"Go to Western Auto, and buy the biggest chamois they have"
I squealed when I saw the price tag below the chamois. Almost six dollars! Twelve hours of backbreaking work in Armando Dianda's almond orchard! Next,
was a trip to the hardware store to get the largest funnel they had. Plastic? In those days plastic wasn't universal. No, the funnel was heavy
galvanized sheet steel with rolled edges and soldered seams. The vertical tube above the cone was a half foot in height. Eight dollars! Dejected, I
purchased the funnel, paid the California 4% sales tax, and met the others at the A & W root beer drive in. It was time to go sell my cherished
'53 Ford coupe. I kept thinking to myself, "Is This Stupid?" It was June 1964.
Jim and Toni, owners of a CJ-3B and military trailer, had found a dozen clips that looked a little like clothespins but were way stiffer. They opened
the box with the chamois, spread it across the opening of the funnel, punched it down to make a deep bowl shape depression, then clipped a half dozen
pincers around the rim and everyone declared "Perfect!"
I was in for a steep learning curve. Like every drop of Mexican gasoline had to be run through the chamois. Then the chamois has to be really washed
out good with soap and water. Sometimes the water was so bad the gasoline backed up and overflowed the funnel to great cursing of the group. Gasoline
was sent through the chamois before it went into the USMC jeep cans.
We filled up in downtown Ensenada with "The best gasoline in all Mexico before heading south. It would be a long time before we saw a similar pump
again. "Mexolina" was the only thing available on the peninsula and it had an octane rating of 78 RESEARCH, meaning it would rate somewhere in the
sixties today.
Here is an image of PEMEX CIEN the best gasoline in all Mexico. Regular gas in California was selling for 31.9 cents a gallon. Pemex Cien sold for the
equivalent of 45 cents US per gallon:
AndyP - 8-28-2012 at 03:52 PM
I like these old stories of Mexico (and elsewhere), I wish I could have had the opportunity to travel back then.J.P. - 8-28-2012 at 04:01 PM
In Texas we filtered the Mexican gas through a old felt hat to get the water out. there was another gasoline We burned it was called Drip. it came
from the condsation of moisture in cross country Natural gas lines.durrelllrobert - 8-29-2012 at 08:41 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by DavidE
It was time to go sell my cherished '53 Ford coupe. I kept thinking to myself, "Is This Stupid?" It was June 1964.
'53 was the last of the flat heads and they, unlike the '54 overheads, would run on anything that was flamable. Did you sell yours in Mexico?
Corky1 - 8-29-2012 at 08:42 AM
In my early days of bike riding in Baja, before all the gas stations along the highway we all carries a chamois to filter the gas that came from
barrels at ranchos along the way.
CorkyDavidE - 8-29-2012 at 10:09 AM
No, I sold it to a friend in the states who earnestly believed that if he jammed a Chrysler hemi motor and '39 packard transmission in it, the car
would be an instant hot rod. The 450 dollars went towards the trip to San Lucas and back. When I got back I was afoot until I worked long enough to
purchase a '59 pickup truck. But I did not venture past Ensenada again until 1973. In December of 1965, I traveled to San Blas, Nayarit. The last day
of December it was 86F. The '53 Ford business coupe (cardboard panels for a back seat) never got close to Mexico. The Victoria hardtop in the image
above was highly coveted and rare. So was a '56 Ford 4-door hardtop.
I carried about 377 dollars with me to Mexico. In Tijuana we went to a Banco de México and stood in line and I exchanged a hundred dollars for one
thousand two hundred and forty nine Méxican pesos. The teller would not take a quarter to make the peso pile 1,250. We went from the bank to the
deposito de cerveza and bought something like 16 cases of Carta Blanca for the 8 Jeeps and jeep trailers. Then to the frabrique de hielo. The beer
cost 14 cents plus bottle deposit. One marqueta of hielo cost just under two dollars. It weighed more than a hundred pounds.
I ate my first genuine taco that day. It cost something like 16 cents. Fresh squeezed orange juice was 11 cents. We camped somewhere along Mex 1
around 20 miles north of Ensenada. A goat herder let us camp beneath a spreading oak. The next day we made it all the way to El Rosario. The day after
that, to the south side of the Cataviña boulder field. A flash flood filled the arroyos and we holed-up for two solid days. Then on to Rancho Chapala,
a jot over to the coast, El Arco, then San Ignacio.
Trucks brought gasolina to the rancheros, and brought everything else including news of the outside world. I lost my cowboy hat on the speedway of
Chapala and we had to turn around a go look for it. Everything was covered in grit and dust. When we met an oncoming truck headed back from La Paz, we
pulled over and so did they (almost all had the front seat and any available room in the bed filled with paying passengers)
News of the road and gasoline filled our ears.
