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Heart to Heart


Gasoline: A Quarter a Gallon?

San Diego Jewish Times, May 5, 2006                                                       .

By Gert Thaler

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— It’s my 52^nd anniversary and I look back upon that day with nostalgia...and not just because what happened changed my life forever.

I look back and am agog at how times have changed. And prices! Oy vey!

Fifty-four years ago this month, two weeks after I celebrated another Mother’s Day, I got my beginner’s permit and enrolled with a private instructor who proceeded to put his life in my hands as I clasped the wheel of his Studebaker, shifted into first gear and took off.

We had been married for six years and in each of those years, after becoming a parent for the first time in 1948 and again in 1950, whenever Mother’s Day rolled around I was presented with a fancy greeting card and a check for $25.

Finally I decided I’d had it and informed the Master of our House in 1953 that unless he went out and bought me an actual present, I no longer wanted him to take the easy way out and write a check. (In those days $25 got a girl some good stuff, but I wanted him to sweat it out and put some effort into the task.)

The following year he did as I asked and showed up with a blue satin “hostess gown” from one of our best stores and told me how he sat down and had similar ones modeled for him until he found just the right one, and its price tag was $200. Did I laugh? Did I wear it? Since I never returned a gift he gave me, it sat in my closet except for a couple of “at home” occasions and eventually withered away.

The next year, 1955, I announced in early March that a check would be appreciated. An idea had been stirring around in my kepaleh.

I shared the confidence with my mother, whose cooperation I needed as a baby sitter, and she consented but on one condition. “You can’t drive with the kids in the car until you have been driving for three months.” I laid my hand on the Bible and promised. And kept it.

After Lesson #8 I was taken to the DMV for my test and failed to park properly. Heartbroken, I had to take Lesson #9, returned and passed with palpitations. A piece of cake. I was already sailing through Mission Valley’s primitive early freeway like a drunken sailor.

Master of the House still did not know my escapade and never inquired how I spent the gifted check. Each lesson was $6 and I had to shell out 54 of some saved up dollars. I placed the plastic license on his dinner plate that evening, and he pretended not to notice it until finally he announced that he had been aware of what had been going on and only waiting for the final outcome.

Of course it meant that the very next day I chose the first car that I could henceforth call “mine,” a red Chevrolet. With white sidewall tires.

Air conditioning? Not yet available. A CD player? Unheard of. Electronically controlled windows? Are you kidding? Seat belts? What?

And gasoline was $.25 per gallon. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. One fourth of a dollar and a whole dollar got you four gallons of the stuff...

Flash forward to 1962. Gas prices went up to .31 cents a gallon. People were really mad at the increase from the year before.

Flash, flash way forward. 2006. Approaching another Mother’s Day and that $25 check is a basis for a great joke when I pull into the gas station. This past week, on April 26 I paid Costco $3.089 for one gallon of the golden treasure.

 I drive a Toyota Avalon and it costs close to $40 to fill it to overflowing. (I have the bad habit of “topping off” at the pump.)

It means I had to cut out buying Weight Watcher chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick. And I passed up having lunch at The Four Seasons Hotel and only seeing one movie this month. My main question is, “What is the minimum wage worker doing for fuel?” Life sucks.

No more entertaining visitors with rides to Indian casinos. Let somebody else take the long trek. Prime rib, filet mignon, and truffles are a thing of the past. Spaghetti and meatballs will fill my plate. But the apple martini remains; $9 for a whopper of a martini glass at Po Pazzo, one of my favorite restaurants in Little Italy that offers free valet parking, which entices me since Gaslamp valets now charge $15.

Last week I entertained the former CEO of Bezeq (the Israeli telephone company) by escorting him through a Costco store. He loaded up on shirts, marveled at the wide choices in frozen pizza, but went bananas when he saw the lineup of cars in line at the gas pumps. Unheard of, and they pay even more than we do, and have for a long, long time for gasoline, approximately $4 a gallon (though they quote it in liters).

As part of that touring day we traveled the roads through La Costa Resort, which has been turned inside out and upside down in an ambitious building program. I related the beginnings of the area when Irv Roston was the general manager and Moe Dalitz escorted us through the place and the price of a home was $46,000. My mouth froze wondering who would ever want to live in such an “isolated” area. You were neither in Los Angeles nor San Diego, but in a wilderness, OK, so I ate crow, and it wasn’t much later when we were driving up there for Sunday night dinner and the man in my life was teeing off once or twice a week.

Times change. From .25 cents a gallon to three dollars and nearly nine cents for the same amount. With no stop signs in sight. A gallon of unleaded gas in one station at $3.089 is the same liquid as a gallon of gas in a national chain at $3.87.

Full service can push the price up over $4.

I continue to drink my apple martini, price no object. After all, its appeal is as important to some of us as mother’s milk to a newborn.

I’ll stick to economizing on unnecessary wear and tear on my tires.

And I think I’ll call up one of those sheiks and tell him so. Or maybe I’ll save money and get in touch with one of the people who manage Mr. Bush’s oil wells in Texas. I have free long distance service on my cell phone.