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Let’s Gas Up at the Gas-a-Teria!
Gilmore Gas-a-Teria at night 1948
In 1948, the first self-serve gas station was opened in the United States. The station was in Los Angeles, the car capital of the country, on Beverly Boulevard just past Fairfax Avenue and was operated by Gilmore Oil. Gilmore Oil was a large, local oil and gas company well known in southern California. Gilmore called these self-service stations “Gas-a-Teria’s”. The Gas-a-Teria was a massive station for the time featuring eight islands with three pumps per island. The self-serve gas saved the customer five cents per gallon and the attendants at the station were young women.
Gas-a-Teria Attendants
The area bounded by Fairfax, Beverly, and 3rd Street where the Gas-a-Teria was located, was prime real estate. The Gilmore family had owned the land for decades operating it as a dairy farm. In the early 1900s, Arthur Gilmore was drilling a water well when he struck oil Beverly Hillbillies style and he turned the dairy farm into an oil production field. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t too surprising that he struck oil as his property was located only a mile or so north of the La Brea Tar Pits.
When Arthur died in 1918, his son E.B. Gilmore took over the business. E.B. expanded the company into the gas station business building it up to a network of 3,500 stations mostly on the west coast. E.B. was also a born promoter – the company motto was “Roar with Gilmore” and the company logo was a Lion. He sponsored aviator Roscoe Turner and several race drivers including Indy 500 winners Kelly Petillo and Wilbur Shaw.
In the early 1930s, Gilmore began developing this portion of their property and it eventually featured a baseball field (Gilmore Field – home of the Pacific Coast League Hollywood Stars), a football stadium (Gilmore Stadium,) a drive-in theater (Gilmore Drive-In), a large Farmers Market open every day of the year, and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium with its distinctive architecture. The ballpark, football stadium, and drive-in were razed in the 1950s to make way for CBS Television City.
From lower to upper photo – Gilmore Stadium, Gilmore Field & Pan-Pacific Auditorium with Gilmore Drive-In to the right of Gilmore Field
Getting back to the self-serve gas idea, it took quite a while for the idea to catch on. At the time of the Gas-a-Teria, gasoline stations competed on the basis of quality – high-quality gasoline and full service with attendants, usually dressed in a clean, white uniform, who would wash the windows and check the engine oil level and tire air pressure in addition to pumping the gas. In my neck of the woods (Sacramento), the first self-serve gas station was opened in the mid to late 1960s along Fair Oaks Boulevard. My dad started gassing up there after they opened and when I got my license, I also got gas there circa 1970.
The attraction of the self-serve gas was the same as at the Gas-a-Teria – the customer saved money by pumping his own. The way it worked is the customer would buy tokens from the attendant who sat in a small kiosk with the tokens being required to operate the pumps. A funny thing, their gas price wasn’t that much different from the Gas-a-Teria in ’48 (the photos show it was 21 cents at the time) and the Sacramento self-serve which was 27 or 29 cents as I (fuzzily) recall. Later, I worked pumping gas at a Standard station for about a year around 1974 by which time three of the stations 12 pumps were self-serve and the other nine still full-serve. I think that was pretty standard in the mid-1970s.
Gradually over the years, the percentage of self serve pumps at gas stations across the country increased from a quarter to a half and so forth but it took quite some time – 15 years or more – before almost all the pumps were self serve. There are, however, still two states – Oregon and New Jersey – which ban self-service gasoline. If you’re interested, here’s a brief article on the history of self-serve gas.
I was trying to think of a song, any song, about gas stations but the only tune I can think of along those lines is “Too Much Monkey Business” by Chuck Berry.
I should note that I originally posted a bit about the Gilmore Gas-a-Teria several weeks ago at Things I Learned Today group. I decided to expand it a bit and post it here in the Member Posts. These sorts of subjects get posted at Things I Learned Today group regularly so, if you don’t belong, you might consider joining it.
Published in General
Yep, that pretty much covers it, except possibly for a few other leftist bromides like No Wars for Oil and destroying the rain forest, though I think that may be one more targeted toward Big Beef than Big Oil.
Shaken, not stirred.
Sorry to buzzkill a delightful thread. Just want everyone to loin-gird for the coming struggle sessions.
Everything is political. The past is a cesspool to be denounced. Virtue attends those who note the sins first, but power attends those who total up the greatest number of sins, and punish those whose insufficiently complete consciousness was unable to grasp the breadth of the offense.
Now, whether this inability to see all the problems was a lack of intellect or a willful, wrecker’s desire to cover for the sins of the past – that can be determined at a future point by the relevant committee. You’re useful until you’re not.
I wonder if the electric vehicle is still t he fair-haired child of the fossil fuel haters, now that Elon Musk has been making nasty comments about California’s laws and posting Red Pill hints online? My SoCal cousin owns a Tesla, which if you’re just doing short distances I suppose is fine, but the virtue-signaling aspect of it might have dropped a few notches in the past two months, while no one’s still answered the question who’s going to build and what’s going to power all the new electrical plants needed to charge 300 million electric car batteries, let alone why it’s OK to make people in other countries strip mine for toxic heavy metals so people in Los Angeles don’t have to hit the ARCO station.
Environmental damage is for the little people.
I do have confidence, though, that if EVs were ever to become seriously viable in the marketplace, in terms of non-subsidized costs and driving distance between recharge, the environmentalists would suddenly discover the evils of strip mining toxic metals for vehicle battery production, in the same way that natural gas was the ‘good’ fossil fuel for 30 years compared to evil coal or oil …. until the new fracking and horizontal drilling techniques made it easily obtainable. Then it became just as evil as the other two (and where the push today in progressive cities is to eliminate the evil LNG-powered buses that were praised 20-25 years ago as replacing the evil diesels and buy electric buses, even though the first gen of those buses haven’t done well in heat or cold in maintaining their charges through runs, and have to be towed back to the depot).
We all know the Left will get indulgences and absolution for any previously defined sins they commit in the purpose of “the thing.”
The thing being whatever thing is their current cause.
And, the irony of electric buses being towed to the depot by a roaring gas-powered truck is definitely a thing for which they will take absolution.
You know it’s bad, and a sad day when @jameslileks
is a buzzkill.
A large Buc’ees is an impressive sight. Besides 120 fuel pumps, many have more than 60 restroom stalls and the stores can be more than 50,000 square feet. They do not however have fuel pumps for tractor-trailers, and most or all have signs instructing 18 wheel tractor trailers not to enter.
But in some ways isn’t the modern arrangement returning to an even older model – many early purveyors of gasoline were the town general stores that put gas pumps at the front or side of the store.
On a busy weekend, the big Interstate Buc’ees will actually have people directing traffic to either the fuel pumps or the parking area, like a stadium parking lot worker (in the Texas summer heat, not a fun job, but Buc’ess does have signs out front advertising $14 an hour starting salaries).
Ha Ha – Yeah Good point.
The gross profit on selling a gallon of gasoline is less than a nickel. You’ve got to sell a huge amount of gas to break even. Candy, soda, or as they say at 7-Eleven “beer and smokes” is the business.
As a Texan , I’m very familiar with Buc’ees. But I question whether or not they’ve embarked on an over aggressive expansion. That space is very competitive and their mega marts are now being built on some expensive real estate.
For now they seem to be counting on the same type of brand loyalty Chick-fil-A has to create the volume needed for their mega-stores, and just staying in region for now, they may be able to pull it off since there’s something very Texas about a 120-pump no-trucks c-store. But we’ll see how their first out-of-state store, in Alabama, does, where the ‘specialness’ of Buc’ess is likely to wear off faster if the product doesn’t develop new word-of-mouth customers in that region.
Thanks for the post!
Don’t the pumps at the Gas-A-Teria seem awfully close together?
Back in ye olden days (or roughly, any time before about 1967), it would be one pump per grade, so if a station had regular, mid-grade and premium, it had three pumps (Los Angeles magazine ran this photo two years ago of a surviving Texaco station in its three-pump glory in the Sliver Lake area of the city):
Ah. That explains it. I was seeing the picture through a modern lens. So one car per island.
You might get two, if one car pulled all the way forward and wanted premium while a car behind him needed the regular gas pump. Googling around, Sunoco actually introduced the first multi-grade pumps in 1956, where you could dial anything up from (roughly) 86 to 94 octane, by blending two underground tanks of 94 and 86 octane to fill in the mid-grades. But lots of stations still had the single grade pumps well into the 1980s.
Thanks Hoya. And, yes the pumps are close together. Almost surely too close together to allow three cars in one lane to use the pumps at the same time. Now, if there were a lot of motorcycles things would be different….
Just in case anyone missed the humor of James’ “killjoy” his family’s business is (or was) oil and fuel distribution (wholesale and retail).
Right. I think they had a gas station with a service bay and a tow truck.
That would be about right.
There are a few lines in “Gold” about a guy who works in a gas station. Too bad the video doesn’t show Stevie Nicks who sang backup vocals.
I own a Prius… What’s a gas station?
(Just kidding. But my biggest fear about Prius ownership is that we so rarely visit a gas station that it would be possible to find ourselves in some remote area without anything in the engine.)
Dug the heck out of this post. Thanks, @tigerlily!
About 20 years ago I had my first experience getting gas in New Jersey. I was quite taken aback at not being able to pump my own, and I asked the attendant about it. He said that gas stations provided many important jobs but “that witch [then governor] Christie Todd Whitman and her cronies in Trenton are trying to eliminate them”. I guess they failed. Hmph.
Thanks Charlotte!
In one hundred years, if the current AntiFa scary pants crowd doesn’t burn the system to the ground, the human race might find their cars powered by something we don’t even know about yet.
I have a friend whose career is in “free energy.” His free energy is not the kind where some magical element runs the gyroscope from now until infinity, but a system whereby simply scoping out the deficits of the electrical system and the power plant for large industries, can allow him to drop the power bills by 15 to 33%.
always fill up at 1/2. I have a Prius too, and I usually get gas every 2 weeks. I’ve barely used any gas since March 11.
Love this.
Thanks Jim.