Quaker State 10w30 premium motor oil.
The crotchety, pipe smoking old man who pumped gas, washed windshields and taught me the other unspoken gas station rules.
Friday nights and Saturdays we hustled, hustled, hustled. Most people got paid on Fridays, so Friday nights or Saturdays they went to the bank, gassed up the car for the next week’s drive to work and bought groceries. We didn’t get a chance to sit on the white-painted concrete ledge outside the sweltering office until 8 o’clock or so. I’d light up a Marlboro, crack open a cold bottle of Mountain Dew and stretch out my gasoline stained, blue-jeaned legs. Old man Saunders inevitably fired up his crusty pipe to puff it as he talked dirty about the last young housewife through the drive or the latest teen age girl who stopped by the chat with me on a dateless Friday night.
He was a crotchety old bastard, but I learned a lot from him, especially how to wrap the paper towels just so, to spotlessly dry the windshield. He also taught me that two bucks worth got a customer the front windshield washed, as you set the pump on slow, which gave you just enough time, if you were quick, to pull the long handled combo squeegee/sponge, wash the front windshield, squeegee then finish off with your carefully wrapped paper towels, hustle back to the gas pump, flip it off, gas cap back on, nozzle back into the pump, up to the driver’s window, ask: “Check your oil?”, collect the two bucks then on to the next waiting car.
Fill ups on the other hand got the full magilla. Wash every window and maybe even a swipe at the side mirrors, and always a side mirror polishing if the driver happened to be female and attractive, but, alas, most of our customers were working class guys who didn’t merit the extra attention to detail.
No summer like a seventeen-year-old’s summer. Graduated from high school. College in the fall. Only responsibility to show up to work on time, make the correct change, while not spilling gas on the concrete drive and save enough of my weekly paycheck to cover the coming dorm costs and spending money. I wouldn’t register for the draft until September, my eighteenth birthday, so Viet Nam just a cloud on the horizon for others, not for me. I’m headed to college and a draft deferment.
My only regret that summer? Most of my classmates had taken permanent jobs in one of the many factories that paid a union wage and were driving shiny new Camaros, Mustangs, Cougars and Firebirds. No car for me, although I had the use of my Dad’s reliable but butt ugly ‘59 Plymouth station wagon work car, or a highly unreliable 1960 Ford, six cylinder, three speed, manual transmission on the column or the rare use of mom’s two year old Ford sedan.
Luckily, however, my summer girlfriend, who’d graduated the year before and had a real job as a secretary at a Chevy dealer in Aurora, had a Corvair convertible. She’d zip past, top down, “WLS 890 --Chicah-aaah-go” on the AM radio, wave and beep several times during the course of my evening shift.
As the 9:30 closing time rolled around I’d dash to the men’s room to scrub my oil-stained hands and tanned arms multiple times in a vain effort to eradicate the pungent gasoline odor. Even though home and clean clothes lay just across the street I couldn’t go home to change as my mother would demand to know where I was going, with whom, when I’d be home, etc, etc, etc.
Nope, not risking that interrogation or worse, a demand that I stay home. Into that white convertible I’d jump, dirty jeans, gas stained shirt and all. Off we’d go cruising the five miles past fields of corn from the Sandwich, Illinois, Dog n Suds to Plano’s Pizza Place and back. Mindlessly cruising as the radio played. She was one of those girls who never put J and L gas in her car. It was too cheap, but she didn’t mind pulling in to chat with me. There were other girls who stopped by that sunny summer, but they had earlier curfews and no convertible.
That summer of sixty-seven was the last sunny summer. Bob Neal stepped on a mine outside Hue in February ‘68. The shit got real. Summer ain’t the same.