You know you have too much time on your hands when - Wed Nov 26 2014 11:47 PM
Since I am still recovering from leg surgery from that damn gas pump accident, I was laying on the couch with my leg propped up looking thru Wayne Henderson's 100 years of Gas Stations book. Then I started using Goggle Maps on my phone to punch up addresses and see if some of the old stations were still there. When he listed an address or cross street's sometimes you could still find the building. Sometimes they were remodeled so much they bore no resemblance to the original structure.
Which brings me to the pictures I have posted. I grew up a half block south of this station and drank a lot of pop from the Coke machine (more about that in a minute). My earliest memories of this station is about 1963 when my good friend Bruce Trump's dad and uncle ran it, it was "Bob and Jacks Texaco". The picture is from 1934. I distinctly remember the station using Tokheim 39's when I was a kid. Although the current picture does not even look like the same building I can most assuredly tell you it is.
This station sits in my home town of Knightstown Indiana on route US 40 at the corner of Jefferson and Main streets. Before I-70 was built I would set up at the station on Memorial Day late afternoon and watch all the traffic heading east from the Indy 500. I remember Bruce telling me that one day a limo pulled up and the driver got out and wanted to see the Womens restroom, it must have passed the inspection because the driver opened the back door and Phyllis Diller got out to use it.
I don't know why but I spent a lot of time up there but I did, hanging out, watching all the action. I can still remember how it smelled. I also bought my share of candy bars up there also out of the vending machine. Oh, about the Coke machine, it was a Vendo 110....my buddies and I were camping out in our back yard and went up there in the middle of the night to get a pop. Somehow we discovered that the machine would dispense the bottles without putting in more coins. Leave it say that if the pop would have been alcohol we would have been drunk on our butts and not sobered up for a week. But since it was pop we did get the belly ache...bad. The next day I was telling my mom about our "good fortune?" and mom marched me up there and I had to pay for all we drank...lesson learned, don't recall my age.
My mom was a professional photographer and she took a lot of pictures of the local gas stations. I will have to work on a then and now series.
Tom.
Which brings me to the pictures I have posted. I grew up a half block south of this station and drank a lot of pop from the Coke machine (more about that in a minute). My earliest memories of this station is about 1963 when my good friend Bruce Trump's dad and uncle ran it, it was "Bob and Jacks Texaco". The picture is from 1934. I distinctly remember the station using Tokheim 39's when I was a kid. Although the current picture does not even look like the same building I can most assuredly tell you it is.
This station sits in my home town of Knightstown Indiana on route US 40 at the corner of Jefferson and Main streets. Before I-70 was built I would set up at the station on Memorial Day late afternoon and watch all the traffic heading east from the Indy 500. I remember Bruce telling me that one day a limo pulled up and the driver got out and wanted to see the Womens restroom, it must have passed the inspection because the driver opened the back door and Phyllis Diller got out to use it.
I don't know why but I spent a lot of time up there but I did, hanging out, watching all the action. I can still remember how it smelled. I also bought my share of candy bars up there also out of the vending machine. Oh, about the Coke machine, it was a Vendo 110....my buddies and I were camping out in our back yard and went up there in the middle of the night to get a pop. Somehow we discovered that the machine would dispense the bottles without putting in more coins. Leave it say that if the pop would have been alcohol we would have been drunk on our butts and not sobered up for a week. But since it was pop we did get the belly ache...bad. The next day I was telling my mom about our "good fortune?" and mom marched me up there and I had to pay for all we drank...lesson learned, don't recall my age.
My mom was a professional photographer and she took a lot of pictures of the local gas stations. I will have to work on a then and now series.
Tom.
