When I was in high school, the 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air was what the Volkswagen was supposed to be in\u00a01930s\u00a0Germany \u2013 a car everybody could afford. If you\u00a0weren\u2019t\u00a0picky\u00a0about stuff like dog hair\u00a0and dog smells and\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0absolutely need both headlights and a floorboard in the back, you could get one for 50\u00a0bucks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That thought made me smile when my\u00a0gas\u00a0fill-up\u00a0Tuesday was just over 50\u00a0bucks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0looking\u00a0at anything\u00a0in particular\u00a0while\u00a0smiling, just staring off into 1966, but appearances are everything. If you happened to be\u00a0looking\u00a0my direction from the next set of pumps,\u00a0it would seem that I\u00a0was looking in your direction and was amused by what I saw.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Become A Member<\/p>\n
The Apopka Chief does not have a paywall, but pavement-pounding journalism is not free. Join your neighbors who make this vital work possible.<\/p>\n
See Member Benefits<\/a>Join Our Newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n What I would have been seeing if I had been looking was a large unhappy man pumping gas into a tank that was about eye level on a truck with five tires.\u00a0He was into triple figures and\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0see anything the least bit funny about the situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u00a0looked\u00a0like he was ready to pound somebody\u00a0into\u00a0the pavement.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Luckily, I am too old to be taken seriously\u00a0enough to pound, which is one of the few benefits\u00a0of\u00a0age. Another is that the cost of fuel\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0hit so hard because\u00a0as retirees\u00a0my wife and I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have to drive that much anymore. The only regular\u00a0trip is to the grocery store two miles away.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have a gas crisis because we can\u00a0fairly easily\u00a0afford to drive to our other crisis: Feeding ourselves. It would appear\u00a0from the prices\u00a0that beef\u00a0must go from\u00a0Omaha to Florida via the Strait of Hormuz. Either that or\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0started feeding cows on gasoline.\u00a0<\/p>\n It can be depressing, but we are not the first to find times hard.\u00a0Anne Murray did a song in 1983 that\u00a0said\u00a0\u201cwhat we need is a little good news today.\u201d\u00a0So\u00a0I\u00a0did\u00a0some figuring and\u00a0came up with\u00a0a\u00a0cheerful headline.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the early 1970s I worked at\u00a0a\u00a0self-service gas station in my area, back before technology had caught up with the idea.\u00a0An attendant\u00a0had to reset\u00a0the pumps and collect\u00a0the\u00a0cash. No credit cards.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gasoline was 28.9 cents per gallon.\u00a0That might seem like the good old days unless you were doing what I was doing for $1.60 per hour \u2013 strolling around with a big\u00a0wad of bills\u00a0at midnight, available to be robbed by\u00a0people\u00a0already\u00a0in what amounted to get-away vehicles.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u00a0drove\u00a0a 1965 Buick Wildcat, which got about the same mileage as\u00a0that previously mentioned\u00a01955 Chevy, 10 to 14 miles per gallon.\u00a0Let\u2019s\u00a0be generous and call it 12 \u2013 that thing was a beast,\u00a0and I never tuned it up.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I could buy 5.5 gallons of gasoline for what I was paid for an hour of inhaling exhaust fumes and risking my life, enough fuel to take that Buick 66 miles.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0internet tells me that\u00a0the\u00a0minimum wage I made in 1972 is the equivalent to $10 an hour in today\u2019s money.\u00a0At the $4.49 I just\u00a0paid,\u00a0that would get me\u00a0only\u00a02.2 gallons, making the old days still seem golden.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n However, I normally get around 30 miles per gallon, and the experts say if I\u00a0slowed\u00a0down to 55, I could get 37. For the equivalent of an hour\u2019s work in 1972, I can now finance 82 miles of driving.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So,\u00a0there\u2019s\u00a0your happy headline: GAS PRICES HAVE GONE DOWN!\u00a0(Relatively speaking.)\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s\u00a0worth a\u00a0smile.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Just\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0let anybody see you do it at the gas pumps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was in high school, the 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air was what the Volkswagen was supposed to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-271543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}