Gas Station Memories
B Y M IKE H. B ROWNIgrew up in the 1950s, which was, in my opinion, one of the best decades a young boy could possibly have grown up in. There was no internet, there weren’t even any computers, but we had Roy Rogers and Buck Rogers, we had bicycles and great places to ride, we had baseball and hot-dogs, and we had fried chicken on Sundays. There was excitement and adventure around every corner. And I had something that none of my friends had—my dad had a gas station!
It was a Texaco station on Hollywood Road in Almond Park, on the west side of Atlanta. Dad’s brother, Uncle Ralph, opened the station in 1947, four years before I was born. It stayed open for almost 30 years, six days a week, Monday
through Saturday (never on Sunday).
I got to spend a lot of time there on Saturdays, particularly during the winter months, and started to help out when I was about eight years old. I did all sorts of odd jobs around the old station, and I got paid for it. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it sure seemed like a lot to this kid. Sweeping, both inside and out, was the only chore I didn’t really like. I had to do that at home! But it was fun putting out stock. I put out everything from potato chips, peanuts and candy bars to cans of oil and tire repair kits, and filled the “drink box,” a big horizontal refrigerator at the front of the store, with all kinds of soft drinks.
Sometimes, Dad let me operate The Lift. It was a great big steel pole that
came up out of the floor in the grease rack. It worked on air pressure and could lift a car about seven feet above the floor. It was just about the coolest thing I had ever seen. All the kids wanted to pull that lever and lift a whole car way up above their heads. It made you feel like Superman!
Lots of great memories from that old gas station have stayed with me through the years. My favorites used to be about all the neat things I got to do and all the cool gadgets I got to play with. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see that the best ones are of the people I got to know, who came around and “hung out” there on Saturdays—the “guys.”
Most were just regular folks, but there
were some real characters too. Let me tell you about some of them.
The first one that comes to mind is “RV”. I never knew his actual name. I think those were his initials, but nobody ever really told me that. It’s just what everybody always called him.
RV was cockeyed, as dad called it. One eye looked where he wanted it to but the other one just seemed to wander around aimlessly. RV worked in my uncle’s other business, an appliance repair shop in a big garage just up the hill behind the station. I guess he was about
came to appliances. No matter what was wrong with it, he could fix it, and he fixed a lot of them.
RV loved RC Cola and Moon Pies. Actually, I think he just loved to eat, particularly sweet things, and he always seem to be cheerful, smiling and happy. Even though he had a pretty tough life, it never seemed to get him down.
RV taught me a lot about electricity. I walked up to the shop one day when he was about to plug in an old refrigerator. I saw him squat down behind a washing machine and lean over to plug the cord into the outlet. There was a bright flash, and RV jumped about three feet off the floor. He made a strange noise, and I think he was just about to say something colorful when he saw me standing there, looking rather bewildered. He looked down and started shaking his hand.
came down a lot, not just on Saturdays. Mr. Smith was definitely the oldest of the guys who hung around the station. I think he was probably in his 80s and had what folks back then called “the palsy.” He was tall and thin, and on cold days he liked to sit near the old gas heater to keep warm. He always had a tremor or shake in his head, sort of like he was shaking his head “no.” I can still see him drinking
the same age as my dad and uncle at the time, around forty or so, and like them, had already started losing his hair.
RV would usually walk down to the gas station to take his breaks and eat lunch, so he could hang out with the guys who seemed to always be around on Saturday. I don’t think he had much of an education, but he was smart when it
I walked on over to the washing machine just as he bent down to pick up the cord. “You see this?” he asked, holding the cord out towards me. “This cord is shot. Half of it’s broke nearly plum in two. Now you take a lesson from this, son. Don’t go pluggin’ any cords in ‘til you know they’re good.” Then he explained how he nearly got “electrocuted” and what “good” meant, and I learned a lot about electricity that day. I learned it could make a grown man jump three feet off the floor, even when he didn’t want to.
Now let me tell you about Mr. Smith. He lived a little ways up the road, maybe four or five houses up on the right, so he
his Dr. Pepper. He always poured a little bag of peanuts in it. When he raised the bottle to drink, his tremor would get worse, and the Dr. Pepper would start to fizz-up. It made me a little sad when that happened, but it never seemed to bother Mr. Smith. He just kept on smiling and enjoying his peanuts and Dr. Pepper.
He told wonderful stories about his childhood, growing up on a farm, and his younger days before his wife passed away. He was one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known. When he told his stories, his eyes would just light up, even sparkle at times. It was almost like he was reliving those happy times from long ago.
One Saturday, Mr. Smith didn’t show up at his usual time. I remember everybody wondering why he didn’t come, and someone saying they needed to go check on him. A few days later, Dad told me that Mr. Smith had passed away. I cried. After Mr. Smith died, things were just never the same at that old gas station.
Now I’m going to tell you about a couple of characters that you may not believe are real. But that’s okay. I find it hard to believe they were real, too.
One of them was a giant of a man whose name I don’t remember, but his nickname was Frankenstein. This man had to be almost seven feet tall and weighed about 400 pounds. He was so big, he barely fit through the door and had to duck to keep from bumping his head. I was probably around ten by the time Frankenstein started hanging out around the gas station. I don’t think he hung around there very long, maybe a year or so, but he certainly made an impression on a lot of people.
Frankenstein liked sweets too, just like RV, but his favorite snack was about three or four packs of Twinkies or King
Don’s with a quart of milk. As far as I know, Frankenstein never drank alcohol and never smoked cigarettes. He was funny and loved to play practical jokes, one in particular.
Franky had figured out a way to squirt lighter fluid on his hand and light it without being burned. He put something else on his hand before the lighter fluid, but I never found out what it was; even then it would singe the hairs, but it wouldn’t burn his hand. He loved to play his joke on unsuspecting customers. While some of the other guys distracted the customer with chitchat, Frankenstein would go into the back room, squirt some lighter fluid in his hand, light it, and run out through the store yelling and screaming “My hand’s on fire! My hand’s on fire!”
Someone, usually my dad, would run out behind him, get out of sight for a few seconds, then walk back in. Frankenstein would appear to be on the verge of tears, his face all contorted in
“pain.” Dad would have an old grease rag wrapped around Frankenstein’s hand. Dad would say something like “How bad is it?” and Frankenstein would say, “I don’t know, I’m afraid to look”! Then Dad would say, “We’ve got to see how bad it is and get something on it, we may have to take you to the doctor!” Frankenstein would just stand there in apparent agony, saying over and over,
“I’m afraid to look, I’m afraid to look. It hurts so much!”
Of course, by now everyone, except the unsuspecting customer, was in on the joke, so they were all standing around looking worried and interjecting their comments like, “I know it hurts Franky, but we’ve got to look. We got to see what’s needed here!”
On rare occasions, the customer would have already bolted at this point. But most were so intrigued they couldn’t tear themselves away. They would watch anxiously as Dad removed the cloth from Frankenstein’s hand. Then someone would say, “It’s a miracle! It’s not burned at all, thank God!”
The joke was over and everyone was smiling and laughing, even the unsuspecting customer. After a few moments, my dad and Frankenstein would let the customer in on the gag. Most of them took the joke well, I think because they were so relieved that he really hadn’t burned his hand after all. I seem to recall a few of them saying, “That’s great. I’ve got to try that one on my brother [or some other poor unsuspecting soul].”
Finally, there was Jesse. I’m sure that some of you, or maybe most of you, remember Ernest T. Bass from the old “Andy Griffith” television show. Well, if you took Ernest T., mellowed him out a little and piled on about thirty years, you’d have Jesse.
Jesse was about half blind, but that didn’t slow him down a bit. He was about
five-foot nothin’ and ornery as any man I ever saw. He was a true backwoods hillbilly. And I wouldn’t have had him any other way. To call Jesse old-fashioned would be an understatement, ancient-fashioned would be closer to the truth. And talk about hardheaded. If you could get Jesse to change his mind or back down, you could plow a field with a pocket knife. I can’t tell you how many times I saw some of the guys get Jesse “wound-up” about a passage in the Bible. Jesse was the very definition of a literalist, and he was certain that the world was square!
“The Bible says, ‘Go to the four corners of the earth,’” Jesse would say. “Now you know dang good ’n well, they ain’t no circle got no four corners!”
Now I ask you, how can you argue with that?
I got such a kick out of listening to Jesse’s adversaries (in the kindest sense of the word) trying to explain that passage in the Bible. But not one of them could convince Jesse that it wasn’t meant to be taken literally—not one! Still, they loved to try.
Now you may think I’m making fun of Jesse, but you’d be wrong. Jesse was one of the most honest men I’ve ever met. He was as poor as a church mouse, but Dad said he could give Jesse the keys to the station and never miss a piece of gum. Jesse was just as bound and determined to follow the Ten Commandments as he was to insist on a square Earth, and how can anyone make fun of that?
There’s more I could tell you about these men, a lot more, and a few others too, but at least you’ve had a little glimpse into their lives, and into the way their lives touched mine. I hope I never forget them. That would truly be sad.
Mike Brown is a writer and retired design engineer in Ranburne, Alabama. Readers may contact him at nugrapekid@gmail.com.
BELOW LEFT: O.B. Moore’s service station, Greensboro, Greene County, 1933.
BELOW: McClellan and Abram Garage, Lithonia, DeKalb County, circa 1920s.
