I really enjoyed this post. It is quite a contrast to today where gasoline (petrol) is sold mainly at "convenience stores" and if a customer needs air in their tires, they have to put a few quarters into the slot to get the compressed air to turn on for a set time.
When I was a kid, a few of the bigger repair garages in Brooklyn, NY, had machine shops. Usually, this consisted of an engine lathe (something on the order of a South Bend or other cone-drive lathe), drill press, and specialized automotive machine tools like a valve grinder, commutator cutter, brake shoe arc sander, brake and clutch "lining" riveter, and a shop press.
There were gasoline stations who did very minor adjustments and repairs, and there were repair garages who might have gas pumps out front on their lot. In addition, there were specialized automotive rebuilding shops- there were carburetor shops and "auto electric" or "ignition" shops as well as radiator shops. When I was a small boy, some of the automotive specialty shops used 3 wheel Harleys or Indians to make pickups and deliveries. Those were fancy vehicles, spit shined, with the name of the shop lettered on them. The driver/delivery man (pre helmet laws) often wore a uniform consisting of a shirt with his name and the shop name, "flat har" (like a military or policeman's hat), and a neck tie.
On the local filling station lots, in the 50's, I can recall seeing the attendants wearing "matched workset" type uniforms. In 1973, I was first arriving at Waterford, CT to report to work on the construction site of a nuclear powerplant (Millstone Unit II). As I drove towards Niantic, CT, I needed both gasoline and directions. I saw a small two-pump filling station with a quaint little stone office having a neatly curved roof-line. A man stood outside the office, and I stopped for gas and directions. The man was wearing the full uniform of a gas station attendant of a bygone era. Flat uniform type hat, khaki shirt with a bow tie, khaki jhodpurs or similar. He gave me directions to the powerplant access road, and I remarked about his attire. He said his father had first become a "dealer" ( I think it might have been Shell) in the 'teens, and he had come to work for his father in the 'twenties and been there ever since. He filled my car's tank, cleaned the windshield, asked if he could check the oil and tires. It was the last time I ever got that kind of service on a gas station, let alone by anyone in a uniform.
Of course, we had the television commercials for Texaco, "Always trust your car to the man who wears the star... the big bright Texaco Star", which had actors portraying well groomed, courteous, and uniformed service station personnel. In actuality, even in the 50's, for the most part the filling station and garage personnel was often wearing greasy work clothes, and could be counted upon to be ungrammatic and brusque in their speech, often hollering to their buddies in language laden with words your mother would not want you to hear. The office walls of those garages or filling stations had a pinup calendar or two, and there was often a back seat from an old car with the shop's watchdog lounging on it. Neckties or bowties, flat uniform caps, clear and mannerly speech were off the table at that point.
Another thing that is long gone, if not forgotten, are the "coin changers" which the filling station attendants sometimes wore on their belts. When I was a kid, the local ice-cream vendors and some of the filling station attendants in busy stations wore coin changers on their belts. These were neat mechanisms, having vertical tubes holding pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Each of these tubes had a spring loaded ring which dispensed one of each coin when the tab for it was depressed. A person with one of those coin changers could rapidly make change without looking, knowing which tabs to press and figuring the change in their heads just that quick. Of course, with gasoline going for under 40 cents a gallon and people paying cash (credit cards being an extreme rarity), the coin changers were standard with many busy filling station attendants.
About 40 + years ago, my late father was at some yard sale and saw one of those coin changers. Dad also got a tin box full of adjustable reamers with conical guide bushings. Dad did not know what those were for, but I did- those were valve guide reamers from an old repair garage. I think Dad paid under a buck for it as the seller really did not understand nor appreciate what either the reamers or the coin changer was. Dad discovered a couple of bucks in change still in that coin changer. He asked me to make a mounting stand for it, and kept it on his dresser with change from his pockets and drew what coin he needed if he were going to be feeding parking meters. That coin changer was made (or made for) J.L. Galef, of NY City- a firm I associated with sporting firearms and importing them. I remember when Dad showed me the coin changer, it was something we had not seen in a few years. Dad always appreciated a neat mechanism, and this has it. Given the fact that Dad had found that box of adjustable reamers, we figured the coin changer came from an old automotive garage or filling station. Some of us are old enough to remember when 5 bucks worth of gasoline would get a bit more than half a tank, but we are also old enough to remember what wages were at that time.
The days when filling station attendants and garage mechanics wore uniforms or dressed like the ladies in the picture in this thread are long gone. While some people will mourn the passing of those days, who really wants to eat asbestos dust from arcing brake shoes or blowing out bell housings when replacing a clutch disc, or swim in gasoline and solvents when dipping carburetors or cleaning parts ? It's funny how this thread brings back the unique smells of an oldtime automotive repair garage, punctuated by the distinctive sound of a slow-turning air compressor or the blasts of air when the vehicle lifts are worked. I keep an old time "oil bottle" in the garage on a window sill. My wife got it for me at a yard sale, as I'd told her how my father kept a wire carrier with oil bottles in the shed behind our house. Dad had the oil bottles filled at the local Shell station from one of those hand oil pumps with the crank, the kind that is on a square steel tank. Dad had a '46 Chevy which was an oil hog, and checking the oil and topping it up was something I knew from the time I was old enough to walk and recognize as much. Dad traded that '46 Chevy on a new 1954 Chevy, and the oil bottles disappeared. Dad progressed to buying his engine oil in cans and had a spout he stabbed into the cans instead. Now, when I take that old oil bottle off the window sill and take a sniff, it takes me back to my early boyhood. Different times when people routinely checked their own car's engine oil level and knew about things like that. Different times as well, when garages not too far removed from the one in this thread were fairly common. I had a fellow telling me that the newest passenger vehicles are being sold and delivered without any spare tire whatsovever- not even the "donut" !
Apparently, an aerosol can of tire inflater/sealant is all the OEM's are furnishing, nor is there room for the spare tire. Then again, how many people nowadays know how to change their own tires by the road side ?
It was a different era when the garage in this photo was operating. In that era, things like getting a driver's license was quite an undertaking on the one hand, but lacking in formality on the other- at least in the USA. I have had old timers (long deceased) tell me how they bought their first cars in the 'twenties. No license, no insurance needed. Some of these old timers were immigrants who saved up to buy their first car, and were taught to drive it by a mechanic at the dealer's. Once they knew the rudiments of driving, with the light vehicle traffic of the times, they were good to go. One oldtimer whom I regarded as my grandpa was an Italian immigrant. A good friend of my father's and the only grandpa I really knew or had. This oldtimer was driving into his nineties, and he told me how he was taught to drive by the dealer's mechanic, and never really had a NY Driver's License. I forget how they caught up with him, but it was an interesting set of circumstances as this fellow suddenly had to go deal with DMV and found it totally bewildering. The mention that the garage in this thread ran a school for motorists rang a bell with me, and recalled my memory of that old timer to mind. He had bought a new Buick in the early 'thirties, and been taught to maintain and drive it by the dealer. As a result, every time he went out in the morning to go anywhere in that Buick (which I rode in as a kid), he'd "check-em up-a da 'wat, turn the grease cup on da wat' pump... check-em up-a da oil.... checkem-upa da belt.... look at all tires, then, put the shift in neutral, set the brake, pull out the choke, turn on the ignish' and step ona da start'.... " Grandpa had a large vegetable garden behind his house, and on part of it, he'd dug a pit with a set of heavy planks and additional reinforcement. He'd run that Buick onto those planks once every week and give things a good going over. Grandpa was not a mechanic, he was a construction laborer and concrete finisher. The Buick was the only car he ever owned, and he had it until he died, well into his nineties. He did what the dealer's mechanics had taught him to do, and his rules for driving were pretty simple: leave plenty of room, signal turns, and don't drive any faster than what traffic was doing. He never had an accident with that Buick, while traffic in Brooklyn increased and cars went faster even on the local streets. A lot to be said for the way the old garages trained a "motorist".
