Share your stories

Last week I had a book event at the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay. My favorite part of these events is the willingness of people to share their own stories. One of the attendees was a man in a NAPA auto parts shirt who regaled me with stories while I was autographing books. He started working in his dad's gas station at age five. It was a full-service station and he washed windows while his dad pumped gas. Since he was too short to reach the windshield, his dad rigged up a stand with an upside down five gallon pail set in a rubber tire. He would pull the pail over to a car, hop on top and squeege the windshield. Even so, he could never reach the top center of the windshield, so a little inverted dirty triangle left behind became his signature. His gleeful description of this odd contraption left me with a smile that stayed with me all the way back to Madison.

A Ripon Monument

On Monday I drove through Ripon, Wisconsin on a work trip and passed this little house type station. Closed long ago, the station has found a life as a sometimes office for a monument company. I shot this ironic photo, with the little station sitting amongst the cemetery markers wating their final inscription, like just another grave marker, where a little entrepreurial dream came to rest. You could see it as a sad little reminder of the sweeping changes that pushed thousands of these little stations to the side in the 1970s and 80s, or you could see it a tough little survivor, bucking the odds and surviving as so very few others have, to continue into the 21st century. I prefer to see it as the latter, a Ripon monument to the lives of the hardworking people who toiled in this little building for decades.

My hunch is that this station was built by the Biegick Brothers, who we feature in our book, Fill 'er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations. If you know something about this station, drop us a line, we would love
to hear from you.

Greasing the skids

We are authors of a new book on Wisconsin featuring a guided tour of 59 of Wisconsin's vintage gas stations—from cottages to pagodas. We offer a spirited and nostalgic look at these historically significant examples of roadside architecture. Since their unremarkable beginnings as cheap shacks and curbside pumps, gas stations have taken many forms, worn many guises, and have been designed by some of Wisconsin’s most distinguished architects.

Our intent in creating this blog is to share the wealth of historic photos, classic advertisements, newspaper clippings, patent drawings and other gas station paraphernalia, that came our way over the course of preparing our book, Fill ‘Er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations. Top off your tank, and get ready for a sweet ride.