Lowest gas prices you remember

For me it was $.89 during the late '80's when I was in high school.

 

About the same for me...

 

Long before self-serve,(circa 1959) I pumped gasoline at my dad's service station. The price for Mobilgas regular was $.249 or two-bits per gallon, U.S., after the rounding-up. We also had gas wars--$.199. A nickel was worth a lot.

It is all kind of relative--most everything is about 10 times more expensive. Too bad the wages did not keep up. In the late 50's, early 60's, $100 a week was pretty good money for the average worker. Now it takes $100 a day just to survive.

Everything will be all right--we are printing more money--but don't hold your breath. The printing presses are hung up because they cannot repeatably make the current funny money without errors. The errors would take years to sort--by hand--only a year by machine. Maybe we can get paid in e-money--Wally Mart would probably take it. Many of us retirees do anyway--just do not try to get cash.

Selah,
Bro. James

 

Im with you there Steve.....I seem to remember 29 cents.

 

Same here. I remember when it went over a dollar, probably about the time I hit college.

 

It was mostly in the 25 cent range when I was growing up, though the occasional gas war would see the price drop to as low as 15 cents a gallon for a day or so here and there. The lines went around the block when that happened.

Gas was in the 50 cent range when I was in high school, and I still recall the first major fuel "crisis" when the price hit $1.00 a gallon (late 1970s). People thought the world would end at that price! Of course, for a bit it did! They had a limit of 5 gallons at a time, and again lines went around the block at all the filling stations.

My old muscle car, a 70 Chevelle was out of the question. It did about 4 mpg when I was taking it as easy as the car would go (It was over 500 hp and just didn't run well when you were not at wide-open throttle!) On many a night I'd fill up with Sunoco 106 octane 3 times! Those were the days. One could dial in on the pump the level of gas that you wanted to purchase, and Sunoco had the best stuff.

I bought a used 76 Chevy Chevette about 2 weeks before the gas started to go through the roof. It had a 1600 4-cylinder engine and probably got 26 or so miles per gallon. GMAC tried to repossess that car from me three times once gas went sky high because the value of the car tripled overnight.

That ushered in the era of vehicles with pollution controls that ran worse and got far poorer mileage than did the older cars. The late 70s and 80s were rough. Cars were crud during that time. They started getting sorted out in the 90s again and we've made good progress in vehicles into the new century. They now run better, longer, get better economy (mostly) and are also as fast (mostly) and handle better than the vast majority of vehicles that came before.

 

19.9c a gallon during a 'gas war' in 1972. Wavaho station on University Drive in Huntsville, AL

 

Actually, now that I think of it, back in the late '80's the car wash I worked at had a radio promotion / gas war with other stations where for 4 hours one morning they were selling gas for 1/10 of once cent.

People got in line 20 hours before and camped out.

 

The lowest I can specifically recall was when I was 12 or 13, and we took up one of those free offers to stay in a trailer house for 2 nights for my parents going on one of those pushy sales tours of the vacation homes. It was somewhere near Mineola, TX, when self-serves were there but they were still few, and the price was $0.269.

Another fuel price story is from 1999, when I drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The last 'town' before the final stretch of about 60 miles is Jacob's Lake, and the price (not sure if there was one or 2 stations) was $1.539, which was the largest fuel price I had ever paid, and thought it would be several years before they got that high anywhere else, especially in Texas. In less than 2 years, that was cheap anywhere, and within 5 years double that price was cheap anywhere. Fortuantely, they have stabilized more since the $4+ days of '07.

 

I remember driving into and then driving out of a station in Lexington, KY, where I lived in the late '60's, because I thought 25.9c was too high. I got it for maybe 23.9c ... mega-savings when you consider I was driving a gas-guzzling car and my salary was about $6000 a year.

 

Jack Burt's ESSO station on Greenwell Springs Road in Baton Rouge back around '65----$0.26/gal ---you could fill your car/truck up for $5.00

Of course, back then was the same as it is now---momma didn't know where she was gonna get $5.00 for gas-------and I can remember spilling it out on the ground when fillin' up the lawn mower gas tank---daddy would say---"SON!!!! YOU WATCH WHAT YOU'RE DOIN'----DON'T YOU SPILL NONE OF THAT---IT COSTS A FORTUNE!!!!":tonofbricks:

When I started driving in '74---gas had gone to about $.50/gal---same then ---- I didn't know where I was gonna get the money to fill up the tank!!:tonofbricks:

 

I remember gasoline prices in Canada in 1948 at fifteen cents a gallon, and that included washing windscreen, checking oil, radiator and tires. Texaco didn't exist. It was called McCall Frontenac and had fire chief as its monicker....Gave away fire chief hats when Texaco took over.

Cheers,

Jim

 

I don't remember prices, just know that $10 used to fill the tank.

I didn't legally start driving until the late 90's so paid little to no attention to gas prices.