Transcript: Fill ’er Up
Intro
Announcer:
This program is brought to you by the combined resources of the Wisconsin Historical
Society and Wisconsin Public Television.
Narrator:
Long before pay-at-the-pump, before the convenience store selling gas and
before self-service, there was the old-fashioned gas station. Gas stations — everyday
places — places usually taken for granted.
Jim Draeger:
Gas stations are really ordinary buildings. And I think that’s what’s
really special about them. They’re the ordinary buildings that
form the backdrops to our lives.
Narrator:
The coming of the automobile created a transportation revolution. And
as it evolved, the ordinary gas station brought about extraordinary changes
in the way we live.
Jim Draeger:
Gas stations develop innovations that become standard everywhere. They
were on the forefront of changes in marketing. They were the pioneers
of the commercial strip.
Narrator:
Over the years, thousands of gas stations have fallen by the wayside. But
a surprising number remain and each one has a story to tell. So let’s
‘Fill ’er Up’ and take a trip back in time, back to the glory days of
Wisconsin gas stations.
Announcer:
Funding for ‘Fill ’er Up’ was provided by the Wisconsin History Fund
supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Filling Stations
Narrator:
At the turn of the 20th century, the first cars began scaring the horses on Wisconsin
roads. Early drivers bought their gas by the can at hardware stores or
other shops that sold kerosene and poured it in. Hand-cranked pumps
soon began to make buying gas faster and easier. Later, the first permanent
pumps with underground tanks appeared right next to the curb.
Jim Draeger:
When automobiles first emerged and they thought about dispensing gas, there
was nothing they could look to as a prototype. So they had to invent
an entirely new type of building that functioned in an entirely new way. The
first stations were crudely slapped together affairs, just tin roofs and
wood sides, real shack-like buildings. When the car is introduced into
the city, the major residential streets, the boulevards end up becoming commercial
streets. And the gas stations are the first buildings that break that
back of residential house after house after house. They become the
pioneers of the commercial strip. And as a result, these crude shacks
are being erected next to people’s houses. And there’s
a huge push back from people in neighborhoods about these dirty, smelly,
ugly looking buildings being inserted into their neighborhoods.
Narrator:
Gasoline retailers responded by building stations that looked like little houses
and fit into the neighborhood.
Jim Draeger:
They looked like the popular house types of the time. They’re bungalows
and craftsmen buildings, period revival styles like tutor design. The
stone and brick. Substantial looking buildings.
Narrator:
When Lester Proksch first opened this cottage-style filling station in 1933
he lived in the rooms on the second floor.
Marty Bauer:
The owner would come down in the morning and open up his shop. That’s
how it was operated. The brick work is rather unique. It’s
very interesting to see how they went around the door moldings and how they
went around the ends of the buildings. And then, if you look from the
southern exposure where they used all different formations of how they put
the bricks in. The corners were all chiseled out by hand. If they
were to erect a building like this now it would be very, very costly, because
it would be so time consuming to do what they did.
Narrator:
To see one of the last operating house-type filling stations, you can travel
to Platteville where Tom Nodorft and his father, Burt, have run this bungalow-style
station since 1967.
Tom Nodorft:
People stop every day and take pictures. I mean, people from out of town
they just come across this, and they buy gas and take a picture, because they
can’t believe that it’s still going the way it is. With being
close to the university, there’s a lot of traffic. And it attracts
quite a bit of attention. One thing I’ve always noticed —
-Thank you!
Is that the families will follow each other around. There’s been people here who’ve taught at the university and then their son bought gas here. And then the son got married, and the family buys gas here. It’s the cheapest, and it’s very friendly.
Tom Nodorft:
We do have a pretty good cross section of people that come in, from young to
old, mostly on the older side.
-Twenty-five, right?
-Yep.
-There you go.
-Thanks.
Most people come in, you know what their first name is because you see them a couple times a week.
-Take care.
People like that. Sometimes you don’t get to know people until they write a check. Once they write you a check, you know what their name is.
-Mm-mm.
-Have a good day.
-Good-bye.
-Thank you.
-It says ‘fat-free,’ look right on it.
-Fat-free! Can’t beat it.
The Service Station
Jim Draeger:
It’s really apparent when you look at early gas stations that there’s
a really volatile period in the teens and ’20s as they’re experimenting
with different forms or different styles. They’re just really groping. Architects
thought that if you designed a really beautiful gas station its beauty would
draw the motorist. They were designed to look like civic monuments or
they were designed to look like suburban houses. But the retailer has
a completely different conception. For the retailer, they should be screaming
at the people driving down the street.
Narrator:
In Monroe, Pure Oil a national company built this house-type station with a
design developed by architect Carl Peterson in the 1920s.
Jim Draeger:
He develops a house-type station that has a blue tile roof and is very domestic
looking. A little, round arched front door a bay window, shutters,
window boxes. He wanted a station that comforted the neighbors by looking
house-like in its form and fitting into that residential fabric. But
he also wanted a building that would stand out, that would have some pop
to it, that you see as you’re passing by in your car. So the
form gave it that level of comfort, but the blue roof gave it the flash and
the pop that made it marketable.
Narrator:
This former Pure Oil station in La Crosse shows some of the changes brought
about by the hard times of the great depression. To bring in more income,
companies began adding service bays to the sides of their stations turning
them from filling stations into service stations.
Jim Draeger:
Before that, the chains had not wanted to get involved in the servicing of
vehicles because they thought, ‘It’s just gonna bring bad will. Somebody’s
going to be unhappy with their service job and we might lose a customer doing
that.’ But as gas retailing got more competitive in the 1930s, it
forced all of these large corporate oil chains into the servicing of vehicles. They
added service bays onto the design of their stations.
Narrator:
With cheaper cars, better roads and more leisure time tourists began wending
their way to Northern Wisconsin. And gas stations featured designs
to entice the vacationing traveler. North of Tomahawk on the old Highway
51 Phil Kilinski built this windmill-shaped station as part of Phil’s
Lake Nokomis Resort.
Jim Draeger:
Buildings like this grew out of the emergence of consumer psychology. Marketers
are trying to figure out what are the triggers that cause people to buy, to
consume things.
Narrator:
Today, the station continues to draw people off the road, this time in its
new life as the Windmill Ice Cream Shop. So the building acts as a
three-dimensional billboard advertising the business. And it’s
the fantasy nature of the design that kind of exotic feeling of the windmill,
that attracts people and gets them to stop.
Narrator:
Further up Highway 51 in Hazelhurst, Harry Klippel built this log cabin filling
station in 1936 that sent a message to weary travelers.
Jim Draeger:
What they’re saying to the people who are driving by is, ‘If you’re
on vacation, you’re already here. Your vacation’s begun.’ So,
they’re giving
you the kind of homey log cabin. They’re connecting it to the larger
mythos of the rugged pioneer, and the spirit of adventure and outdoorsmanship,
and connecting it with things that people already have warm feelings about. And
they’re using that as a marketing device to try to get you to stop.
Designing an Icon
Narrator:
Next to the old mill in Cedarburg stands one of the few remaining examples of
a Wadham’s pagoda gas station, a reminder of a time when many considered driving
itself an exotic adventure.
Jim Draeger:
Wadham was an independent oil company, based in the Milwaukee region, that
got into the gas station business in the late teens and early 1920s. Wadham’s
was a real innovator. Their major innovation was trying to really find
a new iconic imagery for gas stations.
Narrator:
To create the eye-catching new design Wadham’s turned to Milwaukee architect
Alexander Eschweiler. For inspiration, Eschweiler looked to the far east
creating a pioneering Japanese-influenced pagoda, a design made popular during
the World’s Fairs in Chicago and St. Louis around the turn of
the 20th century.
Jim Draeger:
Eschweiler’s capturing that public yearning for a greater sense of adventure
by taking that fair architecture and transplanting it into a commercial environment. In
the 1920s, up until the mid ’30s, they built in the region over a hundred
of these pagoda gas stations. Today very few of them stand. There
are just a handful of these stations left.
Kay Walters:
My dad was William Schnabel. Everybody called him “Billy.” In
1926, he built the building. It was called Billy’s Service Station. He
made his own hoist and he hung a tire on there for me to swing on. So,
I used to play on that as a child. I just think it’s a great piece
of architecture and that it should be preserved. I take great pride in
it.
Jim Draeger:
Eschweiler was savvy to recognize that the way that people experience buildings
was different when they were in a car. He scaled the design to be read
from the automobile. The size of the roof and the kind of eye-grabbing
eye candy-like design is meant to appeal to people who are driving at automotive
speed. It also tied into a sense of adventure and a sense of exotica. It
made the gas station a destination in itself.
Paula Luba:
I grew up in West Allis, went to West Allis Central. And there was a
Wadham’s Oil and Grease station right on the corner of 76th Street and National. And
when I was a kid, my dad would call us and let us know when he was going to
get gas, because we’d all pile into the car to go to the little pagoda. It
was just so unusual. That was the draw. The little red tile roof. It
was a just a cute, little unusual building. It was unlike anything else
around. It stuck out like a sore thumb.
Narrator:
The city of West Allis preserved this Wadham’s station as a tribute to
Frank Seneca, its popular owner, and also its place in automotive history.
Jim Draeger:
Wadham’s became the prototype for most of the roadside architecture
that we see today. When we think of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the McDonald’s golden
arches. These kind of iconic roadside buildings all have their start with
Wadham’s pagoda design.
Restoring the Glory Days
Loren Nelson:
It’s a 1928 Chevy.
Narrator:
In Independence, Loren Nelson restored this 1931 Texaco station back to its
former glory.
Loren Nelson:
It had been a body shop, a bunch of different things. And then about
10 years ago, we revamped it back into a mechanical repair and auto sales
— turned into more of a passion than a business. I mean, that’s
just what it has. We did a ’50s concept. My wife actually
bought the pumps for our anniversary when we first bought the place. She
knew I had everything else done, revamped everything. But I didn’t
have the pumps yet. About five times a week somebody pulls in, wants
to put on gas. They look up and see that it’s 32 or 35 cents
and realize that they are just for show. And then they embarrassingly
pull out.
The sign was here when we bought the place. It was painted over. It was black and it had a body shop name or something on it. We stripped the paint off and it was the original Texaco sign under it. The post is called a banjo post. Which is, very few of them left. It was bought as a franchise from Texaco. And it basically ran as a Texaco station selling Texaco petroleum up into the ’70s. I know they were still pumping gas in 1975 because I was a young gentlemen from around town, and I actually worked here in 1975 pumping gas for a little bit for a guy that had it.
The stalls were basically used for washing cars and things like that. A lot of the repair was done outside. They actually, years ago, would have a hoist that was outside. And this is of the station in the early ’40s. The left-hand side is the original structure. The right side is the new bays that they had put on of course for expansion.
And we got a lot of pictures of some of the guys that used to own the station or rented the station over the years. We got their pictures up. And one old fellow’s name was ‘Skinny.’ And he used to have a very unique Harley Davidson. I get people that stop from all parts of the United States. And the neat thing is just about everyone of them can remember an old Texaco station or an old gas station they may have worked at, or something their dad or their grandpa may have had. And it just makes for a lot of nice stories.
We leave the frontage open on the weekends. We leave the frontage open at night. One of the reasons we leave it open is a lot of people with older cars will pull in and they’ll just take snaps of their cars because they got cars normally from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. And it’s a unique place for them to take a picture of the car because this place basically is something that’s back in time.
When you drive through town a lot of people will make the comment about how they thought they were in a time warp. The site would be a gorgeous site for any prosperous business, but I think it’s important that it’s preserved on what it used to be. There.
The Oblong Box
Narrator:
Increased competition during the Great Depression set the stage for an entirely
new, modern station design called the ’oblong box.’
Jim Draeger:
Gas stations in this time become very systematic in the way they’re designed
and the way they’re laid out, as they’re looking at all of the
aspects that generate profit in a station, whether it’s the set back
of the station on the lot, where the service bays are located, how the entrance
is located, what the layout of the interior of the station is, what kind
of products they dispense, how those products are colored, where the logo
is shown, the height of the lettering on the signs and how far that can be
read from a vehicle that’s passing by, how the station is lit at night. All
of those variables are very scientifically studied and thought out in the
1930s to generate the most profitable possible designs.
Narrator:
This station in Minoqua, now a bicycle shop, shows the transition to the modern
service station.
Jim Draeger:
The style of this station has a foot in both worlds. The homey, domestic
station of the 1920s era and the more modern station of the 1930s and ’40s. It
still has the domestic-style windows in the station, but it has the kind of
angularity and hard surfaces and modern form that stations of the 1930s and
’40s have. So, you’re seeing the blending here of this old traditional
house-form style and the more modern building emerging out of it. By
the late 1930s, they become very square rectangular boxes built out of very,
very modern looking materials.
Narrator:
A model of efficiency, the box-like design improved the level of customer service
a station could provide.
Jim Draeger:
They wanted to provide excellent service. So the corner window becomes
a trademark feature of the box-type station. Improving the visibility to
have the attendant on the pump island by the time the car has come to a stop. They
also realized that that’s great marketing space. They can put display
materials inside that glass window and improve the marketability of all those
accessories as well. The box-type station is beautifully suited to gas
retailing. You
can tell that, because that box-type station was born in the early 1930s and
lasts as long as the full-service station does with very little change. Minor
modifications are made as they kind of tweak the design but essentially
the form exists as long as full-service stations.
End of an Era
Narrator:
Full-service gas stations ran into big trouble in the 1970s. Interruptions
to the flow of oil from the Middle East led to shortages of gas and higher prices. To
save a few cents, more people began pumping their own gas cutting into the profits
of full-service stations. At the same time, cars grew more complicated
to fix and good mechanics became more expensive.
And in 1988, widespread underground pollution led to a new law requiring all stations to upgrade their tanks — an expense that drove many stations out of the business. Of those that remained, some quit the repair business and turned the garage into a convenience store. Other stations quit the gas business and moved strictly to service. Parman’s, a popular neighborhood station on Madison’s west side pulled its gas pumps in 1998.
Clayton Parman:
Our father started this business in 1941.
Narrator:
At its grand opening in 1941, Clayton Parman sold gasoline for 15.9 cents and
eventually employed his two sons, Keith and Clayton Jr.
Clayton Parman:
He retired in ’62 and my brother and myself have been doing it since. I
think one the special things was working with our father for quite a few years. He
was quite a guy. He used to have a saying, ‘Meet them at the pumps.’ So
when you heard that bell, you better be heading that way.
Keith Parman:
When we were done with gas and cleaning the windshield and windows, we would
ask them if they would like the oil or radiator checked, or whatever. We
always had air hoses out by the island there and if they wanted their
tires checked we checked those.
Narrator:
Parman’s now relies entirely on repairs but maintains the old-fashioned service
and social atmosphere of a traditional gas station.
Clayton Parman:
We have quite a group of people that come in — some good, you know.
(laughter)
Man:
We’re part of the lounge lizards that come down here for coffee and doughnuts,
and whatever.
Charlie Larkin:
Meet with a lot of people down here. We discuss everything, or cuss or
discuss everything from soup to nuts. Right. Yeah. We enjoy
it — sports, what have you.
Clayton Parman:
Once in a while, if it gets too crowded back here — it’s a little
problem — but
they usually move on into the front office.
Charlie Larkin:
Shall we go into the sunroom and get out of the way? They’ve been
awful good to the rest of us old geezers — putting up with us as we sit
here and we tell all kinds of stories and all kinds of fabrications,
whatever. It’s
a great place.
Buck Clayton:
My wife asks me, ‘What do you fellows talk about down there?’ You
name it, that’s what we talk about — anything and everything.
Charlie Larkin:
You just don’t find this kind of gas station anymore.
Historic Gas Stations
Narrator:
Most of the old-fashioned gas stations are gone now. But if you look around
a handful of stations remain, often converted to another use reminders of where
we’ve been and how we got here.
In Janesville, this convenience store was built to resemble the 1925 filling station preserved on a corner of the lot. When the little station stopped selling gas in 1977 there were some sad customers.
Bob Hedgecuck:
One particular lady — she sat and cried for 25 minutes. She couldn’t
bear to leave. So I talked to her, you know. She said, ‘I’ve
been coming here for over 50 years. Where will I go?’ I recommended
a fellow up the hill.
Narrator:
In Milwaukee, the Sherman Park neighborhood saved a crumbling gas station from
the wrecking ball converting it into a coffee shop named ‘Sherman Perk.’
Cliff Lepke:
I saw what happened at other places where service stations had been torn down
a nd what you end up with is an abandoned lot. And I just went, It
should be brought back. It should have some use in our neighborhood. I
saw a great potential in this spot. Instead of an eyesore I saw something
that could be actually beautiful — a gem. Something that was part
of the neighborhood’s heritage.
Bob Olin:
My wife and I spoke and having raised our family here, we thought it
would be a good addition to the neighborhood. We were told that there
were different grant programs we might qualify for. So we naively said
sure we’d like to pursue this.
Narrator:
The restored station continues on as a gathering place pumping out coffee,
tea and other drinks for a grateful neighborhood.
Cliff Lepke:
It becomes the free space in our neighborhood where everyone can get together
and I think that’s just absolutely fantastic because it’s something
this neighborhood needed.
Narrator:
The City of Milwaukee declared the Sherman Perk building a local historic landmark
joining nearly 70 other Wisconsin gas stations now listed on local, state
and national registers of historic places.
Jim Draeger:
It’s a funny notion to think that something as humble as a gas station
could be historically important but gas stations are symbols of the automobile
age. For
the 20th century, they’re what the railroad depot is to the 19th century. So,
when we save an old gas station we save the stories that help us understand
that world and what it once was like in order to understand better how it is
now.
Announcer:
Funding for ‘Fill ’er Up’ was provided by the Wisconsin History Fund;
supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
