TRUE COLORS It is not at all unusual today to feel a sudden tinge of redness flushing into your cheeks when you see a sign proclaiming the latest 9/10th of a cent rise in the price of gasoline. Up! Up! And away!
There was a time some years ago when gas was sold by color and red was a favorite with many of us. That was back in the 1930's, as I recall. It started suddenly, last a year or so and ran dry. It seems strange today, but a great many people favored one hue over another ready to prove their car operated better, longer, safer and actually with less service and repair work if their favorite color of gasoline was used at all times.
I think the brand then called “Standard” was a red. Pumps at local filling stations in those days had large, glass tanks atop their six-foot towers. Red gasoline spouted into that glass display area from a nearby or underground storage tank was an inspiring sight of fresh, green gasoline it could lend a Christmas feeling to year round happiness and joy.
Those pumps were hand-operated. The attendant stood erect between the tanks and worked the long handle to start the gasoline flowing from down under upward to the glass container above in a sudden flush of liquid color related foam... a soft, nursery pink if your car “ran better” using red gasoline.
Other product brands of the day shared other colors. There were green, blue, yellow, copper-toned, and I'm sure that, had we had a company based in Scotland, someone would have devised a plaid “designer” gas or a tartan toned type for kilt-wearing motorists. I don't remember exactly who had what colors, but there was a shade for Cities Service, Gulf, Sinclair, Texaco, and Sun Oil Company called their gas “Blue Sunoco”. So, me one, I think it was American chose to buck the trend; to battle the blues, golds, reds, tans, coppers and others with a perfectly white, absolutely clean, pure, untainted pollution-free gasoline to be had without a doctor's prescription. . A new brand “Atlantic” also went aggressively white.
Prices varied in those days, as well but I don't remember them doing drastic price stunts as they seem to do so readily today, allegedly responded to influence at the sources of crude ...events which hadn't even happened yet but may at any time in those volatile mid-east spots where entire nations have been sitting on crude supplies for centuries.
In my memory gasoline prices seem to have stayed in the 20-cent level; then it jumped to twenty-five and up to thirty-nine. We heard the very same comments we are hearing today. Today gasoline is selling for $2.50 in Texas; it was $2.14 in the Valley of Virginia is afternoon and I see a quote from California that a gallon there costs you $3.00. That's where we have five perfectly good refinery plants sitting idle and unused because of
environmentalist objection to their use. We do not have the capacity to refine supplies of crude currently being shipped from Valdez.
FOOTNOTE:
A strange event is taking place in our midst this very moment which might teach us a thing or two about our future. Now that we have advanced to the cultural level where we can legally execute a human being with mental and physical difficulties and physical irregularities by starvation and dehydration while, at the same time protecting known criminals from such a fate. We, having attained to such competence as that, certainly ought to be able to solve our petty power problems without any difficulty - and soon.
A.L.M. March 29, 2005 [c616wds]
