The Roadside Icon Scholars Drive Deep To Examine The Cultural Significance Of That Great American Institution: The Gasoline Station

On his way back here from Atlanta, John Jakle was driving “the long way, as geographers often do.” Just outside a little town in Indiana, his Ford LTD broke down, as cars often do.

Because the engine breakdown occurred about 25 years ago, Jakle had the car towed to a gasoline service station, a rapidly disappearing part of the “roadside vernacular,” according to the University of Illinois professor, who has become an authority on this bit of utilitarian Americana.

It was inside a Sunoco station in Knightstown, Ind., that Jakle tanked up on the cultural significance of the full-service gas station.

He was given plenty of time to ponder it. His DOA LTD went into the service bay at 6 a.m. and wasn’t pronounced road worthy until 11 that night. Because this was an oldfashioned, no-frills service station with nary a mini-mart nor a McDonald’s inside, Jakle wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the prospect of waiting there for his car to be fixed.

But in the small town of 2,000 people he didn’t have many entertainment options. So the professor took a seat in the station and sat there for 17 hours until his car was done.

Now, you might expect that when Jakle finally drove away at 11 p.m. he would have been furious, or at least numb from boredom. But as it turned out, Jakle experienced a sort of Sunoco awakening that day; a complete overhaul, for him, and his car.

“I just got taken up with the whole idea of being there and so I ate candy bars and drank Cokes and it was really interesting and informative,” he said. “It was marvelous.”

At this point it should be noted that Jakle, 55, is not your run-of-themap geographer. He is a “cultural historical geographer,” which means that even while bumming around all day in a gas station devouring Snickers and Cokes and risking overexposure to 40 weight oil, he could conduct scholarly research that one day would lead to his co-writing a book titled “The Gas Station in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

As a scholar whose mission is to relate what is built to where it is and who goes in it, Jakle became intoxicated with gasoline alley.

“There was a cycle in the day when the bell on the gas pump was ringing actively at some times and didn’t ring at all at others,” he marveled.

“It was a day in the life of a gasoline station, watching the comings and goings, which included the town prostitute,” he said. “When she drove in, the mechanics all tried to get a look, and there was a lot of joking and horsing around.”

The passing parade at the pumps was one thing, the mechanics of it another, he noted. “It was really interesting because the owner called in former owners and mechanics for consultation (on the car), and people stopped by to see how things were going,” recalled Jakle. “The guy was really marvelous; he was dedicated to helping the stranger in town.”

In his 17-hour tuneup, the professor came to regard gasoline stations not simply as roadside pit stops for car refueling and kidney relief but as “material culture,” and “commercial icons” that are “emblematic and symbolic of things quintessentially American.”

So when Keith Sculle, now head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, walked into his office one day several years ago, the pump was primed.

Sculle, 53, had been roaming the Champaign-Urbana area in search of inspiring candidates for the National Register of Historic Places, but because Garcia’s Pizza didn’t qualify, he was having a hard time of it.

Knowing Jakle’s penchant for scraping deep meaning from the common place, Sculle went to him for inspiration. A high-octane synergy developed between the historic preservationist and the cultural geographer.

“The roadside kept coming back and back and back, as if it was tapping us on the shoulder and insisting we take a look,” Sculle said mystically.

Soon they were combing the countryside, looking for the houses of Sunoco, Shell, Unocal, Texaco, Esso, Exxon, Marathon, Clark, Mobil, Standard and Fina.

They became aesthetes of gasstation architecture and Ph.D.s of pumpology. With tigers in their tanks, Jakle and Sculle decided to write a book about gasoline service stations.

No,Their book would be a geo historical examination of gasoline service stations, a work replete with high-brow dipstick language.

“What we are trying to do in this book is define a few concepts and lay a basis for a more theoretical-based consideration of the roadside, with the two most important concepts being place-product-packaging and corporate territoriality.”

Among the themes explored, drilled and refined in the book is the notion that the gasoline service station is a cultural icon “central to the American psyche.”

In their wide-ranging study, Jakle and Sculle even veer into greasemonkey sociology, noting that, “For males especially, the neighborhood gasoline station - with its ringing bell announcing customers, its smell of gasoline and grease signifying technology, and its brisk socializing indicating community - constituted a very important social setting indeed. Here could be found the exhilarating tension of mechanical and other problems faced and solved.”

And you thought it was just a place to gas up, put some air in your tires and get the bird bleep off the windshield.

Thick with academic language, the book does not give up its more interesting material without a crescent wrench, but there are some facts of general interest. Here are a few:

The first gas station opened in 1907 in Seattle. It was owned by Standard Oil of California.

In 1909, the American Gasoline Co. of St. Louis, a Shell agent, built the first drive-in station to be located apart from bulk-plant facilities. The one-pump station consisted of a small tin shed housing barrels of oil and two converted hot-water tanks sporting short lengths of garden hose.

Gulf Oil built the first architectdesigned station in Pittsburgh in 1913. It was a hexagonal building with a roof cantilevered outward on all sides to cover 13 electrically operated gasoline pumps. In it, the company distributed the first free commercial road maps in the U.S.

Standard of California launched its chain of look-alike stations in 1914. By 1920 there were approximately 15,000 service stations in the U.S.

Traditional gas stations now number fewer than 100,000 in the U.S., compared with 236,000 as of 1969.

In applying dead-serious scholarly analysis to the pump jockey’s dominion, the authors said they knew they were setting themselves up to be mocked - either as pointy heads by the gas-guzzling public or as braindead scholars by academics who have never looked under the hood.

“It’s a scholarly book, but it is being marketed as a trade book, which is kind of a dangerous thing because we run the risk of not pleasing anyone,” admitted Jakle.

The two hard-driving scholars are already at work on “Motels in America” and, their final stop on the road, “Fast Food Restaurants in America.”

Said Jakle with an odd gleam in his eye, “Everybody ought to have a trilogy in life.”