The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (19 page)

“Mother, you were never just a housewife.”

“Well, I was so. I cooked and cleaned and raised two children, and if that wasn’t me, then who was it?”

“Mother, you never cooked, and you never cleaned.”

“Well, I oversaw everything, and anyhow, that’s not the point. That’s why I pushed you to be something. But you just never had any ambition, and I don’t understand it. You are descended from a long line of leaders. Your great-grandmother single-handedly saved the family home from the Yankees, and you are just content to sit around all day and fiddle with those birds. You will be sixty years old soon, and what have you done? If I told you once, I have told you a hundred
times. You need to think about your duty as a Simmons, and at least try to accomplish something to be proud of before it’s too late.”

Sookie had heard this same speech a hundred times, but today was obviously one time too many. “Mother, just stop it. All that Simmons stuff is just a bunch of baloney, and you know it!” Sookie was stunned at her own outburst.

Lenore was shocked as well and just looked at her for what seemed to be a long time and then said, “I don’t know what you mean, Sookie. It’s obvious that you are just not yourself today, and so I am going home.” Lenore stood up, walked out, and got into the car and waited.

Sookie, still a little shaken, paid the bill and went out, and drove her mother home in silence. When they arrived at her house, Lenore got out of the car and said, “Call me if and when you regain your senses.”

Sookie felt terrible about snapping at her mother like that and immediately called Dr. Shapiro, and he met her for an emergency meeting. But he did not find her behavior alarming at all. “It’s to be expected,” he said.

Sookie understood that that kind of behavior might be expected somewhere else, but in Point Clear, Alabama, upset or not, she should never have raised her voice in public. It just wasn’t ladylike, and besides, she was married to a dentist, and a certain amount of decorum was expected.

P
ULASKI
, W
ISCONSIN

1941

M
OMMA HAD TRIED
. S
HE STILL BAKED THE OPLATKI
—P
OLISH
C
HRISTMAS
wafers—as usual, but it was a bleak old Christmas in 1941. All of the songs about peace on earth and goodwill toward men that played in between the grim news of the war rang a little hollow that year. It seemed the whole country was preoccupied with one thing. Every large company in America was busy changing over, mobilizing, and gearing up to put all their resources toward the war effort. Everybody wanted to do something to try to help win the war and get the boys home again.

Fritzi had been home for only about a month when their old friend, bathroom inspector and nurse Dottie Frakes, came by for a visit and informed them that after today, she was taking a leave of absence from Phillips Petroleum to become an army nurse. After a big lunch, Poppa went back to work, and Momma and the other girls started to clean the kitchen. Dottie offered to help clean up, but Momma said, “No, you two just go relax.”

Dottie got up and said, “All right, then, Fritzi, let’s you and me go sit in the parlor and have a little catch-up chat.”

As they went in, Dottie turned and pulled the wooden sliding
doors shut and turned to Fritzi with a concerned look. “How long has your father had that cough?”

“Oh, quite a while, I think. He’s had a bad cold. Why?”

“I didn’t want to alarm your mother or the girls, but I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve worked in hospitals, and I know what that sound means.”

“Oh … what?”

“He needs to see a doctor as soon as possible.”

That afternoon, Fritzi tried to get her father to go see the doctor, but he said, “Oh, Fritzi, I can’t leave the station for that kind of foolishness. You know how shorthanded we are now. I’m fine. I’ll be better tomorrow.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and pleaded with him. “Please, Poppa. Just go for me.”

He laughed. “If I’m not better in a week, I’ll go. I promise.”

When she had first arrived home, Fritzi had noticed how thin and tired her father looked, but when she felt his shoulders now, there was nothing there but skin and bones.

She hated to do it to Poppa, but she had to tell Momma what Dottie had said and see if Momma could talk some sense into him. Before she even finished the sentence, Momma had her apron off and her hat and coat on and was headed next door to the filling station. Five minutes later, she and Poppa were downtown, sitting in Dr. Renschoske’s office. Momma was an old-fashioned wife and rarely questioned her husband in any way, but not this time.

The tests came back, and the diagnosis was as Dottie had suspected: advanced tuberculosis that had to be treated right away. But when the doctor started talking to him about the different sanitariums that specialized in TB treatments, Stanislaw would have no part of it. “Just give me some medicine. I have a business to run.”

“Stanislaw, you won’t be alive to run anything if you don’t do what I tell you. You will go home and get in bed and rest until Linka and I work out where you are going and when.”

He did, and in the meantime, his nineteen-year-old nephew Florian was put in charge of running the station. Three days later, the arrangements for Stanislaw had been made at the sanitarium. The
hard part was getting him there. All the trains and buses were full of servicemen trying to get to bases. So Fritzi called a flying pal of hers and Billy’s in Grand Rapids, who flew over and picked up Poppa to fly him all the way down to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Poor Poppa. He had flown off with two sets of clean pajamas, a sack full of sausages, and a rosary that Sophie had slipped into his pocket. When the plane had taken off, Momma, who had never been separated from him for even one night, had stood and cried into her apron and wondered if she would ever see him again.

A
ND AS IF THINGS
couldn’t get worse, Florian soon received his draft notice, as did Poppa’s mechanic. The other fellow they had just hired to fill in quit to work in Sturgeon Bay, where he could make more money, and Momma was worried to death.

A week later, after Fritzi came home from work, Momma went into her room and closed the door behind her and told her about an offer she had received from a man in Oshkosh to buy the station. Fritzi was stunned that her mother would even think about selling. “You can’t do that, Momma.”

“But Fritzi, what will we do when Florian and the boys leave for good? We have to close down. There will be no one left to run the station. When I think how hard Poppa worked to get this place … it will kill him for sure.”

“You can’t sell it, Momma.”

“But Fritzi, the hospital costs so much. We have to. Who knows how long Poppa will have to stay away or how long the war will last. And there are no men left to hire. They will be all gone—either to the service or working at the factories. We have no choice.”

Fritzi said, “Yes, we do.”

“What?”

“I’ll run it!”

“Oh, Fritzi, by yourself? You can’t do that.”

“No, not by myself. The whole family—all of us. Now that you have Angie to help cook, Gertrude, Tula, and Sophie can help.”

“But, Fritzi, you can’t have all girls running a filling station. Nobody would come.”

When Momma said that, something suddenly clicked in Fritzi’s mind, and she said, “Momma, you just wait and see.”

Later, Fritzi called a meeting in the kitchen with all the girls and told them her idea. They seemed skeptical. “But we don’t know how to fix a motor or anything about carburetors and things like that,” said Gertrude.

“No, but I do.”

Tula said, “But it’s so dirty over there. I don’t want to get grease all over me.”

“Oh, come on, girls. We can’t let Poppa down now or Wink. We’ve all worked at the station at one time or another, and what we don’t know, we can learn. Florian isn’t leaving for a couple of weeks. He can teach you what you need to know, and I can teach you the rest. I know we can do it. Whatta ya say?”

The sisters all turned to Momma. “What do you think, Momma?”

Momma said, “I think you should listen to what Fritzi says. She’s the man of the house now.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, F
RITZI
gave her notice at the pickle factory. That night, she rooted around in the gas station files and found Poppa’s old study materials from the service station management course he had taken. She sat down and studied all night long. It didn’t look too hard. All you had to do was follow instructions.

“Oh, hell,” thought Fritzi. This was going to be easy. She knew most of this stuff already.

The gals would need uniforms, so Momma took all of Wink’s and
Poppa’s old uniform pants and shirts and cut them down to fit the girls. Just for an extra added touch, she embroidered in red on each individual shirt the words “Hi, I’m Fritzi” or “Hi, I’m Gertrude,” and so on.

Fritzi had learned a little about organizing a work team from her old Flying Circus days, so she sat down and worked out a plan. And at the end of the week, everybody had a designated assignment.

Tula would do most of the mechanical work. Gertrude, the strongest girl, would be in charge of changing tires and fixing flats. Fritzi would pump gas and check under the hood and drive the tow truck when needed. Sophie was good at math, so she would work as the cashier. Inside the station, they sold candy, potato chips, cold drinks, hot coffee, and Momma’s sausages and homemade sandwiches and pastries. They also sold trinkets, key chains, lighters, glass ashtrays, and toys and gave away free maps and free postcards.

In three weeks’ time, Fritzi and her sisters, wearing brand-new uniforms with hats and cute little black bow ties, were ready to start. When word got out that four good-looking sisters were now running a filling station, business suddenly started to pick up. Doing the air shows with Billy, Fritzi had learned a lot about advertising, and pretty soon, ads started appearing in local newspapers that featured a photo of the four smiling girls standing in front of the station with a caption above it that said:

They had signs put up along the highway that, underneath their logo, said:

As an added attraction, a day before he left for the navy, Gertrude’s boyfriend, Nard Tanawaski, had come to the station and rigged up the record player to four big outside speakers. After that, they played big-band swing music all day long. It added some cheer to the cold winter days.

As word continued to spread about the “All-Girl Filling Station,” long-haul truck drivers suddenly made it a point to reroute their runs through Pulaski, and a lot of men all the way from Green Bay and as far away as Madison mysteriously developed car trouble.

Carloads of guys and gals carpooling to factories stopped in to fill up on their way to work. The music made them feel happy, and so did the four friendly girls with the big smiles. Before long, they even had big logging trucks swinging down across the border of Canada just to get a look.

Secretly, Fritzi had been worried whether her sisters would be able to handle it, but they surprised her at how they had jumped in and helped. Even though Sophie Marie was still a little shy, she was very pretty and, therefore, a big asset. Nothing helped sales faster than a pretty girl, and the All-Girl Filling Station had
four.