Description

Once an integral part of daily American life, the traditional full-service gas station has given way to sterile convenience stores with automated, pay-at-the-pump service. Fortunately, memories of old service stations live on in this entertaining book filled with original period color images, as well as modern color shots of surviving filling stations. Readers will witness eccentric and wacky station styles, including airplanes, teepees, windmills, petrified trees, railroad tanks cars, icebergs, and more. Author Tim Steil also examines the role of the automobile and filling station in American society, from the earliest days in the 1910s through the end of the service station era in the 1970s.