TBT…

Sigh…

I had a car that got 8MPG and I didn’t care… I was making $1.25 an hour…

Yesterday, I spent $70 filling the tank… Grumble…

Comments

TBT… — 23 Comments

  1. Think that’s bad?

    I can remember as a kid, watching da grumble about 17.9 cents a gallon gas at a FULL service gas station, where they came out, pumped the gas, checked your oil and radiator, and did washed ALL the windows and the front headlights.

  2. Yeah, I recall having to decide the nickel per gallon increase if switching over from leaded gasoline to unleaded was worth thinking hard about. That was in ’82 – ’84 or thereabouts, I was making $3.35 an hour working in an un-airconditioned warehouse.

  3. Those days are long gone, but not forgotten. One of my first cars was a Toyota Celica. It got almost 30 mpg, cost a whole $6 to fill up the tank at $.54 a gallon. I remember my father complaining about when the price of gas went over $.29 a gallon.

  4. The lowest I ever paid was 19 cents for a gallon of regular leaded. Five dollars filled up a full sized sedan, but it took a few hours of work to earn five dollars.

    • With the prevailing minimum wage, pumping gas will now pay $15/hr in states where employees pump gas. I know that’s true in Oregon, but I don’t know which other states do that. Texas (home of Old NFO) is one of those places where you pump your own.

      Old NFO, life was simpler before cell phones when you answered the phone if you were home or at work, but if you weren’t home or at work, you were simply unavailable and it wasn’t a CRISIS. Today I get calls from China at midnight and New York before I (naturally) wake up on the Left Coast. It’s nuts. But people expect that you’re available. Soon cell phones will be surgically implanted and you won’t have to carry them around.

  5. Norfolk in the 70’s:
    Scott station full service at 18.9
    Zayre Dept. Store pump it yourself at 17.9
    They were having a “gas war” one block apart.

  6. In high school it cost me $1 to fill my tank, payable to a parent up front, in cash. Then I got the key to unlock the 200 gallon ranch gas tank padlock. When finished, the key was immediately returned.

  7. I think I only paid about $295 for my first car.

    Then again, you’re paying $70 to move a ton of metal a pretty good number of miles with you inside of it. That’s still pretty amazing.

  8. My first car (a loaner from my Dad, actually) got 7 mpg, and the gas gauge didn’t work. You checked the gas by putting a long stick into the gas tank. If if came out dry, the tank was empty. But at $.29, I didn’t much care. Made $1.65/hr at minimum wage, and thought I was rich.

  9. All- Yep, we’re old…LOL When I ‘first’ started driving in 65, I paid $300 for a ‘nice’ Chevy, gas was around a quarter. The least I ever paid was .08 cents in Houston at the pump in the Humble Oil building’s basement pump. LL- True, and it’s only getting worse!!!

    Posted from my iPhone.

  10. Run the numbers.
    According to the MILDEST inflation calculator, (USgov),
    36 cents a gallon in 1970 equates to $2.23 today. The real inflation rate is way higher. So gas is not expensive, historically speaking.
    Someone had to find the oil, drill a well, pump the oil, deliver it to a refinery, deliver it to a gas station, and all this for .16 cents a cup. (at 2.50 a gallon.) One tenth the cost of a cup of coffee. At 20 mpg, that is a mile and a quarter for .16 cents. Sounds like a bargain to me.
    The real crime here is the inflation.

  11. Wow, cars, gas, lesse

    First car was a 72 Olds 98. Mega land yacht. Could out-accelerate Porches for the first 100 yards. Could afford gas to go to work and school and back again, and that was it. Budgeted every movement with that car like a ship’s captain figuring out going from one port to another.

    Had a Ford Econoline that had a 2.5 hour gas tank. That white blob of doom would idle, or drive, or stop-start for 2 and a half hours max. After that, it needed to be fed. Going on long trips was interesting, especially when someone else was driving. No-one believed me when I gave them the 2.5 hour rule… the fools.

    Gas has always been, to me, an expensive item. Admittedly, these days are much nicer than when the price was close to $4.00 a gallon, or worse (I experienced $4.65 a gallon once. My butt hurt for a month.)

  12. Thirty cents a gallon in California was the early seventies. I remember going to the gas station and buying a dollar’s worth for my ’55 Chevy.

  13. I can remember the lower prices, but when I started driving in the mid-70’s we were all grumbling because gas prices in California had doubled – up to ~70 cents per gallon the year I started college (1977).

    Plugging in inflation since then, current California gas prices are about the same ($2.77, according to this handy calculator: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Inflation_Rate_Calculator.asp)

    And an hour’s minimum wage, both then and now, would buy ~4 gallons of gas.

    Now if you want to complain about house prices around here . . .

  14. Raven- You are correct, and yes, inflations is the real crime!

    Mike- Oh yeah…

    Javahead- There is that… sigh…

  15. When you hear someone complain that stuff is more expensive, tell them “No, it still has the same value. Your money is just worth less now.”

    Back then, it was REAL gas, not with all the additive crap they put in now. When we moved to Texas from Kalifornia, I noticed a small but distinct improvement in performance (Chevy Silverado, 5.3L). A buddy of mine who is into R/C model airplanes says he drives over to a rural county to get real gas for them.

    Yeah I know, clean air and all that. Well, I have to think there might be a better way.

    Back in the ’70’s some acquaintances out in west Texas (Sanderson) got into the business of converting vehicles (mostly pickups) to natural gas. A trip to town for fuel was a 40 mile round trip for many ranchers and bulk delivery was not available. Gas tanks were installed in the truck bed where you would normally mount a cross-bed tool box. I don’t recall the exact numbers, only that the system worked well, providing greatly increased range. I also seem to recall that natural gas provides about 85% of the torque of gasoline, the rest is heat. This makes correct engine valve adjustment critical so you don’t toast the valves. I also recall oil changed at 10,000 miles looked brand new.

    I recall a magazine article (Popular Science?) that had a photo of a 2-inch cube of ceramic material that had been heated to glowing red hot. In the photo, is was cooling—the corners and edges were dark—but the core still glowed bright enough to take a dim photo. The amazing thing was that the cube was being held in an un-gloved hand. Talk about heat dissipation.

    So what if you could build a light weight V-8 with a ceramic block that didn’t need a liquid cooling system and ran on natural gas? Or something already air cooled—A Corvair? VW? Yeah I know, again. Money and politics.

  16. RHT- Exactly! There were a lot of folks that did the conversion to LP gas. Tuning was a bitch, but when you got it right, you got great mileage. The biggest problem, if I remember correctly, is the heat/cool cycling on ceramics. I think there is a point where it just fractures.

  17. I distinctly remember my father chewing a gas station attendant out when he saw that gas had gone over $1.00 a gallon. Of course, back then, a dollar was actually a useful amount of money.

  18. I made $1.25 per hour and worked for it. Gas was $0.249, so I could buy roughly 5 gallons for an hour of work.