You can trust your car …

It’s funny how kids get stuck on a given brand.

When I was growing up in California, gas station brands meant something. Shell was the Good Guys — warm reds and golds, inviting. I liked their commericials, with the Shell Answer Man passing on great words of wisdom to consumers.

Chevron (which was still also going by the name of Standard at some of their stations) was the Bad Guys. Sure, their red-white-and-blue colors were patriotic, but they favored the blue, which was vaguely sinister, and the sharp-edged chevron logo was a harsh contrast to the scalloped shell logo.

And don’t ask me where this comes from, but to me, Shell was Arnold Palmer — the smiling, jovial, warm golf champ. Chevron was Jack Nicklaus, the fierce, unfair competitor (of course he was unfair — he was competing with Palmer, my hero).

Of course, the bottom line, the genesis of all this, was that we bought gas at the local Shell. Kids tend to dogmatize preferences like that, and take random comments (“Boy, that Chevron sure is expensive”) as Dictates from the Mount. And I’m sure my folks would be flabbergasted to hear about these attachments and associations (“We bought gas at a Shell station when we lived in Mountain View? Are you sure? Huh. I honestly don’t remember.”)

All of which was a round-about way of getting to the current topic.

One thing I noticed when I came from California to Colorado was the change in gas stations. Gone were the Shell stations that are sunnily ubiquitous in LA. Gone were those hard, cold Chevron stations. Gone were the Exxons and Mobils. Instead, we had new, strange names, like Amoco, Conoco, Total, and Diamond Shamrock.

One constant was Texaco. We’d not been a Texico family growing up — the one station I remember as a real little kid was some distance away, and there was never one close or convenient enough to be The One True Station That We Always Go To.

There seemed to be more Texacos here in Colorado than back in LA. One was even the most convenient to the apartment we first lived in. There’s one that’s the only convenient station to my office on the way home. I came to like rediscovering the T-Star logo, the bold red and black (the green trim having been dropped from the color scheme years ago). I recalled the “You can trust your car/To the man who wears the star” jingles of my childhood, and smiled fondly at the memory of the different evolutions of the Texaco station in the Back to the Future movies.

But things change. And just as every bank in the cosmos is slowly merging into a single entity, so, too, have acquisitions and mergers in the petro biz changed the landscape.

Locally, Diamond Shamrock bought Total, and has pretty much finished converting all of the latter into the former branding. The BP-Amoco merger has led to a slow vanishing of the Amoco red-white-and-blue (a hallmark of the old Standard Oil monopoly) into the cheerfully European BP green and yellow.

And now Texaco. They merged with Chevron last year, but because of anti-trust issues, they had to divest most of the Texaco service stations. Those, in turn, were bought by Shell, which will finally start showing up in the Colorado landscape, as the conversion takes place from one brand to the other over the next few years. The bold, almost unseemly black-and-red, and the simple T-Star will be replaced by the warm gold-and-red of Shell, with a stylized scallop for a logo. Though it doesn’t seem that gas stations advertise on TV much any more, so I don’t expect to hear the Shell Answer Man any time soon …

All of which would just pass unnoticed, if not for those odd childhood attachments and associations. Which makes me wonder what sorts of atavistic reactions Katherine will have one of these days, triggered by things we inadvertently do, or buying habits we have at the moment …