Exhibit of Vintage Gas Pumps Fueled by Love

When you’re married to a man who roams the West in search of vintage gas pumps, you either hate it, shrug it off as a weird male aberration--or embrace it.

Carolyn Lundgren embraced it.

“It was exciting for Harry to come home and tell me, ‘Gee, honey, I found this terrific nozzle,’ ” she said. “Most people wouldn’t understand that, but I did.”

Harry Lundgren died last January at 71. To honor his memory, Carolyn has given the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum seven of his eight meticulously restored gas pumps, plus a slew of old oil cans, signs, a pay phone and other souvenirs of a day when “service station” suggested something as quaint as actual service.

What had been the ever-spreading accumulation in Harry Lundgren’s four-car garage is now the Harry J. Lundgren Collection, so marked by a shiny brass plaque. Before two dozen friends, Carolyn cut the red ribbon fronting the museum’s new permanent display at a dedication ceremony Friday.

“The hardest thing I’ll ever do is clean out Harry’s shaving drawer,” she said in a quavering voice. “I haven’t done it yet. But the easiest thing was to give his gas pumps to the museum, because I know they’ll be safe here.”

It’s hard to imagine people a half-century from now collecting the soulless metal boxes that squirt the fuel that runs the world. But the pumps in Santa Paula are something else again; a few stand 9 feet tall, streamlined and gleaming, devices to be operated not by ordinary, know-nothing motorists but by specially trained engineers in brown uniforms who could also polish your windshield, fill your tires and tell you the quickest way to Pokeville.

Pump collecting today has its Web pages, its magazines (Check the Oil! is among the biggest), its conventions, dealers, appraisers and escalating prices. The glass globes that topped pumps a generation or two ago can run as high as $1,000.

But Harry, a co-owner of Economy Plumbing in Ventura and a major donor to a number of charities, wasn’t in it for the money.

“I think he was an artist, I really do,” Carolyn said. “It’s just that he expressed himself in gas pumps.”

When Harry met Carolyn, each already had been married once. After a laugh-filled three-hour lunch, he said: “I’d like to take you home to meet my dogs.”

“Thought I’d heard ‘em all,” she replied.

They married in 1981.

The couple would hit auctions and garage sales, ever on the lookout for little treasures like an old wooden crate that once held cans of turbine oil or a Texaco (“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star”) wastebasket. Harry, who also collected old tools, would ramble into junkyards. He drove far and wide to see a man who had a friend who could find a part for the motor of this pump or that.

“Friends would ask if I knew where Harry was and I always thought that was such an odd question,” Carolyn said. “I’d never worry about him. I knew he was out in the middle of the desert somewhere, shagging parts or trying to buy a gas pump from a guy who didn’t want to sell it to him. He’d always call me at 5 p.m. just to let me know he was OK.”

At Friday’s dedication, Lundgren’s collection drew other collectors. Gazing at shelves crammed with oil cans of companies long gone, Harry’s brother-in-law freely confessed his own addiction: road maps.

“At last count, I had 40,000 of them,” said Keith Ross, a retired printer from Olympia, Wash. “I’ve been collecting since 1952, and I’m not sure why. I don’t open up newspapers any more; I just open up road maps.”

There were none in the Lundgren collection--just the magnificent pumps, set at long-ago prices such as 43.5 cents a gallon, an old bronze fire extinguisher, a dial pay phone with instructions in French and English, a bubble-gum machine, a wire-spoke tire, a dozen glass jars to hold your emergency gas, a can of Shell Fly Spray, and on and on.

“It’s the finest collection of gas-station memorabilia on display in Ventura County by far,” announced Mike Nelson, the museum’s director.

More important for Carolyn Lundgren is that it’s the finest display honoring the memory of Harry J. Lundgren.

“When the guys from the museum were up at my house loading the pumps onto a truck, I said I’d really miss them. One gentleman told me, ‘You know, you can come visit any time you want.’ ”

*

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.