From about the 1930s to well into the 1970s, drive-in gas stations weren’t just about gassing up; it was the creation of American driving culture. They literally helped shape roadside America.  Drivers just generally loved taking pictures of these operations during their travels, and you could circle the planet 100 times with the number of postcards documenting the history of gas stations if laid out end-to-end.

The first drive-in service station opened in Pittsburgh, PA in December 1913.  Before that, drivers typically pumped their own gas at curbside filling stations, and you bought gas in cans from your local pharmacy or blacksmith shop.  Once the automobile became more affordable and readily available to more families, so did these purposefully designed pagoda-style facilities that offered free air, water, crankcase service, oil changes, tire and tube installation and everything else.  And because they also offered shelter from rain or snow, owners could sell soda and snacks, which is what I remember most about my Uncle Cliff’s Atlantic service station on Route 12 in Chenango Forks, New York.

I hung out at his shop on warm summer days, when we would drive down from Albany to get away from “the city.” As a young kid we couldn’t afford a proper vacation, so we’d visit my grandmother in Oneonta and Uncle Cliff and Aunt Jean near Binghamton instead. I idolized my cousin Joe, who was a bit older and took me on rubber-squealing adventures down old county roads in his Chevelle.  He introduced me to Star Trek and taught me how to catch nightcrawlers and shoot a .22.  They lived right on the banks of the Chenango River and we’d go fishing almost every day, and definitely pop in on Uncle Cliff at the station, which was less than three miles from their house but seemed like it was in another state at the time.

Atlantic had merged with the Richfield Oil Corporation, so there was a big ARCO sign out front, but pulling bottled Orange Crush out of the Atomic Age soda machine in front of the station’s huge glass bay doors is still as clear as a bell in my mind’s eye. My uncle was meticulous, and even as a kid I noticed how you could practically eat off the floors in his shop, even as the permanent crescents of grease pressed into each fingernail showed years of tough work and long hours under hoods.

Lo and behold – as if these memories have the power to will things into existence – I stumbled across Uncle Cliff’s station on eBay!  The seller had apparently acquired a massive amount of Midcentury 8×10 negatives of old Atlantic Petroleum Company service stations.  They were all Northeastern sites and meticulously catalogued, most likely the property of Atlantic and taken perhaps for insurance or some other business-related purpose. I fought off the urge to buy them all (because: humans) and snapped up the one depicting that old shop on Route 12, still standing and owned/operated by my cousin Joe.

Then I hunted down professional photographer Joe Putrock, an old friend from my Metroland days and beyond, to develop it. Fantastic drummer, collector of sneakers and just a rock-solid shutterbug.  He blew up the shot to a 16 x 20 print that I was able to give to my cousin, and I also gifted a smaller copy to my Uncle Steve (Cliff’s younger brother), who worked there shortly after this pic was taken.  Read the rest on my blog… link in bio!

However, as you can see, the owner of the shop on November 26, 1960 – which would have been two days after Thanksgiving that year – was Robert G. Wightman. I’m guessing my uncle bought the station shortly thereafter, since his house just up the road on Shore Acres drive was built in 1961, and photographs I have of my mother and her sisters in front of the main entrance are dated 1962.

Robert G. Wightman is a bit of a mystery. There are several Robert G. Wightmans in the public record, from all over Upstate NY. I can’t find a direct connection between any of them and the station, but one of them owned an Esso station in Perry, NY in the 1940s, so he’s a candidate, but there are also Robert G. Wightmans from Norwich, Johnson City and Binghamton, the latter which still owns property on Powderhouse Road.  There is a Robert G. Wightman who runs a sign shop in Norwich to this day, and one that is currently the associate superintendent of Norwich CSD.  Apparently, it’s a popular name!

One of my favorite things about this picture – and historic photos generally – is that each one becomes a time capsule if you look at it long enough. Look at the bike parked on its kickstand near Kattelville Road.  Classic 1950’s-era Schwinn or Rollfast bicycle. And check out the election polling sign posted on the telephone pole to the far right of the shot, left over from the 1960 general elections a few weeks prior, when Kennedy upset Nixon to become the youngest president in US history (both Chenango and Broome counties overwhelmingly voted for Tricky Dick).

And I love how, while many things change, the longevity of things never ceases to amaze. The trees cradling the property, which appear to be of the same species, are long gone (“Hard to forget having to cut them down with dad,” recalled cousin Joe) as are gasoline sales at the station. But the shop is still there, sitting in its original footprint, as is the white house on the right (though it has been resided and its porch gable reoriented). Those telephone poles are in the same spots, and there’s still a mailbox spiked in front of the one on the right.

Here’s something else I find fascinating: I thought that the old barn in the print, appearing as if it is directly behind the station, would have been knocked down ages ago, but there it sits today, on Old River Road!  It looks so much closer in the picture, as if it is actually sitting on Kattelville Road, so I wonder if it was moved to make way for new construction?  Maybe where a NAPA Auto Parts sits now?  How old could that barn be, and how many people throughout history have set foot in it?  And how many have set foot in Simmons Auto Services?  Crazy.

Another interesting thing about this picture is how you can see the photographer’s shadow in the lower left corner of the frame.  It seems like the picture was taken in the afternoon, and I originally thought that since it was winter the guy was wearing an overcoat, but Joe Putrock said that the camera he used – just based on the silhouette in the picture – would have been a large format camera on a tripod, and in order to see the image better he’d have used a dark cloth to block out light.  So that’s probably what we see happening there.  He also told me a bit about the camera itself; because these devices had no separate viewfinder system, the photographer had to rely entirely on a ground glass at the focal plane to focus and compose the image. The ground glass attached to the back of the camera, the lens was opened to its widest setting and this projected the scene onto the ground glass, which means that the photographer had to focus the image upside down and backwards!  Sometimes they used a magnifying glass or loupe to do this. This was so cool to learn about because I know absolutely nothing about cameras.

Unlike today – where smartphones have turned massive chunks of the global populace into amateur shutterbugs capable of snapping hundreds, even thousands of images daily if their phone’s memory plan is sufficient – you had to really want it.

Do you?