Feb. 27, 2017. 2:10 am.

After 2 am and I can’t sleep.  Started thinking about Grandpa Johnson’s Sinclair station.  It was located on Hazel St. on the NW corner of W. Madison.  To the south was the YWCA, across the  street was the library and diagonally was the parking lot for the post office vehicles. The station is gone now.  The library as now a war museum.  The post office vehicles all bought their gas from Grandpa.  He also rented moving trucks.  He was the first one in Danville to offer that service.  Sometimes they would let me pump gas.  That was a big thrill for me.  My brother, John and I liked to stomp on the black rubber hose that ran from the station out to the drive where the gas pumps were.  When a car ran over it, the hose would trigger a bell inside the station to signal that there was a customer.  In those days, the driver never pumped the gas; the station attendant did that.  And while the gas was running, the attendant would check the tire pressure and oil level and clean the windshield.  All of that was part of the service when gas was purchased.  John and I discovered that the bell could be triggered by stamping on the hose.  Great fun!

Then there were the peanut machines.  One machine had peanuts and the other had cashews.  I don’t remember the price but I think it was ten cents for a handful of peanuts and twenty-five cents for cashews, but I’m not sure.  Occasionally I had enough money to splurge on a handful of peanuts but never for the cashews.  There were candy bars too.  I liked the PayDay best.  Speaking of candy bars, Mom’s favorite was Snickers but Dad preferred Milky Way because nuts would get under his false teeth. And he had false teeth from early adulthood.  Supposedly he had pyria that was so severe that all his teeth were pulled.

Anyway, speaking of vending machines, there were two more at the station.  One was the pop machine.  It had multiple slots, each one loaded with a different flavor.  The bottles were suspended by their necks.  I don’t remember all the flavors. My favorite was Chockola, a chocolate drink, but orange and grape were good too.  I also liked Squirt.  There was a cola but I don’t remember whether it was Coke or Pepsi.  The bottles were in wooden cases with probably 24 bottles in each case which was divided into a 4 X 6 matrix.  Sometimes I would be allowed to load the pop machine.  So the way it worked was you would raise the lid, identify your choice of soda by the bottle cap, then slide the bottle down the slot to the end, then up and into the dispensing mechanism which was a sort of hinged metal piece that would allow a bottle to be pulled up and out once a quarter was put into the slot.  You would hear the money drop into the coin box and the metal hinged piece would ratchet upward.  Now the other vending machine was a mystery.  It was mounted on the wall beside the bathroom door, inside the bathroom.  On the front of the machine was written that whatever the contents were, which was not stipulated were for the prevention of disease.  Now a bathroom never struck me as a disease free zone which heightened the mystery.  I wanted to put in a quarter, turn the knob and see what popped out, but I was afraid that somebody would hear the noise of the machine and I would have some explaining to do.  I must have thought that it was some secret reserved for adults because I never asked anybody about it.  By the time I learned about such things the gas station and with it, the mystery machine were long gone.

Now there were two other employees at the station along with my grandfather.  One was named Jim and it was evident even to me as a child that he had a serious drinking problem but he was friendly enough to me and since Grandpa was far from a teetotaler himself, I guess they got along just fine.  Jim had a little trick that he would sometimes pull.  He would short stick the oil dipstick.  The way that works is that to check the oil, first you pull out the dipstick and wipe it off, then reinsert it, pull it back out and read the oil level on the stick.  But if you don’t push it all the way back in, you can make it appear that the oil is low and thereby sell a quart of oil along with the gas.  That doesn’t mean that you have to pour all the oil into the engine.  You just go through the motions.  I don’t think that my grandfather approved of the practice, but I’m not sure that he actually forbad it either.  There was another man too whose name I don’t remember.  Turns out that the cash that he put into the register stuck to his fingers and ended up in his pocket.  He embezzled a lot of money from Grandpa and when that came to light, he disappeared.  So far as I know, no legal actions were taken.  Then there was Clarence, a black man.  We loved him.  One of the bays in the station was equipped with a car wash machine.  It consisted of two vertical and one horizontal metal device that could be rolled forward and backward on tracks on the floor.  It was equipped with spray nozzles that would soak the vehicle with water.  It was an early forerunner of the car wash machines that you see today.  All it did was spray water.  Soap was applied with a bucket and brush or cloth and the vehicle would be dried by chamois.  There was also a wringer to run the chamois through and squeeze out the water.

I was fascinated with the car lift.  It consisted of two steel runners spaced the correct distance to line up with an automobile’s wheels.  A car could be driven onto the runners and then a large hydraulic cylinder would come up from the floor, lifting the runners, car and all up into the air.  As it raised up above the floor, two metal plates would flip up behind the rear wheels to prevent the car from rolling backwards off the device.  Then the mechanic would wheel a small barrel equipped with a large funnel under the car’s crankcase to drain the oil.

They also had a dynamic wheel balancer that would spin the wheel really fast and mark where the wheel weights needed to go to balance the wheel.  There was also a machine that would break the tire off the rim in order to take out the inner tube and patch a hole.  And, of course, a specially designed tank to submerge a tire to check for leaks.  There seemed to be no end to gadgets and things to play with and surprisingly, nobody seemed to mind that my brother and I play with everything.  There was also a very cool adding machine that had ten rows of buttons numbered from zero to nine.  A number would be entered by mashing down the appropriate buttons for the first number and operating a lever on the right hand side to enter it.  Then you would press a function key to add or subtract the next number, then enter the next number and pull the lever, and so forth.  Each time the handle was pulled, the number would print on a strip of paper called a tape.  It was noisy, tactile and magical.

Finally, there was a radio that was always tuned to a ball game if any were being broadcast from Danville, Chicago or Indianapolis which were the limits of the reception range.  So the smell of gasoline, oil and grease along with tires, belts and car engines bring back those memories to this day.

There are three more things that come to mind, dogs, the jeep and plastic letters.  In the 1950’s, plastics were not as pervasive as they are today.  In fact, many were being developed at that time.  At the station Grandpa had plastic letters that would stick to windows.  He would use them to advertise specials or display messages.  I loved playing with them.  The idea that they would stick to glass and then could be peeled off to be used again was amazing.

Lady was an old Dalmatian who lived at the station.  She mostly just laid around.  Because there was a lot of grease and oil around, she tended to pick up her environment.  But everybody loved her.  Butch was one of her pups.  He was at the station too, but much more active than Lady.  They were a part of the life of the station.  I can remember Butch jumping into the jeep when it was taken out on a service call.  The jeep was a WWII surplus, no frills vehicle.  The windshield wiper on the driver’s side was motorized.  It ran off the engine vacuum.  The wiper on the passenger side was manual.  A knob stuck through into the cabin and was operated by hand.  The passenger compartment was enclosed by canvas, but there were no doors which made for some pretty brisk rides in the winter.  In the back of the jeep, you would find chains, jumpers and tools to change tires.  I think that it also had an air compressor.  No seat belts, of course.

The memories of long ago when the world was more innocent and life was simpler and slower.  And as a child, unburdened by the worries and cares of adulthood, it was a great time to be alive.

It’s 4 a.m., so I’ll try to find the sandman again.