My fondest memory of the old service stations has to be free road maps.





I was going to college in LA at the time. The odd-even plate rules exempted cars with out of state plates, but I did not feel right taking advantage of that.

Many people would sit in line for an hour idling their motor awaiting their turn at a pump. I found a station at the bottom of a small hill and let gravity move me forward as the line inched along.

One time, an old bat in a Lincoln cut into the front of the line. The guy now behind her asked her nicely to get in the end of the line with everyone else. She refused. He then yelled at her to leave. She said, "you cannot make me." He calmly walked to his car, took off the locking gas cap, took off hers, put his on and drove off.





Mommy, why do they call punching in a phone number dialing?


Bill

__________________
It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

Yeah, I remember that. I still have a couple of SOHIO maps of Kentucky/Tennessee. It was always fun going on vacation and seeing places I'd only heard of from the map. Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky was one that I really remember. If you looked at it just right, it really did look like where the eyebrow would be on a monkey's head.
I also remember getting free Bengal's glasses with a fill up and Sunoco NFL Trading Stamps. I still have an album somewhere at home.



Awseome. I love to see people like that get what's coming to them. Doesn't happen often enough.

My only experience with gas lines was telling my Mom to go to the gas station at 5th & Monmouth when the normal station was packed. Newport was LOUSY with gas stations back then. Now I think there might be three. Mom couldn't believe that I knew about one she didn't. I knew because the girls who took us to see Star Wars filled up the Pinto there on the way to the movie.

__________________
Bill Eichelberger
NAR 79563

http://wallyum.blogspot.com/

I miss being SAM 0058

Build floor: Estes - Low Boom SST Semroc - Marauder, Shrike, SST Shuttle

In paint: Canaroc Starfighter Scorpion Centuri Mini Dactyl Estes F-22 Air Superiority Fighter, Multi-Roc, Solar Sailer II, Xarconian Cruiser Semroc Cyber III

Ready to fly: Estes - Solar Sailer II Semroc - Earmark

Man, I pretty much forgot about that... only thing you'll get for free at a gas station nowdays is a hard time or a disease...



You're a good man, Charlie Brown... LOL



Folks in Texas wasn't that stupid... at least back then. We sat in 100 degree heat with the friggin windows down and sweated it out... Good idea letting gravity do the work... I drove down Pike's Peak in my 92 F-150 5 speed manual with my engine off most of the time, just turned the key off to kill the motor and let gravity do the work, spinning the engine like an air compressor... saved my brakes and gas too... Did the same thing on the Chief Joseph highway up on the northeast side of Yellowstone National Park... some steep hills, and I'd be climbing in third gear, and top the hill and just as steep coming down, so I'd just turn the key off and coast down the other side in third gear too...

Of course, times change... when everybody in Houston was scared out of their wits and heading for the hills right after Katrina, when we were about to get hit by hurricane Rita, and all 2 million + folks ran like h3ll at once, and just totally locked up the freeways, they sat and idled their cars, not moving, stuck in traffic, until they ran out of gas... of course, a lot of folks probably don't know, but because the hot air coming out of the top of the hurricane spreads out and sinks in front of it, it gets like 100 degrees + the day before a hurricane hits... I was boarding up the house windows and it was like 100 degrees at 9 am... crazy. Must have been a b!tch on the roads... so I can see idling the car for air conditioning. BUT STILL, HELLO! Idle the car for a few minutes to cool off, then screw the windows down and sweat it out til you HAVE to run the AC again for a few minutes... save the gas so it'll last longer. Folks died on the road from heat prostration... ran out of gas and then COULDN'T cool off and no/little water... guess folks aren't as smart as they used to be...



Oh, that's priceless... well worth the cost of the gas cap... I wouldn't have lost my place in line over it, though... I'd have thrown the key down the storm sewer or broken it in half and tossed it at her or something...

Karma's a b!tch ain't it?? I love it!



Oh man... another trip down memory lane. I lived with my grandmother from age 13 on (LONG story, and not particularly good) and she had an ANCIENT rotary dial wall-mount phone the size of a pay phone on the north bedroom northern wall. You basically had to sit on the bed to use the phone. I got pretty sick and tired of that so by around age 15 or so I ran phone wires along the crown molding of the wall from the phone to the new front room (where I lived) and the old living room (where grandma had her TV and chair). She was apoplectic at first, with me stapling up phone wires everywhere with a staple gun, and taking the phone off the wall to tie into the phone wiring for that old dinosaur, but it sure was nice-- she only had Dearborn propane space heaters for heating the house, and she only heated about half the house-- her bedroom and living room, kitchen, bathroom, and I had to stick a fan in the door to blow the cold air out of my room and draw warm air in along the ceiling... the bathroom had a mini-heater in it. The rest of the house was pretty much in the 30's all winter, including the "phone room". No air conditioning in the house but a window unit by her bed and a window unit in my room, so you'd sit there and burn using that old phone.

She didn't like the wires, but once they were in and she got used to having a phone by her chair (and one by my chair) she liked it.

That old rotary dinosaur kept working well, starting out in the old party-line days and ending up well into the 911 era when push button phones had made them hopelessly obsolete. The phone company FINALLY took it out when they switched to a low-voltage system or something that wouldn't send enough power down the line to operate the old dinosaur. Probably in a museum now (or it should be!)

Reminds me of a tip I learned wiring phones... at least back in the old "high voltage" days when the wire jumped from a few volts to about 60 volts or something to drive the ringers on those old phones... when installing phone wires, and you think you have a bad connection, DO NOT hold onto the phone wires and have someone call the number... ZZZAAAPPPP!!!!

Don't ask me how I know this...

LOL Later! OL JR

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

"There's a life-size bronze statue of you out there somewhere... of course it's turned green with age by now; nobody can read the name anymore..." -- Charlton Heston as "Taylor", Planet of the Apes...

LOL

Later! OL JR

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

Come on, Bill! Don't leave us hanging on this one. Tell us about the launch! Spare no gory detai!



.

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I love sanding.

I remember the free Lunar Module paper models that Gulf stations gave out during the Moon landings.

__________________
Bob
S.A.M. # 0014

I know I wrote about it somewhere, but I can't find it. They had a week long space camp at Woodfill that kids could sign up for as a summer enrichment class. I offered to bring up my launch gear and help with building the rockets, and even tried to give the guy running it some of the Quest Educator stuff that I had printed off. (Multi packs and motor deals.) He obviously felt threatened by someone who knew what they were doing.
Sam brought his rocket home to work on it. His was a Bullpup. Stock shock cord. No nose weight. Initial construction work done with MODEL GLUE. I stripped it down, cleaned the crap off, and had him rebuild it. I worried about the rest of the class after that. I had good reason to worry.
The afternoon of the last day of the class was flight day, so I got up early to catch the action and get some pics. What I saw when I got there was just stupid. There were about 20 kids in all, with a mishmash of Estes kits. Chrome Domes, Prowlers, AstroCams, Cosmic Cobras and Stormcasters were the ones that I remember. Rockets had fins taped on with duct tape. Tubes were connected the same way. He had a bunch of high school kids helping. All they wanted to see was crashes, and they were in the right place. They flew the first rocket of the day, a D engine with a nose cone and fins that they called the Buzz Bomb. It lived up to its name, buzzing and bombing its way across the dry August grass. They howled like zoo animals. On the hillside sat a bunch of parents who had taken the afternoon off to see what enrichment their kids had gained in the class. They looked stunned. The Prowler with the wiggly fins recovered in pieces because it had been built with model glue and the motor mount flew out at ejection. (We saw that several times on the day.) The parents on the hill just looked stunned. Several times over the course of the afternoon I saw kids and parents just slip away with their rocket unflown, which wasn't a bad idea. Two twins flew matching Stormcasters which lawndarted like a ballet. Lots of chutes fouled and lines stripped. I think that saying there was a 25% success rate would have been WAY overstating it. I never got the urge to volunteer after that, and I don't remember seeing anything about space camp the next summer, so I think it died the death that it deserved.

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__________________
Bill Eichelberger
NAR 79563

http://wallyum.blogspot.com/

I miss being SAM 0058

Build floor: Estes - Low Boom SST Semroc - Marauder, Shrike, SST Shuttle

In paint: Canaroc Starfighter Scorpion Centuri Mini Dactyl Estes F-22 Air Superiority Fighter, Multi-Roc, Solar Sailer II, Xarconian Cruiser Semroc Cyber III

Ready to fly: Estes - Solar Sailer II Semroc - Earmark