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Your old Olds must have been reincarnated as our kids’ old VW 2002 Jetta. At about 80k miles, we just routinely dumped a quart of oil in at every gasoline fill-up. Sometimes it took 1.5 quarts if it was off the bottom of the stick.

I used to buy oil in the paper containers with the metal lid in Missouri around 1970 for $0.25. You’d push in that piercing spout and your hands would always smell of oil afterward. Today’s youngsters with the plastic oil “cans” and the screw-off cap — sheesh, they don’t know how good they have it! Of course, who has to add a quarter of oil between changes these days anyway?

Didn't have Valor Oil in our neck of the woods. But I used the other "Val" oil == Valvoline. I had to stockpile oil in my garage and in the van to keep it running happily. I figured nobody would ever want to steal it for use as a getaway car, cuz the cops could use its cloud to figure out where it went.

What was really a headache was fulfilling the terms of the rebates on a box full of 1-quart oil cans. They required you to cut out a symbol from the outside of every single can. But the cans were cardboard with a thin inside layer of some oil resistant material, and the rebate deadline always came before you'd used all the cans. So you had to use a knife or razor *VERY* carefully to cut the logo from the outside shiny paper along with a few layers of the cardboard underneath, without cutting through the cardboard *too* much.

I remember at a dinky little gas station I worked at in the early 70s, the only way to buy unleaded gas was not from a pump, but from a big barrel with a spigot in the same shed as the air compressor. Never called it "unleaded," but rather "white gas". Campers bought it for their Coleman lanterns, and backpackers for their camp stoves, which would have clogged up quick with leaded gas.

When they started requiring annual emissions testing in COLO, my old van miraculously passed the "no visible tailpipe emissions" test each year, and I never questioned how this could be. Well, the reason was that my annual test was in January, and since I had it done at a little gas station that tested only outside, the cold weather made it difficult to tell whether you were looking at heated water vapor or smoke. And the gas jockey always gave me (wrongly) the benefit of the doubt.

But one fine summer day when I took it out of mothballs to donate to our church in response to a newsletter request, and was required to first get its paperwork up to date including an emissions test, the tester was required to fail me, because the stuff you could clearly see coming out of the tailpipe on a warm day was definitely 100% smoke and 0% water vapor. Being a kindly sort, he gave me some advice on how to get it to pass. He directed me to an auto parts store to buy an oil additive called "No Smoke" that I'd never heard of.

It was the first product I'd ever bought that had the instructions in Spanish *first* on the label, and the English version at the bottom. (Is it racist of me to merely mention this fact? If so, apologies in advance). I dumped the entire contents into the engine, drove it a few miles, and voila, no smoke! I took it back to the same guy for a retest, it passed just fine this time, and I donated it to our church, along with a tip to the janitorial staff about prepping the engine just before next year's license renewal & emissions test. (Boy, those automotive engineers in Spain really know what they're doing, eh? :-) )