Word: tanked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Buzz off, Government. You're messing too much with things that have made this country great. Get out of my gas tank. I want supply and demand...
Other hotels within a fuel tank's distance from big cities have been advertising that gasoline is available to their registered guests for side trips, as well as their return home. Harry Kelley, the expansive mayor of Ocean City, Md., has become something of a national celebrity by appearing on TV and announcing a "secret plan" to assure visitors enough gasoline to get home again...
Such tactics must seem like small potatoes to former Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf II, who this spring had a 4,000-gal. underground tank installed in the front yard of his four-acre McLean, Va., estate. The tank should ensure him enough gas to travel about 10,000 miles a year for seven years in a standard six-cylinder sedan. So many of Middendorf s prosperous neighbors prudently followed suit that last week the Fairfax, Va., Board of Supervisors adopted an emergency ordinance prohibiting any further tank installations...
Suddenly, driving distances seem to be reckoned in tankfuls, not miles. Being "just a tankful away" is now the come-on for cottages, motels and beaches. So far, tourist centers within a tank of major cities have not suffered appreciably from the gas shortage: attendance at Williamsburg, Va., 158 miles from Washington, B.C., has actually been up, and Disneyland, which is only 27 miles from metropolitan Los Angeles, also reports increased patronage. Businesses in areas that are more isolated, like Las Vegas, the Florida Everglades and Lake Tahoe, though, have suffered. Overall weekend automobile travel in the U.S. is down...
...trend will doubtless continue. This works to the advantage of railroads, bus lines, short-hop airlines and, ironically enough, the rental car business. For one thing, people who once drove to a nearby city may now fly and then rent a car, which usually comes with a full tank...