John's Blog

It wasn't that long ago that I linked to a cool site that featured pictures of gas stations, and confessed to my obsession on the subject. So here is yet another great series of gas station pictures as found at the Vintage Gas Museum. The only problem I have with this one is the series of weird memories that it dredges up.

Seeing the slogan on the gas station wall "Atlantic keeps your car on the go" dredges up the memory of a long dormant advertising jingle that got stuck in my head as a child, and unfortunately is now stuck there again. Almost makes me glad that fewer and fewer advertisers rely upon jingles these days.

And the other weird memory that this made me recall is "The Atlantic Weatherman". Back in the early days of TV, Atlantic apparently sponsored the weather report on a variety of local newscasts in their marketing area. This featured commercials but the signature move was that the weather report was delivered by a guy in an Atlantic uniform, hat and bow tie. Yes, children in the old days gas stations featured attendants who pumped the gas, wore uniforms, gave you free stuff as an enticement to buy their product, and charged about 30 cents a gallon....but those were different times. And this reminds me of another really weird TV weather format where on Baltimore's channel 11 they had the weather delivered by puppets! But at least this suggests a bit more creativity than what I've seen recently on TV newscasts. The current crop of TV weather persons seems to consist of one of these three cliches: the jolly fat guy, the blow-dried hunk, or the weather-babe. This is progress?