Darwin-
In the 60's in LA, I never paid more that .25 per gallon. (about .09 per liter).
Of course, the dollar did go a bit further those days, and survival was simple.
Rent for 3 months in Huntington Beach? $90.00.

Darwinsdog -

I too have been have similar thoughts regarding the uniqueness of growing up during the Postwar boom, which I would roughly place as the period from about 1953 through the late 1960s, or thereabouts.

Not only was fuel cheap and totally taken for granted, but there was a pervasive optimism that the future would be better (provided we didn't get nuked by them Rooskies) and that one's children would do better than one's own generation. Even throughout the turmoil of the late 1960s, economic and resource worries appeared to more in the background.

If one came from a working-class background, it was a given article of faith that if you acquired a college diploma, it would be an automatic ticket to a life of prosperity. Of course, this may have been wishful thinking on the part of a lot of second-generation immigrant families, but nonetheless there was faith that the system would hold and that there would be a niche in that system for almost everyone (of course it helped to be white).

As an example, I graduated from a small eastern engineering school, class of '67. Of the 270 graduates, EVERY single one had at least one job offer, and the average number of job offers was something like 4.4. When I relate this little factoid to young people that react with total disbelief.

If things continue the way they are, I think colleges and universities are going to be in for a real hard time, as it becomes more and more apparent that going to college is no longer going to offer much promise of bettering oneself economically. College was once largely the domain of the professional and monied classes, and it wasn't until after WW II that there was a flood of young working-class people attending college, all looking for a shot at the American Dream. I think we might see a retrenchment, in which enrollment at colleges and universities will shrink and we will once again see these institutions revert to serving a smaller body of elites. This would be entirely consistent with the ongoing hollowing out of the American middle class. Alas.

"the extremely narrow window in human history when ...antibiotics actually worked"

This reminds me of the return of wheat stem rust (UG99) which has been on my mind lately. We bred disease resistant wheat varieties back in the 60s, which resulted in much more reliable yields, which together with pesticides and fertilisers has allowed grain supplies to increase to the point where we can feed 6 billion people.

However, a new form of wheat rust has evolved which can overcome the most common genes for resistance in modern wheat varieties, and is likely to make it to India in the next couple of years. Wheat yields could be severely reduced. Fertiliser is getting more expensive due to demand and higher oil & gas prices, shipping costs and production costs for pesticides are rising as oil prices rises. Can the "green-revolution" get a second wind post-peak?

We are due to hit 7 billion in 2012, and 8 billion in 2025. Most of the extra people will be a band from Nigeria to Bangladesh.

It seems to me that at some point the population growth omnibus is going to run into the brick wall of peak food. And the more people on the bus when that happens, the more horrific the resulting mess is going to be.

On the northeast corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Ortega in San Francisco is a Standard (Chevron) gas-station. I worked at that gas-station from January, 1972 to October, 1976; I was at San Francisco State at this time, so I worked weekends during the school year and full-time for most of the summer.

When I first started working there, gasoline fluctuated between 25.9 and 35.9 cents per gallon, (for Premium, or Ethyl, as it was then often known, Regular was a three or four cents a gallon cheaper) as, if I recall correctly, they had for the past decade or more. The price fluctuation was due to the ongoing “gas wars” conducted by local gas-stations. I could come to work one weekend and gas prices would be at the bottom of the range, and we would be quite busy, the next weekend the prices would have gone up a few cents, and the weekend after that we would be at or near the top or the scale, and business was quite slow. Then, the next week, prices would have plunged down to the bottom of the scale again, and the whole cycle would continue.

But, although none of us working at the gas station were aware of Peak Oil, or the fact that the US had hit its peak back in 1970, this last fact undoubtedly was behind the unexplained minor shortages that started appearing in mid to late 1972, the first of the long lines at the station, and the price (temporarily, as I recall) rising to an unprecedented 40 cents a gallon. But the optimism of that era was deeply entrenched, I recall at the time gas hit the 40 cent mark sitting around with four or five co-workers at the gas-station on a slow day, and asking how long it would take gas to reach a buck a gallon. Everyone looked around, thought, then the unanimous verdict was: “Naah, never happen.”

Anyway, I don’t know if we made arrangements with the Saudis or others for increased imports, because, as I recall, this 1972 mini-crisis seemed to melt away after a few months. But this didn’t last long, as the Arab Oil Embargo came down in mid-October of 1973, and its effects begin to be felt at the pumps only several weeks later. At first this consisted of price rises, to what were for the times, unprecedented levels. I recall going out to service a car, and the old guy in it looked at the price on the pump, a mind-boggling 50 cents a gallon. He looked at me and said “F**k you, I’m not paying you rip-offs” He started to drive off, but before he left, I snarled back at him, “Well, Asshole, you’ll run out of gas before you find anything cheaper, the price is the same everywhere.” And the price WAS the same everywhere, from now on it would only move upward or at best hang steady, the era of the “gas-wars” between service-stations was over, forever.

And the gas-wars were not the only long-standing business practice to end, forever. Before the Arab Oil Embargo, gas-stations, grocery stores of all sizes, and other retail outlets gave away trading stamps. People born this side of the late ‘60’s probably have never seen these, but they were a regular feature at retail outlets throughout my childhood and teenage years. On the West Coast, the trading stamps were Blue Chip Stamps and S&H Green Stamps, with Blue Chip being by far the more widely offered. Each stamp had printed on it “Cash Value One Mill.” (A mill is one tenth of one cent.) These were actual stamps, about two-thirds the size of an ordinary postage stamp, and gummed on the back, and you pasted them into booklets which, when a sufficient quantity was amassed, could be redeemed for stuff like toasters, vacuum cleaners, etc., mostly household appliances and stuff, as I recall. Anyway, these vanished from the entire retail scene, not just the gas stations shortly after the Arab Oil Embargo really started kicking in. Gas-stations in general, as far back as I remember, also offered free state and local highway maps that they gave away to their customers. Maps didn’t disappear, but they were no longer free as a price-tag of from 50 cent to a buck was now charged. And, of course, the Embargo was the beginning of the end for the true “service-station”, before, “self-service” was rare, but from this point in time on, it expanded, while the full service stations continued to diminish in numbers over the years.

When the Oil Embargo was first announced, the first effect were the price rises. Most people must have (incredibly, naively, from to-day’s vantage point) thought all this would be quite temporary, as for the first week or two of the Embargo, business was slow, as, I suppose people, like the guy who buzzed me off over 50-cent gas must have thought that prices would soon come down. It takes about six weeks for a tanker to sail from Saudi Arabia to the U.S., so six weeks after the Embargo was announced, the effect became quite noticeable, and the real gas lines became an everyday feature. This was when the government installed the odd-even (based on your car’s license number) sort of “Rationing Lite” system. And the oil companies practiced their own rationing, as each service station received a specific monthly allotment of gasoline. Scotty (Scotty Petrie, the operator of the 19th and Ortega station at this time) calculated that if he sold every car all the gas they wanted, that he would exhaust the monthly allotment that Standard Oil granted him in slightly more than two weeks. So Scotty instituted a limit of 8 gallons to every car coming into the pumps. Business hours were also cut back, and this created problems with the long lines of waiting autos, which backed out of the station and went up the street, frequently curling around the block and extend up most of that block. So, a couple of hours before closing time, we would take a large cardboard sign that said “Last Car”, go out to the last car an the line and inform the driver he was lucky, as he would be the last getting gas here to-day, then hang the sign on the back of his car. One day, I went out with the sign, and as it turned out, the last car sort of stood out, an almost overwhelmingly bright yellow VW Bug. I put the sign on the car, and returned to the gas-station and continued pumping gas. A couple hours later the yellow VW comes up and I sell it its gas, and went on to service the next car after the VW departed. It wasn’t until three or four cars had bought their eight gallons that I flashed on the fact that the VW was supposed to be the last car for the day. There were several cars still in line with the sign now on the last of them. It turned out that after I left the sign on the VW, the next car came up, and offered the driver of the VW $5 to take the sign and put it on his own car; he then sold the sign to the next car coming behind him, and so on. Ever after that, an employee of the gas-station had to simply stand by the last car, and slowly walk with it as it inched towards the station, and waving off all would-be customers.

After five months, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia felt he had wrested as much as he could out of the US and the West insofar as seriously addressing the (at the time) 25 year old Arab-Israel conflict. So the Embargo was lifted, and the oil flow resumed. But before the Embargo, the Saudis were getting something like $2.80 per barrel, afterward, as part of the price for restoring production, Faisal insisted on, and got a price of $11.65 per barrel. And the era of 25-35 cent gasoline, along with free maps and trading stamps, was over….Forever.

Anyway, thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. A lot of it just seems unbelievable now, free maps and trading stamps and getting cussed out behind 50 cent gas. Definitely, it was another era.

Antoinetta III

Cheer up, your grand kids won't have the many compounds in their food that suppress their immune systems, or fragile immune systems from being raised too clean. Antibiotic resistance is only an advantage for a bug if there is antibiotics.