Sounds like a clown hopped up on petroleum fumes: Benzo! Wikipedia says the Fire Chief brand was introduced nationwide in 1932, but judging from the phone numbers, I’d put this a few years earlier. Surely there were more than 419 phones in Greenville.

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To celebrate the summer driving season and the inevitable gnashing of teeth over the price of fuel, we now inaugurate a series of retro gas-station matchbooks. If ever there was a business that shouldn’t have encouraged people to strike matches, it was this one. But they put out matchbooks by the millions, and I’m glad they did.