Kickin' Rocks

with Don Pennington

Surfing the Big Greasy

It comes to me that the only reason that we mess with cars may be to collect cool things and play with them, like the little kids we really are, and the reason we drag most of this stuff home is that they have memories attached often with a bee-line straight to high school. Maybe the best part would be to actually go a few decades and use what we have learned about the fun of identity theft on the jerks that made our lives hell. Reliving those days might not be all it's jacked up to be but by running that stuff through our brains we can creatively edit things and always have the  fastest car with the blonde cheerleader in the middle of the front seat. Standing in the circle talking about what we did and who we did it to, the future used car salesman in the bunch would come up with the trick of the day, "I think I'll set up this members only hot rod town that is all fifties stuff, people will come from all over and max their VISA." Yeah... maybe, but if your memory cells are still there, you can just sit there and let your brain swim around on the good old days anytime you want. Brain wandering is a strong force, you need to control it, be careful about when you let it happen. An anonymous rodder type told me of such an episode during a Parent-Principal "talk" about another unfortunate M-80 experience in the Women's Faculty Rest Room. The masked rodder was sitting there in the meeting "wandering" during the Principal's blah-blah-blah part, when a particularly funny memory came to mind, he gave a jovial wahoo and slapped the table top. He came back to the now world just in time to see that Principal bouncing off the floor! You don'r suppose she was in the rest room at M-80 time do you?.

The hot rod town is not a bad idea, it could even become it's own country and get federal dollars to not grow something or invade smewhere. The people mix would be nery important, there needs to be some alma mater high school clones (maybe one of those new cheer leader robots that are programed to say "yes dear" or a Boy's Dean that likes you or a football coach who doesn't care if you miss practice), but mostly people like Wally Parks who could be in charge of roads, the straight ones at least (no speed limits), Bill Hines could take care of the money, changing all that pesky gold and silver into lead (those 1945 pennies word get real valuable), and maybe Norm Grabowski could manage a program to carve gear shift knobs out of all that old growth timber. Don't need a Mayor or President all they do is spit shine the lies, (we can do that ourselves), and the garbage collector... well that could be any number of people we have done business with. Our town has a bunch of hang outs, but the most important is a gas station. Only the hot rod itself is more intrenched in hot rod history,  there should be a gas station on every corner of every major intersection and then one in the middle of the block from time to time. A gas station is where many of us had our first job and likely where we saw own first neat car. The coolest cars in town sat under those huge flood lights and big neon flying horse, it seems like every gas station had a car parked on the corner, owned by the guy working there and often was for sale, how many of us bought a car off one of those corners?  (One of the bad things is that the sell-buy experience taught some of us that a living could be made by screwing their friends and maybe some day build a car town). The big deal about working in a gas station was that it could be you that parked on the corner after the boss went home... and... the gas was free, or so we thought. Getting the gas from the pump into your car without being caught offered a unique opportunity to be creative. I always kept a can near the pump and after every customer I would drain the hose into the can, after all it wasn't really anybody's gas, the customer left it behind and since it already went through the pump it didn't belong to the station anymore. After doing this for a while you had a gallon, which was worth about two bits, certainly worth the risk of job loss and shame... don't you think?

Gas station owners were looked upon as the dregs of the community, only dirty people would hang around those greasy-smelly places, or some such comment as that from mothers everywhere (when I was a kid I loved the smell of gas and Tide soap, but not at the same time). Being the rookie and the lowly of the low I got the late shift, and... "the responsibility of closing". The owner told me he didn't give this job to just anybody, boy did I feel important... corner parking, "free" gas, closing up, and all alone with the till, what a great job! The "closer" (my first actual job description) also got to clean the floors. In our neck of the woods we would lift the lube racks and throw solvent all over the floor swishing it around with a broom loosening the oil and grease left behind by the tidy day guys. Here comes the fun... then you would wash it down with water! In school you are taught many formulas in Geometry and Biology, most of which will never be used in the real world. Here's one that the real world taught me... Water + Solvent = Ice! The luckiest guys worked in the three or four bay stations, after the floor got really really slippery, you could go into the office and start running towards the lube room... and if you were good, you could solvent surf wall to wall. Kinda screwed your shoes up for a while, but it sure was fun!

These corner emporiums were not just places to surf and get free gas, they were also landmarks, worthy of a Nobel Prize or something. In the early years oil companies were very competitive and built great architectural wonders to attract customers. They were designed after everything from the Roman Coliseum to a Moor Hacienda, great stone work, artistic spires and tile floors. These wonders of the world that survived into the 50s and 60s also included the most important thing ever, the giant neon clocks. Every station had a clock, a huge clock so you could read it as you went by at speed... late getting home. Most guys knew which clock was fast and which was slow, how many times were you late because the station owner set his clock wrong, or so you pleaded, that usually worked at least once.

Some of the stations were also gathering spots, usually just until the station owner showed up which would trigger a run to start pumping a bucks worth of gas... or you and your "shot gun" would take off if you didn't have a buck between you. They were also status symbols, some guys bragged about buying "white pump", Standards most expensive gas, while most were just a happy to spend as little as possible on anything that will make the car move. In addition to these architectural wonders, oil companies also did very aggressive promotions like a weekly raffle that gave a new car away and bunches of prizes, every time you bought gas you got a ticket per gallon or dollar or whatever, then each Saturday you would go check the big chalk board to see what you won, if anything, I can't remember winning anything, but we still went there without fail. This didn't work too good if it rained.

The coolest stations had a mechanic, a cold water coke machine, bulk tanks for reclaimed oil, I-beam hoists, paper wrapped tires (there was a trick to busting those bands off), and a big counter in the office that you could get five or six guys around to play poker. Buzz Peck and I remember the owner coming in to pick up the daily receipts and finding a pile of IOUs stuffed in the till. If you  build the hot rod town or just go back and brain-wander, the best place in town to go has got to be the corner gas station with all that cool stuff, endless gas, an on-time neon clock, ice water Cokes and not a high school bruiser in sight, they never had cool cars anyway.    

Kick a Rock

DP