I once rode in the rumble seat of a 1928 Chevrolet. I was probably five or six years old. The man who owned it had bought it new and kept it the rest of his life. When he died in 1965, I tried to buy it, but his heirs wouldn't sell. I learned later that they had sold it for far less than I would have paid.
The car used "natural gasoline." There were no additives to raise the octane which would have been between 50 and 55 octane. It could use the low octane gas because the compression ratio was only 4.3:1. It ran fine on high octane gas as well. Some rascals would steal drip gas which collected around oil wells. With the passing of low compression engines, the theft ended.
Has anyone ever seen low octane gas for sale? Some stations supposedly carried it until the early fifties, but I never saw it. My only childhood memories of gasoline are of Regular and Ethyl. I hope that everyone here has heard of Ethyl. :sentimental: