The Pinnacle of Civil Society Was 1970s Era Gasoline Lines. Very Polite. Classic Americans Waiting Hours in Their Cars and Trucks

The $5.00 rotisserie chicken.

My mom would make oven fries from potatoes and butter. she had one of those old pressure cookers everyone had with the locking lid.

I was there for both gas crises, 1973 and 1979. 1973 was OK, but had people a bit more frazzled and short-tempered simply because it lasted longer, along with war nerves due to the Mideast crisis. The 1979 mess (which was in large part responsible for Carter losing the presidential election the next year) was very civil. This was during the height of the CB radio boom, and this played a big part in how people reacted.

I remember pulling an all-nighter, sitting near the front of a nearly mile-long line of cars parked on the shoulder of a state highway, waiting for the station we were at to open in the morning, right after the scheduled tanker unloaded. Two-thirds of the cars had a CB, and it was like a big friendly party line. As the night wore on, people would make coffee and donut runs to 24 hour places, asking who wanted what and making a list (paid on delivery). We saved their spot in line by literally filling it with our bodies so no one could cut in.

We were in CB contact with other people waiting in gas lines miles away, and everyone was in pretty good humor. We knew that the shortage was going to be transitory (it lasted about two weeks, iirc), and was the result of the idiot Carter administration’s meddling in the fuel supply chain (as democrats love to do). There was a sense of camaraderie that I never felt before or since - we were Americans, all pulling together, and this was just a momentary blip. Today, I think most people would lose their shit if something similar happened; we surely wouldn’t have that same sense of solidarity that was present back then.

Those gas lines were again caused by demonrats they hate America...Jimmy Carter is now so happy he in not the worst prez in history anymore.