There was a time when a visit to a gas station – aka filling station or service station – would involve encountering branding that was clearly intended to differentiate the station you did choose from those that you did not choose. It’s hard for me to pin down when that stopped being the case and when gas stations became generic carbon copies of each other regardless of brand, but it has happened during my driving lifetime.
There was a time though, not that long ago, when one wouldn’t be surprised to encounter something like this life-size fiberglass tiger leering at them from the roof of an Esso station. In fact, you’d expect it; and seeing that beast on the roof might be the very thing that drew you in to the station. This might particularly be the case if you had small children in the car who were actively cultivating the mental connections between driving, cars, gasoline brands, mascots and life-long purchasing habits, just as the folks at McCann-Erickson intended in 1964.
Actually, this particular 8′ long fiberglass tiger has leered at me as recently as sometime during the first decade of the 21st century. I was reminded of this fact when I spoke to the man who now has it, and a slightly smaller model, mounted on top of his house.
His house is about 2 miles up the road from the Exxon station where the tigers originally lived. The tigers moved to his house (I do expect money may have been involved in that transfer) when the Esso station turned Exxon station turned into a Walgreens/Chipotle/Panda Express parking lot. I recall that particular Exxon had a large cage-shaped bin of stuffed toy tigers, watched over by their fiberglass parents. On one visit I asked if the large tigers were for sale and was told “no”…not at the moment. In fact, that was good news for me whether I knew it or not at the time; as those were the days – about 20 years ago – when I would have not thought twice about hauling home a gigantic piece of gas station memorabilia. My only question being if it would fit in the back of the Town & Country, or if the kids would need to be left at the gas station while I took out their seats and converted the van to cargo mode. Once home, it likely could have sat on top of the 30 year old BMW that hadn’t moved in a dozen years, right in front of the two or three Coca Cola machines that also inhabited my basement/garage/back yard around that time. I’ve pared down those static collections of stuff in more recent years (although that would be somewhat surprising news for most people who know me). Better that I didn’t get the large tigers as I think I would have been hard pressed to ever let them go.
The tigers disappeared from the Exxon station when it was remodeled from a “service station” into one of those modern things that’s basically a donut coffee liquid sugar-and-caffeine-in-honking-big-plastic-cups dispensary that sells gasoline on the side. Shortly after, the Exxon station itself disappeared. The current owner of the big tigers told me that the service station operator gave up the tigers once he could no longer procure the smaller stuffed ones to sell. I don’t know if this might have had something to do with various legal disputes over the course of the proceeding decade concerning Exxon and Kellogg and the use of the tiger as a trademarked mascot.
Anyway, I was mighty pleased to catch a glimpse of the big tigers a little while back while driving by what at least for me is a local landmark — the “house with all of the gas pumps”.
And that’s what this post is really about.
It turns out that The House With All of the Gas Pumps (as it’s known by everyone in my family) is the residence of a Mr. David Dwyer in Nashua, NH, and he’s been collecting gas pumps, pump parts, and all sorts of gas station memorabilia for over 30 years. I was careful to check as to whether Mr. Dwyer minded that I identify him here in this post, and he’s fine with that. In fact, much of what you see here is for sale. I was careful to note that I personally wasn’t in the market for any gas pumps. I swear. I’m not.
David’s collection leans heavily to pumps that last saw commercial use in the 1950s. For me, it’s wonderful to see these old globe-topped pumps with their globes intact and mounted to the pumps. All too often I see just the globes for sale. No doubt those are attractive to collectors who don’t have the fortitude (or space) to wrangle an entire pump. Yeah, there’s something to be said for convenience, but when you see the whole contraption, you really sense how these classic pumps were designed to make a bold statement to the motoring public. It’s just not the same when you only see part of the intended whole.
In this collection, there are also some of the older glass cylinder pumps, a few clock-face pumps, and even a couple of the trapezoidal ones that I remember from the 1960s and 70s. Nothing has a card reader, and the pricing dials are all in cents, not dollars.
With that, I’m going to mostly just leave you to look at the pictures I took when visiting David’s collection last week. I found the bright colors of these machines…machines that like the cars that they serviced were intended to stand out, be noticed, and draw in the viewer…just the thing to brighten up a gray, cloudy, winter New England day.
Jenney Gas was a Boston-based refinery/oil company that started off as a whale oil producer in 1812 and was ultimately sold to Cities Service – later Citgo – in the 1960s!
So as I said to Mr. Dwyer, I really don’t want a gas pump, but I have to admit that there’s part of me that still wishes I’d been able to buy the fiberglass tiger when I first saw it 20 years ago. It could have anchored my Esso Tiger collection, that now only consists of the Happy Motoring Key Club tag that I have from my mother’s old keychain. I lost my plush tiger tail (that was intended to be attached to your gas cap) some years ago.
She carried her keys with that tag on them for 30+ years, and for easily the first dozen was asked nearly daily by me “Do you think that you could REALLY drop them in any mailbox and they’d come back????”. The answer was “Yes”…although she wisely always declined my immediate suggestion that we engage in real world research by chucking her keys in the nearest mailbox.
Well, never having run that particular experiment, I still have her keys. The Esso Tiger keyfob is plenty enough of a keepsake.
As a burgeoning car-kid in the late ’60s I recall the tiger tail you would attach to mostly the rear license plate showing you had an Esso (in the northeast) “tiger in your tank”. Or the orange horse shoes you would stick somewhere on the rear of the car courtesy of Gulf.
I recall the orange horse shoes well. I had several sets of those, but they disintegrated with age many years ago. While I don’t recall seeing too many cars even back then with the horse shoes stuck to them, at one time the tiger tails were quite popular.
Here’s a great old commercial that features the “no nox” horseshoes thing at the end.
Now that people don’t smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day, we don’t get commercials with that deep voice anymore.
Had forgotten all about the horse shoes!!
Sinclair stations with the green dinosaurs and the “Dino-marts” have recently started appearing in Southern California.
They’ve been around for quite a while in other parts of the country. It was common to see the dinosaurs wearing face masks during the COVID outbreaks of the 2020 and 2021.
That’s not happened around New England/the Northeast yet, but I hope it does!
Meanwhile, it is still possible to run across some of the old dino statues repurposed one way or the other.
This one stands as the mascot for Granby (MA) High School. I’m prettu sure that it is an original Sinclair statue, although recently cast reproductions have been cropping up all around town. Granby has a strong association with dinosaurs.
“Sinclair” (the spokes Dino) was cool!!
I’m surprised that’s new in SoCal as they e been around, though not in huge numbers, in other parts of the West for a long time. In fact I was going to comment that Sinclair seems to be the only chain left with a distinctive brand, thanks to Dino.
In Heritage Park in Calgary there is an excellent automotive display that includes many old gas station pumps etc, all in wonderful condition.
I vaguely remember the Esso “Tiger in your tank” ad campaign, but our small southeast Ohio town had no Esso station. We did have Sohio, Shell, Texaco, Ashland. Quaker State and Gulf. Dad was a Gulf man, so I probably had a pair of the “No Nox” horseshoes at some point.
My wife and I recently went to the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati. No Esso tigers, but they had a couple of nice old gas pumps!
Here’s a photo
Crosley tribute billboard in the American Sign Museum parking lot. This was a great l pace to spend an afternoon.
Thanks for the tip about the American Sign Museum. That sounds like a great place that I definitely need to visit!
Growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s I remember well the independent gas stations where the attendants would actually pump the gas, clean your windshield and check the oil level for the customers. I remember there was always a lot of promotions going on as the refiners competed for business and trying to differentiate their brands as somehow better. As near as I remember they started disappearing with the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74 due to the rising cost of gasoline and the need to increase profits; the stations became self service and evolved into convenience stores. I haven’t seen an independent gas station in years.
Maybe the area where I grew up was exceptionally dull, but I recall very few examples of creative gas-station branding. Certainly no fiberglass tigers.
The one thing I do remember is that our local Mobil station had “Happy Motoring! displayed prominently over its garage bay doors. Being the car-crazy kid I was, I used that term in some sort of school assignment, but my 3rd grade teacher admonished me that “motoring” wasn’t a real word. As a consequence, I harbored a grudge against that slogan for the remained of my childhood.
Oh, and I love the House With All of the Gas Pumps. Amazing to think that plain, old analog gas pumps are quickly becoming just as old-fashioned as these relics!
It’s a shame that a car-crazy kid couldn’t have experienced all of the gas station branding that I recall. Between the dinosaurs (and the much-sought-after Mold-a-Rama machine that I was sure I would find a the Sinclair station…although more often it was just a dino model/statue), the fiberglass tigers and tiger tails, the Gulf Horseshoes, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something…it seems that every brand was fighting for attention one way or another. And that doesn’t even count the various giveaways and “premiums” that seemed to always be present. That’s probably an article topic in itself.
I too adopted “Happy Motoring!” as a often-said slogan as a kid. Fortunately, I didn’t have Mrs. Bummer as my 3rd grade teacher and therefore didn’t get my buzz harshed for that. Sheesh. 🙂
I forgive Mrs. Bummer. She was actually a great teacher, and my only elementary school teacher I remember fondly after all these years. In her class, I developed a love for geography, which I’ve carried with me ever since.
I probably annoyed her by saying “Happy Motoring” too much, which (just guessing… having known myself as an 8-year-old) is quite likely why she told me to stop.
Happy Motoring and geography came together for me at a DC-area service station and towing company chain called “Call Carl”. Stations featured the “Happy Motoring” slogan over the service bays and also a sign with the towing company motto – “Washington’s Little Detroit”.
There was one of these in Bethesda where I went to 3rd grade and I never ceased to comment on what I took for geographic weirdness (calling something in Maryland a “Little Detroit”). Somehow as an elementary student who was very tuned into what was written on gas stations, I missed the joke entirely…quite typically for me.
Call Carl was long gone by the time I moved to the DC area, but I’ve heard of it. The Call Carl chain was one of those entrepreneurial success stories – Ed Carl started the firm with a small amount in the 1920s, and it grew to be one of the nation’s biggest auto repair franchises by the 1960s.
Mr. Carl was very humble and attributed his success to the fortunate timing of being in a growing area “where people aren’t mechanically inclined and don’t like to get their hands greasy.”
Amazingly, it looks like Bethesda’s former Call Carl building still exists. As far as I can tell, it was located at 7701 Wisconsin Ave. It’s now the used Acura facility for Chevy Chase Cars, and is surrounded by a high-rise apartment building. StreetView below:
Amazing that the building is still there. (and the Bethesda theater too!)
The same can’t be said of Ralph Brown Buick right next door where I used to go marvel at the multi-colored Opels in the lot…and where I once persuaded my parents to bring home an entire Opel cardboard showroom display. 🙂
Remember “Chevy Chase Chevyland”?
I sure do remember Chevy Land! That was what, 5 floors of showroom? That blew me away as a 2nd/3rd grader. I believe that building is still there.
I have always found gas station memorabilia to be cool. There was a time in my life when I probably would have dragged an old gas pump home had the opportunity arisen. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana which was the HQ for Tokheim, which made a lot of gas pumps (and still does, though they are no longer local).
My mother bought her gas at a Shell station (“Service is our business”) but I don’t recall getting any Shell swag. My grandma was a Standard/Sohio customer. I think people were especially brand-loyal once they got a credit card issued by that company.
I was always disappointed that my family never bought gas at Sinclair because what was cooler than a dinosaur gas station?
You know, I don’t recall any Shell swag either…just the huge yellow sign of the shell.
Maybe as – at least what I always presumed to be – a European brand (in my mind at least) they had no room for such tomfoolery.
And yes, the credit card made a big difference. My dad had an American (Standard/Sohio) card, and he was pretty loyal. I was sent off to college with one of those…in his name, to use “in emergencies”. My first credit card, even if it wasn’t actually in my name.
Didn’t Shell have a yearly game where metal tokens were given out with every purchase?
Tokheim. Great logo.
(this too is from the collection in Nashua)
In Australia, we had a sheep.
I was so sure this would have a Daniel Stern byline, then continued reading and was so sure he’d be the first comment 🙃
Great piece on the branding – this was certainly something long gone from stations even when I was a child… I’m gonna guess most of the pump related ones faded away when pre-paying for gas became the standard way to fill up? The thought of “pump now, pay after” is similarly unfathomable to me. On that topic I wonder; was gas theft a significant problem back then or was gas really was cheap enough that it rarely if ever happened – and might such things have escalated during the gas crises if they hadn’t been phased out by then?
Regarding branding as a USP… growing up my mom always filled up at the 76 station locally that had a small Lube N’ Tune shop co-anchoring it’s small triangular lot. They would periodically give out the orange foam “76 ball” antenna toppers and my mom would ask for a few extra for my siblings and I. As I write this I am getting nostalgic with many happy memories of that and waiting in their (very 70’s dated) waiting room while we got smog tests and oil changes done. My mom would always be anxious if our car would pass or fail and I would share the feeling even though I wasn’t fully aware of what failing a test meant insofar as preventing registration renewal, etc. but she (and in turn, I) would be very happy and relieved when our car would pass (I don’t remember a car of ours failing until maybe when I myself started driving, come to think of it).
Thanks for this look back at a bit of automobilia, I definitely spent more time on this comment than any other I’ve written before!
Thank you!
Shirley once self-service became the dominant mode at stations, pumps needed to become computer/point-of-sale terminals, and those features ultimately took over design-wise. Leading of course to the horror of gas pumps that play “Gas Station TV”. Ayyyyyeeeeeeeeeeee.
In between there was the “walk to the attendant and get your purchase authorized” thing, which I doubt that anyone cared much for. I know I didn’t. I mean, I always figured that if I was going to do all of that walking around (sometimes needing to go back and get change or the residual charge released from my credit card…back in the stone age) then there was nothing “convenient” about this transaction. I suspect that most people felt similarly and this just lead customers to assume (rightly so) that the REAL motivator behind “convenient self service” was simply that it was just cheaper for the station to fire all of the attendants but one and to make the customer do the work that the attendants previously did.
(No one except Amazon is going to be happy once Amazon fires all of its drivers and starts dropping packages on our heads from the sky via drones…but we’ll get used to it and ultimately assume that boxes falling out of the sky are simply “the price to pay” to get things ranging from toilet paper to anvils “conveniently” delivered to our homes.)
Re. the 76 orange balls…I recall those, but for some reason I always assumed that they were a west coast thing. I think we did have some version of Arco here on the east coast, but nothing like out west. I recall my first visit to California in the early 70s and being fascinated by the big orange balls that were the station’s eye-catching design feature.
What is…a thing that makes me stabby?
There are certain parts of the Esso tiger we probably shouldn’t ought to discuss in polite company.
Ha! 🙂
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/A-roadside-icon-the-76-ball-comes-round-again-1226499.php Bit of an old article, but from what I can tell, they have made a comeback.
I have to wonder if ExxonMobil still has Box 52008, and what would happen today if a set of keys on one of those keychains were dropped into a mailbox.
Well, the USPS says that the box is still a valid address, but who knows who is responsible for the mail that goes there.
In this case, someone would have to be responsible for researching the old Happy Motoring Key Club records to even begin to try to return Mom’s keys to…Baltimore? That could be interesting. And highly unlikely that there’d be a way to get the forwarding addresses to the dozen place my family lived after there. So sadly, in this case, that’s a dead end.
But for what it’s worth, I DO know how the similar – and equally fascinating to me as a youth – “Drop in Any Mailbox” thing works for stuff like hotel keys. I learned all about the Post Office’s “Nixie Desk” some time ago when I had a consultant who worked out of my office for a while, and apparently left with the ladies’ restroom key in her possession. I had affixed a tag to the key indicating that it was for my business (you know, in case someone were to leave the key in the restroom, someone in the building could bring it back to us). Well, this person decided that instead of sticking the thing in an envelope and mailing it back to us, she’d just DROP IT IN ANY MAILBOX!
Several weeks later, our mail includes a plastic bag from the USPS, and a postmark from somewhere in the midwest indicating that the key made it from a mailbox in Massachusetts to the local postoffice and then to the “National Nixie Desk” whereupon it was returned back to my office in Massachusetts (postage due). It was really all quite fascinating. (and kind of a ridiculous act on the part of the consultant).
Great topic! For fun, during the Christmas break, I started illustrating some vintage gas pumps. I use Adobe Illustrator, the stroke lines to the right show the hand-drawn framework. Coloured fill artwork is to the left. Still much detailing to complete. If I remove the branding, this can be sold as vector artwork at commercial art sites like Shutterstock.
I collect some gas station memorabilia. I especially like the very commercial branding for the vintage ‘Supertest’ gas stations, located in Canada. Supertest stations were everywhere here, until the early 1970s.
So very Canadian! I love it!
My only collection of gas station memorabilia is really promotional glasses. When I started driving in 1969 I always went to Shell stations for gas. Why, I have no idea other than it was the closest and my parents went there. They had a promotion in the early 70’s dealing with glasses that had your NFL team logo on the side. In San Diego it was the Chargers, in Oakland the Raiders, and in San Francisco the 49ers. So I have a collection of all three and they make great glass tumblers but seeing as how I was under the drinking age they just sat. However, I am drinking age now. In the end I haven’t been to a Shell station this century.
That’s funny – we have the St. Louis Cardinals equivalent, and I never knew its origin.
My wife said that neighbors of hers gave it to her parents in the 1970s. Eventually, this glass moved around with her as an adult, and now it’s become our daughter’s favorite glass (she’s not a football fan, she just likes the glass), and it’s used all the time.
Never knew it was a Shell giveaway!
We had the tiger-in-the-tank thing in Australia. I remember seeing cars sporting tiger tails, but the one time an attendant tied one on Dad’s car, he was livid, tore it off, and gave it to me. It’s long gone.
The promotion I remember was swap cards for us kids, in the early-mid sixties. Shell ran an annual (I think) series; I remember Australian birds, animals, and these was one on cars, along with spiral-bound albums to put them all in. Somewhere I have all those albums from my childhood. Dad was a commercial traveller, so I always wound up with the full set of cards.
My favorite promotion was the inflatable dinosaur from Sinclair. It was about 3 feet long as I recall and made a great pool toy. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long due to a puncture at one of the main seams.
It didn’t come with a hideously toxic dinosaur-repair kit? »tsk«
No, but I had plenty of those for repairing bike inner tubes!
Trust your car to the man who wears a star. Great writeup. We had a local muffler shop where we used to live in CA that had a huge fiberglass dude out front holding a muffler. Google Joor muffler man. There are a few of these guys left around, 29 Palms has one with a cowboy hat, one along the 405 in Torrance holding a golf club, and one along 69 in Gas City IN. Joor man gets a giant Santa suit every Christmas.
It does seem that Texaco has a huge presence in the popular culture around gas station advertising. I used to have one of those Texaco Tanker Truck toys (it was great, one of my favorites). Nevertheless, there weren’t too many visits to Texaco stations when I was a kid. I believe that this was for 2 reasons. One, Texaco didn’t have that much representation in the Northeast or Southeast, at least not relative to Esso, Mobile, American. And two, my mother hated Milton Berle and associated Texaco with him. So all things Uncle Miltie were discouraged in my house.
Mom could be that way about things.
Does anyone remember the Midas Muffler man? Stood approximately 20 ft tall, held a muffler in his hands. Usually stood next to the entrance.
In his second career, he locally advertised an auto title transfer shop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muffler_man
Happy Motoring!!!
I see your Muffler Man (Indeed, I recall 🙂 ) and raise you a Big Indian.
This one stands guard over an insurance auction lot (cars) not too far from me.
Here’s a golden Muffler Man shown with many of his pals. This is not my photo, but we did come across this collection when we took a secondary road parallel to US Route 522 near Berkeley Springs, WV some years back.
Petroliana is a great collectible. There’ve been some books written on it also such as one by Michael Karl Witzel. Fun stuff.
Oh, wow! I’ve always liked the great big Sinclair dinosaur, but I don’t want one on the roof of my house. I do want a great big tiger on my roof, but they appear to be quite expensive, and I would never get the idea past the comptroller.
So I must make do with the considerably-less-bulky-and-costly likes of this:
…which came with this fog lamp:
In Chicago and Midwest, we had Enco gas stations, with the Esso tiger mascot and “Happy Motoring” tagline.
Went away after ’74 or so. Exxon returned about 20-25 years ago, and in some cases, being across street from Mobil co-brand.
“Enco”…that’s a new one for me. I’ve probably forgotten that name which no doubt appeared on the back of my parents’ Esso credit card, along with all of the other variations on the brand where the card could be used.
I remember being fascinated by all of those other names and similar, yet different, logos on the American (Amoco, Standard, etc.) card. Knowing nothing at the time about the 1911 busting of the Standard Oil trust, I was mystified as to why there would be different names for the same company in different states. Now of course, I get it.
Although I’m still seeking an explanation for why Hellmann’s is “known as Best Foods west of the Rockies”.
As a young lad growing up in Ottawa Ontario in the 50’s, I was obsessed with the Texaco kite my dad would get with a fill up. I had so much fun flying these things. Thanks for bringing back the memory.
My favorite ‘swag’ was the Standard Oil Red Crown tire caps.
As a ten year old in the 50s, it was sporting to re-appropriate these as the opportunity presented itself!
The most unusual logo I recall from childhood was the Douglas sign, a bright red heart with a white wing. I think Douglas sold on price, as the price per gallon was typically a big part of their signage.
Interesting. Never heard of this one. What city/state was it in?
California. Three refineries and 300 stations. Bought out in 1961, the signage and brand lasted through much of the ‘60s in places. I remember them around, and later disappearing.