In the fall of 1997, Shirley Morganstein was the Director of Speech Therapy at the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in West Orange, New Jersey. In November of that year, I had a stroke that had spared my limbs but had left me with a galloping case of aphasia, which is why I consulted Shirley Morganstein.
Thirteen years later, in 2010, I am still afflicted with the problems of aphasia. For example, I ride a stationary bicycle in the downstairs gym. I cannot name that stationary bike without thinking first of a store in Summit, New Jersey, called the Siegel’s Stationery Shop. I take diuretics to prevent congestive heart failure. I cannot think of the word congested without first thinking of the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, which tells me of the congestive part.
On one occasion, when my wife went to the post office to mail some items, I asked her, when she returned, if she had put her umbrella in the mail. Aphasia never goes away. With practice, the brain can try to overcome it. I am convinced that aphasia will be with me until I become an angel. Until that time, I suspect that I will be writing essays, as Shirley Morganstein first suggested. The point is putting the brain to work, which is why these essays are being written.
In the past thirteen years I have composed something more than 475 essays. While I still had eyesight, I wrote them out in longhand, and my wife Judy typed them. Five years ago, when my sight was lost, I began to dictate them on a tape recorder. I have worn out the original tape recorder and at this point, I am on my fourth tape recorder.
As it turns out, one of the readers of Ezra’s Essays is a gentleman of 92 years who was a former vice president of the NW Ayer advertising agency. He is also a veteran of the Eighth Air Force, of World War II fame. More importantly, he comes from the gorgeous state of Missouri. My reference here is to a man named Howard Lawrence Davis.
In recent weeks, Howard Davis has strongly suggested to me that he knew of my career with the telephone company and he knew a bit or two about my military career, but he knew nothing about the years I spent in the filling station business. I pointed out to Howard that I had included some incidents from the filling station business in other essays. Howard insisted that the business of filling stations be treated as a separate part of my career. So it is that this essay is about the cumulative four to five years that I spent working in filling stations. Today those filling stations are sometimes or often called service stations. These days, you do not receive much service from a service station. The essence of this essay has to do with the extensive service that we provided our customers at the filling stations where I was employed.
It is at this point that the business about Jesus becomes significant, hence the title. For all of my childhood, I was forced to attend religious services which lasted from 9AM until at least 1PM every Sunday morning. In many cases there were evening services as well. I should tell you that I was unhappy that I was forced to listen to preachers who spoke in terms of great illogicalities. They spoke of how Joshua stopped the sun in its tracks and lengthened the day into nighttime. I believed at that early age of eight or nine that such a thing was plainly impossible. But it was preached as a matter of faith. I have great doubt that Jesus could walk on water, and that Jonah survived three days in the belly of that great fish. And I have many other doubts about the theology that was being presented to this youngster.
The end of the story came about when I was thirteen years of age. At that point, the preacher in the Free Will Baptist Church gathered all of the youngsters from ages three or four up through my age and demanded that we should sing a stupid hymn called “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” I made a vulgar reference to what the preacher could do with his sunbeam and I refused to be involved in the singing. When we reached the car that would take us home, I informed my father that I was not ever going to come back to that or any other church for the rest of my life. I was a muscular chap at that point because of the many hours spent with my father cutting trees, sawing them, and then splitting them to provide wood for our furnace because we could no longer afford coal. My father was not a violent man but he knew that if he attempted to discipline me I would resist it, so he more or less acquiesced in the inevitable agreement that church services were not for me.
I knew that my parents would never agree to my simply taking Sundays off and lolling around the house. The discipline I enforced upon myself, which would apply to all of my siblings, was that in a case such as this, I should go to work. And so it was that I went to Carl Schroth’s Mobile gas filling station and asked Mr. Schroth if I could spend Sunday mornings wiping windshields. Mr. Schroth listened to my story and there were guffaws from him all along because Carl Schroth had had similar experiences with the theology profession. And so it was that, in the beginning – to borrow a line from Genesis – I worked at the Schroth station wiping windshields to start my career. In those days, in 1935, customers were coddled endlessly.
The price of gas was about the same at all the stations, but the difference came as a result of the services that were offered free of charge. When a customer appeared who requested gas, we were instructed to always check the oil level in the crank case. Beyond that, there was a radiator to be looked at to see whether there was enough water. In the wintertime, there was a hydrometer that was used to check the state of the anti-freeze in the radiator. There were at least five tires, including the spare, to be checked. In this dog-eat-dog atmosphere, every service station tried to outperform the others. That was fine with me, because it gave me a chance to learn about the business and provided me with a spot to begin a career to replace the Sunday morning church going.
At the Schroth filling station, there was a permanent canopy from the offices of the station itself out to the pumps. There was also a driveway beyond the pumps that was unprotected from the weather. When a customer wanted to use the unprotected part of the driveway, the attendant had to stand in the rain or snow to pump the gas into his tank. But nobody complained.
In those days, hoods were raised separately on both sides of the engine compartment. There was no such thing as a unified hood as we have today. The hoods were raised to check the oil level in the crank case. On some models, the dip stick bayonet was located on the left-hand side and on other models it was on the right-hand side. A potential customer could recognize an experienced filling station attendant if he knew which side of the hood to raise to check the oil level. I soon learned how to do that.
If we were permitted to do so, we would not only check the tires to see that there was enough pressure, we would also look at the battery. At that time, batteries were located in the front compartment, usually below where the passenger or driver put his feet. It was a matter of raising the mats and finding the battery and unscrewing the four cells to see if there was sufficient water.
There was a method to this madness about checking oil levels and tires etc. The idea was to sell some oil or even a tire to the customer. My colleagues, Charlie Kosta and Bob Litzenberger, were very adept at persuading customers that they needed another quart of oil, a new tire, or a new battery. So you see that in the filling station business, I learned my trade thoroughly under the tutelage of Carl Schroth, Charlie Kosta, and Bob Litzenberger.
I also learned that when it came to checking the fluid in the radiator, it was important to keep your head away from the exposed stack once the cap was removed, particularly in wintertime. At that time, most people used antifreeze based on an alcoholic content. When the radiator and the engine became hot, the antifreeze would boil away. There could be foam and pressure coming out of the radiator.
But beyond that, after 1936, there were cases when the caps on the radiator were often ornamental. It was incumbent upon us to know that if there was a radiator inside, we should not twist off the ornamental hood ornament. So you see, learning all of this stuff was fascinating to me and it beat the hell out of attending church services.
Now let us go on a little bit more about Carl Schroth and his customers. The filling station was located at the edge of the estate holdings in the St. Louis County area. Carl’s customers were affluent people who did not care much whether there was a Depression or a recession or any other downturn in the economy. They were usually very well fixed and by driving their convertibles with the tops down they showed how the rich folks lived.
That brings me to a recitation of some of the idiosyncrasies of Carl Schroth. He always referred to himself as “Yours truly” rather than the personal pronoun of I or me. It took me two or three weeks to figure out who “Yours truly” was.
At that time, the hernia was called a “rupture.” For one reason or another, Carl decided that he was ruptured and rather than find a truss, he decided to use a very novel replacement. Plywood came into being at about this time. The plywood sheets are not of great thickness but they are of great strength. So it was that Carl, to deal with his rupture or hernia, bought a piece of plywood and fashioned it so that it could be inserted in the front of his pants. I am quite certain that it hurt when he sat down but that is not the point in this story. There was a young socialite who came to buy gas from Carl, who was manning the pump. After he had filled the tank, Carl stood beside her and plunked the plywood board in the front of his pants and said to the young woman, “How about them apples?” I am sure that she was thoroughly surprised. But in point of fact, it was very difficult to be angry with Carl Schroth for any length of time. The business about “How about them apples?” had reached one more customer and to this day, whenever I see a piece of plywood I think about Carl fashioning the truss and putting it down the front of his pants.
Another story about my experience in the filling station business took place with one of those wealthy customers whom I described a little earlier. This gentleman owned a sixteen-cylinder Duesenberg automobile which was a touring car. That meant that the top level of the car was canvas and could be rolled back. The rest of the car was enormous. The hood itself must have been eight feet long. In any event, twice each year this gentleman, whose name I do not remember, would bring the car to Schroth’s filling station and leave it for at least two days while we washed it and polished it, using the compound calling Simonize. Mind you, as the youngest man on the staff, I was given the job of cleaning the white sidewall tires on the wire wheels. This car had six wheels, four on the ground and two in wheel wells in the fenders. Each of those rims below the wire spokes had to be cleaned with a special brush. On a nineteen-inch wheel, that is a lot of wheel to clean. We did that twice yearly and I assume that Schroth charged this gentleman a hefty amount of money. In any case, I was tired of dealing with the Duesenberg”s white side wall wire wheels. But Simonizing that car after washing it and doing the wheels was a major undertaking. Unfortunately, I was never in a position to drive the Duesenberg, but when the owner came to pick it up, it made a wonderful bubbling sound as he pulled out of the filling station.
Another episode that contributed to my education in the filling station business had to do with a place called Lake Forest. Lake Forest was a lovely subdivision on the southwest corner of Clayton and Hanley Roads. In this subdivision, there were several large homes that at the time looked like castles to me. There was certainly some exclusivity about living in Lake Forest, much of which had to do with the single-lane road that connected the estates. Shortly after going to work for Carl during the winter when I was perhaps fifteen years old, we received a call late in the evening about a person who had gone off the road in a snowstorm and was stuck. It was during the holiday season. So Carl, Charlie Kosta, and I went to pull him out. This happened about one and a half miles from the station where we worked. It was snowing and when we arrived at the scene of the mishap, it was soon determined that we could not winch him out using the front bumper alone. He was in too deep for that.
So it was necessary for someone to get under the car and put a chain around the axle of the front wheels. In those days, the two front wheels were on axles. Naturally I was nominated to get on my back in this wet weather and get the chain around the axle. I did that. The operation was a success and we winched the car out of the ditch and onto the roadway.
It turns out that Carl had told the owner of the car he would charge him something on the order of $15 to $20. Granted, in those days, that was a large sum of money. But then, when the car was safely winched out, the owner said that he was not going to pay $15 or $20; he was only going to pay $10. There was almost nothing more to say. Carl opened the door, determined that the car was in neutral, and released the emergency hand brake. Charlie Kosta went to the right front fender and Carl pushed on the frame that held the left front door. Soon I realized what was going on and I was in charge of pushing the car from the radiator. So, instantly, when the man told us that he would not pay us the full amount, we shoved his car back into the same ditch from which it had been pulled. In legal terms, this is known as restoring the status quo ante.
There was also a sad occurrence for me in my young career as a filling station worker. On another cold and snowy day, a call came in from a female customer of ours who had suffered a flat tire on a lonely country road. I was sent on that mission to replace the flat tire. I used the 1928 Packard tow truck and found the customer huddling in her car because of the cold and wet weather and snow. It was a very difficult operation to get the jack under the car because of ruts in the road. Eventually I wound up putting the hydraulic jack directly under the differential and lifting the car that way. Before I did that, I had loosened the lugs that held the wheel onto the car to avoid pushing the car once the wheel was raised. I also asked the customer to step out of the car while the operation was taking place.
The problem with lifting the car with the differential as the focal point is that both rear wheels are lifted off the ground. Beyond that, differentials are housed in round casings, and the lifting part of the jack is flat. This means that any disturbance between the jack and the differential could cause the car to slip. This is what crushed wrists and arms are made of.
Changing a tire under these circumstances is a delicate operation. Great care must be taken to avoid having the car coming down on your hand as the tire is changed. Eventually, in spite of the cold and the snow, I put the spare tire on the right rear wheel, and in so doing had laid the flat tire off on the side of the road a few feet behind where I was working. At the conclusion of installing the spare tire, the lady thanked me very much and I got in my tow truck, which provided very little relief from the snow, and returned to the station. What I had done was a cardinal sin. I had left the original tire of this Buick automobile by the side of the road and failed to bring the flat tire back to the filling station.
Later that night and again the next day, I realized what I had done and so I returned to the scene, looking for the wheel and the flat tire of this new Buick automobile. But it was no where to be found. I was simply distraught. Schroth told me that I was responsible for this and that he would hold me accountable when it came to the money business. I suspect that in those days a wheel for a Buick automobile with a tire on it was worth perhaps as much as $75 to $100. I was making $15 a week, so you can see how long it would take to pay it off. In the end, Carl relented and I contributed maybe $15 or $20 for the wheel that was lost. But that never again happened to me, because I saw to it that it would not happen ever again.
And so my education in the filling station business continued apace. After I had worked for Carl for a while, I wondered why he had not paid me. It turns out that he had a unique system consisting of a safe buried beneath his desk that all of us had access to. When we needed money, we would go in to the safe and take some out; we would leave a note as to how much we had taken. This was a preposterous arrangement. Rather than paying us, that was the way Carl did business. But if Carl Schroth was the boss, which he was, and that’s the way he wanted to do business, there was no objection on my part. But it took me quite a while before I caught on to the fact that paying myself was the only way to do it, rather than waiting for Carl to pay me.
I worked for Carl from some time in 1935, part time or full time, until a little after January, 1940. At that point, I was considered a full-fledged filling station worker and an offer came from a Sinclair station down the road which would pay me $17 per week. So I left Carl and went to work for Eddy Williams at the Sinclair station.
Williams was the person who, not long after I arrived there, was driving his new Chevrolet up a road called Eager Road. Eager Road ended at Hanley Road. Apparently Williams did not see the stop sign or the fact that the road ran out. So it was that he drove his new car into the showroom of a lumber company. Whether he had had too much to drink or was sleepy, I never found out. But I did come to know that the name of the filling station was changed the next morning to a new name, The Friendly Service Station. I also believe that there was a transfer of property to his wife. So you see that I not only learned a little bit about the filling station business, but I also learned something of the legal profession as well.
My job was to work from noon until 9:00 PM each day but on Sunday I was to open the station and to man it until 1:00 PM when it closed. In the beginning, I had been granted Monday as my day off. Eventually, I negotiated with Williams to take Thursday as my day off. That is the same day as housemaids were given their day off. At that time, I was courting a housemaid. The romance department will have to wait for a subsequent essay.
Working for Ed Williams was a straightforward proposition, which I liked. The fact that I was alone in the evenings and on Sundays gave me a sense of responsibility for a mere 17 or 18-year-old youngster.
As I have recited before, there was a car washer named Dell van Buren Barbee, who also worked for Ed Williams. Dell had probably graduated from the second grade in a Mississippi school room but he was possessed not necessarily of book knowledge, but of practical knowledge. On rainy days when there were no cars to wash and business was slow, Dell and I had a bit of a gab fest. On one occasion, as I have reported earlier, Dell told me that if God had invented something better than f…ing (sexual intercourse), he had “kept it to hisself.” I thought that this was a masterly presentation of the thought process of Dell, and I never ever bothered to try to straighten out his grammar. For all I know, God may be a female, in which case the old thought would have to be reconstituted.
I worked for Williams until September of 1941 when an offer came, courtesy of my former drafting teacher, for a job at AT&T. It was a drafting job and it also paid $17 per week. But it was for a 35-hour week. So I took the AT&T offer and, again, looked for filling station work for my weekends. The first person I asked about weekend work was a man named Harold Bauer, who ran a Standard Oil (Indiana) filling station. Like Carl Schroth, they also served a very wealthy clientele.
Harold and his older employees had a fixation about putting grease anywhere near the interior of automobiles. So I was forbidden while I worked there ever to sit in a customer’s automobile. Instead, I found myself lubricating front wheel bearings, which was a filthy job. Mark, who was pretty much in charge over the weekend, had me on the front wheel bearings. In the end, I diddled myself because I was working for Harold on Saturday and half a day on Sunday for only $5. At that time, I needed no more experience but I did find out that Mark, a graduate of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, was not my biggest fan.
Now, before we wrap up, there is one more thought to express here. Howard Davis, who asked for this essay, is a lucky man because I am still alive to produce it. The reason is simple. At my first job in the Schroth filling station there were four lanes of concrete running in front of the establishment. The station was located at the corner of Clayton Road and the North and South Road. You will be amazed to find that the North and South Road ran in those two directions. There was an electric traffic signal that controlled traffic on these two very busy roads.
The first two lanes of the Schroth station connected Clayton Road with North and South Road. If you were standing in the station, there were these two lanes before reaching the gas pumps. These were protected overhead by a permanent structure. The third lane was unprotected and the fourth lane contained only the Packard tow truck with big signs on it advertising the Schroth filling station. Drivers on Clayton Road who desired to turn right on North and South Road had a penchant for driving through our driveway in an effort to miss the stop sign. Similarly, drivers on North and South Road who wished to make a left hand turn on Clayton Road were often tempted to use the Schroth driveway to avoid the electric stop sign. I soon learned that it was necessary to look both ways when stepping out of the office to serve a customer. I don’t remember anyone being killed by the people illegally using our driveway, but there were some very close calls. It is for this reason that I say that Howard Davis is a very lucky man because I am still around to dictate this story after dodging the speeding cars in the Schroth driveway.
Well, look, there you have it. I worked in filling stations from some time in 1935 until April or May of 1942. Although this is longer than four or five years, that is all I claim because some of it was part-time work. In the final analysis, I learned a lot about automobiles as well as learning a lot about life. Filling station work is not for the genteel of society. It is a rough and tumble job with long hours, often performed in snowy or rainy weather. You may recall my story about pushing this ditched fellow back into the ditch as well as leaving the rear wheel from the Buick lying by the side of the road on a rainy or snowy afternoon. All of this was done because there was no possibility for me ever to attend college at that point during the Depression. When push comes to shove, this was a matter of survival and I was fortunate to be employed by Carl Schroth, Eddy Williams, and Harold Bauer. I still think highly of those men and I am glad for the opportunity that I had to work for them. And as you can see, I had an opportunity to gather some interesting war stories along the way.
So, Howard Davis, this is my story about my career as a filling station attendant. I hope that you find it interesting. It still brings together the whole career I had working in the oil and gas business. I think upon review that you will find that the title of this essay is appropriate: it all was because of Jesus and my dislike of attending church services on Sunday morning. Had it not been for that, I may well have become a stock broker or an insurance mogul or somebody like Bernie Madoff.
But I took the hard route and in the end I do not regret it. I am happy with the way things have turned out. It gives me pleasure to dictate this essay. It is a look back which provided me with several giggles.
E. E. CARR
June 6, 2010
Essay 463
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Kevin’s commentary: This was one of the longest essays I’ve published in weeks, coming in at right around 4,600 words. It is the mother of all filling station essays, and touches on points briefly mentioned in a number of the other filling station essays that you can find under its tag here. I wonder if this filling station still exists, and if so who owns it or works there. Perhaps Pop knows these things and can give an update on his old place of employment.