In 1939 two important things happened.  Uncle Ted helped Dad get a job where he worked at Colgate-Palmolive-Peets in Emeryville, just down from Berkeley.  Mom and Dad had saved enough to buy a house.  They bought one in Oakland.  After that we’d often go back to visit Aunt Jerry and Uncle Ted in Pleasanton.  When we did, I always hoped we’d stop for gas at the service station at the crossroads in Dublin.

The gas station filled me with wonder.  We’d pull up to the pump.  I’d scramble across the back seat, stand on it and watch with awe as the process went on.  To see better Dad let me roll down the window.  Getting out of the car, Dad would make the purchase.  Gas cost nine cents a gallon.Sometimes he’d buy ten gallons. He’d hand the attendant a dollar.  Ninety cents with a dime left over.

Then the real magic would begin.

The attendant would go to one of two pumps, one for regular and one for ethyl.  Dad bought regular.  A round glass cylinder made up the top of each pump.  Inside it ran a metal scale that calibrated the gallons.  I think it held up to twenty gallons.  The size of the jar impressed me deeply.  It seemed huge.

Once he knew how much Dad wanted to buy, the attendant would attach a marker to the outside of the pump. Then he use a pump handle on the front of the pump to fill the jar.   He had to pump vigorously to lift the ruby red gas into the glass cylinder.  Up, up it would splash.  Carefully he’d pause to make  sure he’d reached the gallons Dad had bought.  Dad watched carefully as well.

Once the man had put the nozzle in the car’s gas tank, he’d push a switch.  Gravity took over.  Down flowed the gasoline through a white hose into the car.  As the gas in the jar emptied, it did so with great burps and blorps of bubbles, silently splashing violently inside the glass.  A sight to behold!

Once he’d finished came the best moment of all.  The man would go back into the station and bring out a brown wicker basket filled with lollipops.  Reaching out of the window, I’d take my pick.  This was no ordinary sucker, mind you.  Rather than a stick to hold onto it had a loop of rope.  If I got tired of sucking the candy I could, with royal aplomb, standing behind Mom and Dad, leaning on the back of the seat, observing the road ahead, lick it.

Sometimes I made it last even after we got to the Aunt Jerry and Uncle Ted’s place in the fields north of Pleasanton.