Pick a date -- in this case, July 14, 1936 -- and pretend that an alien spacecraft plucked a gas station from somewhere in Los Angeles, held it suspended in time and then dropped it back to Earth in 2003.
Behold: Tall, snazzy, cream-and-red-colored pumps, the kind that let you see the gasoline inside. Decorative glass globes, bearing the face of a lion, atop the pumps. An old-fashioned "lubester," from which a station attendant once drew fresh oil for your engine. Neon banding around the edge of the station roof. Vintage magazines, furniture and maybe even a couple of dead flies inside the office.
What you've imagined -- a near-full-size replica of a pre-World War II gas station -- is about to be assembled at the Farmers Market in the Fairfax district. The permanent exhibit, which will not actually offer fuel for sale, is intended to rekindle the little-remembered artistry of an era when independent gasoline and petroleum companies with names like Gilmore, Mohawk, Gibble and Polly battled for business at individual service stations. Within a decade of the war's end, most of these companies would be gone, swallowed by a handful of oil corporations. Their mascots, promotional stunts and theme songs would fade from memory.
But not in the home of Hank Hilty.
Hilty is the great-grandson of Arthur Fremont Gilmore, who established a dairy farm on the land that is now the Farmers Market and whose heirs launched the market, an oil and gasoline business, a football stadium and a minor-league baseball park. Hilty, 52, runs the A.F. Gilmore Co., where he's worked ever since a hitch in the armed services.
Two years ago, when construction was beginning on the Grove, a shopping and entertainment center on Gilmore-owned land adjacent to the Farmers Market, Hilty was confronted by a city development requirement to provide public art. The discussions began with plans for a couple of large kiosks about the land's colorful history. But then Hilty had a chat with Jim Olson, a local exhibits consultant who was once chief of exhibits at the county Natural History Museum, that prompted him to go further.
Hilty knew Olson had installed a replica of a service station at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Now Olson encouraged Hilty to do something similar at the Farmers Market -- to tell the story of Gilmore Oil Co., which during the '30s claimed to be the largest independent oil company on the West Coast, supplying 1,100 stations in five states. The Gilmore lion roared from cans of Lion Head Oil, from colorful road maps, from lion-shaped candy and on radio commercials that played ditties like "That Funny Red Lion Gas Song." Pick a date, Olson suggested to Hilty, and re-create the station as a giant time capsule.
