Paul Kengor: Cheaper and saner times, when gas was 33 cents per gallon

My father-in-law (his name is Al) recently handed me something he came across in a box of old stuff. It was a receipt from Wilson’s Pleasant Valley Station, in McMurray dated June 13, 1958. The receipt was signed by Al, a hustling teenage boy working at the gas station.

What immediately struck Al was the cost of gasoline. Currently, you’re paying around $5 per gallon. In Al’s day, it was 33 cents.

The handwritten receipt for Al’s customer listed $1 for gas, six quarts of motor oil for $3.60, a lube for $1.50, and an oil change and filter for $3.15. The grand total was $9.46, which today wouldn’t get you two gallons of gas at Sheetz.

Also, the total included merely 21 cents in sales tax. Sales tax was half the percentage it is today.

All of this is revealing, of course. It will make you chuckle, or perhaps scream. But take a deeper dive. Al’s receipt is revealing of much more.

First off, inflation in 1958 was 2.8%; today it is 8.6%. Purchasing power for your hard-earned cash was much better.

Second, we were drilling domestically. This was long before we started depending on the Middle East or countries like Venezuela for oil. We were getting oil from states like Texas and Al’s home state of Pennsylvania, the state of Quaker State, Pennzoil, Oil City, Titusville — where the oil rush began.

Most important, we didn’t have a president and political party at war with fossil fuels, pushing an entire population to electric cars and public transportation. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower would have dubbed the Green New Deal a form of insanity. So would the Democrats of his day. The Democrats back then were the party of the working man.

Not only was gas far more affordable in 1958. Al told me that he bought his car for $100. It was used, but still, that was a good deal. The price of used and new cars alike right now is awful. Car prices have been uniquely terrible.

Finally, consider this: employment right now is likewise terrible. Our unemployment rate does not capture the extraordinary number of unfilled jobs. The number of non-working people is shocking.

Al worked as a teenage boy at that gas station for a rate of just under a dollar an hour. The gas station could afford to pay Al that small amount because there was no state minimum-wage law yet. In fact, one of the reasons you no longer see young boys filling you up at a gas station and running around cleaning your windows and checking your tires and oil is because minimum-wage laws killed those jobs. There are plenty of teen boys who would do that job for a few bucks an hour — half the current minimum wage. My 14-year-old son would. He tells me, “Dad, that job would be awesome!”

A liberal would protest, “You can’t raise a family on $5 per hour!” Correct, but that isn’t a job for a father of three. It’s a job for a teen boy.

In all, Al’s receipt from June 1958 adds up to not only a more affordable time, but also a saner time.