VIEWPOINT : My grandfather’s grease spots were as viscous with history as anyone’s.

As a child I spent many hot summer days at my grandfather’s gas station. When truckers came in to gas up, I eavesdropped on their conversations about life on the road, diner food and foul weather in Flagstaff.

My grandfather and I listened to Dodger games inside his dingy office. His hat wet with perspiration, he sat in a creaky, wooden chair facing the radio so that the manager could hear him better when he shouted his advice.

It was a wonderful, exciting place. But I must say that I never fully appreciated it until I heard that the folks in Studio City had asked that a car wash and gas station on Ventura Boulevard be declared a cultural landmark.

I thought it was a joke. But the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission seemed to be taking the whole thing pretty seriously last week, when members elbowed their way past the BMWs and Cadillacs waiting for a wash to tour the business. Advocates proudly pointed out that gas has been pumped there since 1929. Now that’s culture.

Well, my grandfather’s grease spots were as viscous with history as anyone’s. Perhaps if we had been as cagey as those clever people in Studio City we might have preserved the station. Maybe even conducted tours of the storeroom, filled with oil cans, and showed off the lift that didn’t work.

Instead, some people who do radiator work took over the station after my grandfather died. They even planted a palm out front, destroying the industrial scorched-earth look my grandfather seemed to prefer.

The Studio City folks maintain their car wash qualifies for landmark status because it is the Valley’s oldest and is the only one in Los Angeles graced by three 55-foot-tall, boomerang-shaped steel beams on its roof. Well, out where I live, there are several homes with antenna arrays on their roofs so exotic that I figure they are either communicating with Rigel or tracking Soviet subs off Greenland. I admit they aren’t shaped like culturally significant boomerangs. They look more like upturned silverware trying to spear flying potatoes.

The good people of Studio City deny they are cynically using the landmark proposal to stall construction of a shopping center at Ventura and Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

“The car has been a great part of our culture in the Valley,” preservation campaign organizer Jack McGrath shouted over the sound of rinsing jets Wednesday to members of the Cultural Heritage Commission.

But that’s not all the evidence they have to support their claim for landmark-hood. The car wash, they say, is the Gateway to the San Fernando Valley.

In my ignorance, I didn’t know the Valley had a gateway. And if I had known, a car wash would have been the last place I looked for it. One can get pretty wet entering and exiting through a car wash.

The Gateway to New York is the Statue of Liberty, holding aloft her torch of freedom.

So how do we welcome the castoffs of Chicago and the huddled masses of Des Moines, seeking the promise of “tasty waves” and better video stores? With a wash and wax for $3.75 on Wednesday and Thursday.

“The New York Times wrote a story making fun of us,” said a friend sadly. The sense of it, she said, was, “there go those wacky Californians again.” If they aren’t celebrating sex priestesses and yuppie panhandlers, they’re trying to put gas stations in the museum.

I called Joan Olshansky of the New York Landmark Preservation Commission. While New York celebrates its history with dignity, it turns out it has its frivolous side as well. The 11-member commission recently held hearings to decide whether to preserve a Pepsi Cola sign. Of course that sign was erected in the ‘30s.

The San Fernando Valley may have been erected then, but nobody had yet found the gateway.

The commission also is considering designating as landmarks three structures at the Coney Island amusement park. “We range from the Wonder Wheel to the Empire State Building,” Olshansky said.

But what about a car wash? “If it was the first car wash built in New York,” she said hesitantly, trying to be a bit more helpful.

OK, I thought, let’s not be coy. What do you really think of this idea? “I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” she said.