I'd put my bets on the date being in the mid to late 40's maybe 1950 at the latest. The car looks like it might be a Ford Model A from about 1929. Standard Oil did not let their franchise stations get too antiquated, or the the owners lost their franchise. The station owners had to update at their own expense, possibly getting a loan from Corporate. They were also required to sell a certain volume of gas every 30 days or lose their franchise. Maybe there were regional differences in the rules, but Corporate did play a heavy hand. There were also quotas for sales of TBA (tires, batteries, accessories) that had to be met each month.
In the early 60's I worked for Conoco Oil corporate as a part time job in college. They had stolen the book from Shell Oil, who had stolen the rules book from Standard Oil. From my perspective, Standard Oil had been the leader in creating the "sell or die" rules, and there was an established history. Part of my job was to assess whether a station owner was keeping his place clean, presenting the pump attendant in proper clean uniform and corporate hat, double checking the monthly gallonage (to see if the operator was buying and selling some loads of "no-brand" gas), and to assess the station's repair shop honesty. We also had to do traffic counts, including left turns, straight throughs, and right turns for all 4 traffics coming together at the intersection the station was located at. They also counted total traffic on the main road, and the side road the station was located at. The traffic counts were put into some formula to determine how many customers should be coming into the station, and how many gallons should be sold.
Nostalgia is great, but by the end of WW2, corporate was a very mean task master. A lot of good mechanics and honest station owners were put out of business because they did not sell enough. It was all about $$$$$.
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Today's Featured Article - The Day Mom Drove the 8N - by Brian Browning. My Dad was wanting to put in a garden but couldn't operate the 8N and handle the old horse drawn plow he had found and rigged up to use with the tractor. Well, he decided to go get Mom out of the house and have her drive the tractor while he walked behind the plow. You got to understand that while my Mom is a hard worker who will always help whenever she can... she had never operated farm machinery before that day. Dad got her out there, explained how the clutch was the same as in our o
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