When I was in high school, the 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air was what the Volkswagen was supposed to be in 1930s Germany – a car everybody could afford. If you weren’t picky about stuff like dog hair and dog smells and didn’t absolutely need both headlights and a floorboard in the back, you could get one for 50 bucks.  

That thought made me smile when my gas fill-up Tuesday was just over 50 bucks. 

I wasn’t looking at anything in particular while smiling, just staring off into 1966, but appearances are everything. If you happened to be looking my direction from the next set of pumps, it would seem that I was looking in your direction and was amused by what I saw. 

What I would have been seeing if I had been looking was a large unhappy man pumping gas into a tank that was about eye level on a truck with five tires. He was into triple figures and didn’t see anything the least bit funny about the situation. 

He looked like he was ready to pound somebody into the pavement.  

Luckily, I am too old to be taken seriously enough to pound, which is one of the few benefits of age. Another is that the cost of fuel doesn’t hit so hard because as retirees my wife and I don’t have to drive that much anymore. The only regular trip is to the grocery store two miles away. 

We don’t have a gas crisis because we can fairly easily afford to drive to our other crisis: Feeding ourselves. It would appear from the prices that beef must go from Omaha to Florida via the Strait of Hormuz. Either that or they’ve started feeding cows on gasoline. 

It can be depressing, but we are not the first to find times hard. Anne Murray did a song in 1983 that said “what we need is a little good news today.” So I did some figuring and came up with a cheerful headline.  

In the early 1970s I worked at a self-service gas station in my area, back before technology had caught up with the idea. An attendant had to reset the pumps and collect the cash. No credit cards. 

Gasoline was 28.9 cents per gallon. That might seem like the good old days unless you were doing what I was doing for $1.60 per hour – strolling around with a big wad of bills at midnight, available to be robbed by people already in what amounted to get-away vehicles.  

I drove a 1965 Buick Wildcat, which got about the same mileage as that previously mentioned 1955 Chevy, 10 to 14 miles per gallon. Let’s be generous and call it 12 – that thing was a beast, and I never tuned it up.  

I could buy 5.5 gallons of gasoline for what I was paid for an hour of inhaling exhaust fumes and risking my life, enough fuel to take that Buick 66 miles.  

The internet tells me that the minimum wage I made in 1972 is the equivalent to $10 an hour in today’s money. At the $4.49 I just paid, that would get me only 2.2 gallons, making the old days still seem golden.  

However, I normally get around 30 miles per gallon, and the experts say if I slowed down to 55, I could get 37. For the equivalent of an hour’s work in 1972, I can now finance 82 miles of driving.  

So, there’s your happy headline: GAS PRICES HAVE GONE DOWN! (Relatively speaking.) 

That’s worth a smile.  

Just don’t let anybody see you do it at the gas pumps.