The Texaco Man

I’m Reaching for the Stars!

Audio narration coming soon you YouTube.

It was January of 1962, and I had been four years old for just a few short weeks.

It was cold that day. Cold enough for me to be dressed in two sweaters, corduroy jeans — no dress today! — and tennis shoes.

Those shoes. Ugh.

I hated wearing shoes, but even I knew this was a day to cover my feet.

Mama topped the whole thing off by tying a scarf over my head and ears.

I was like one of those wild bucking broncos at a rodeo, throwing itself around inside the chute before the gate opens.

I could not wait to get outside.

“Keep that scarf on. I don’t want you getting sick again.”

I had not had my tonsils taken out yet, and getting sick was something I did often enough for Mama to worry about it.

Not me.

I just wanted to get outside.

That was where I always wanted to be.

I loved to run. I loved to play. If the sun was up and I could make my escape out the door, I was going. I was already halfway there even before Mama finished tying that scarf around my head.

So the fact that anything could stop me on my way outside is saying something.

But then I looked up at our little black-and-white television.

And there he was.

The Texaco Man.

“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.”

That’s when everything stopped.

I was speed dating before anyone ever thought to call it that, and I wasn’t about to go anywhere until this commercial was over.

When the Texaco Man showed up, you couldn’t drag me away from that little television set. It became my world, and the backyard could wait.

Running could wait.

Everything could wait.

Because this was the only time I got to spend with him.

The Texaco Man could do anything.

He put gas in cars. He changed the oil. He fixed things. He helped people.

Whatever the problem was, he always seemed to know exactly what to do. And he was happy to help.

He must’ve had some kind of special “in” with Santa Claus too, although in our family, we never believed in Santa Claus, but I’m pretty sure the Texaco Man did because he always had toys at Christmastime, and he handed them out to people just like Santa.

And these were nice toys.

He was ahead of his time too because he told parents to “make your boy or girl a fire chief this Christmas” by getting them their very own Texaco Fire Chief Speaker Helmet. He thought I could be a fire chief too!

During one of our one-minute speed dates, I remember watching him put the Texaco Fire Chief Speaker Helmet on a little girl who used the speaker to say, “I can be a fire chief too!”

I didn’t want to be a fire chief. But I sure wanted to be that little girl.

One day I watched him put chains on a pretty lady’s tires.

Living in Northwest Florida, nobody I knew was putting chains on their tires. But the Texaco Man did it. So, we must have been missing out on something.

“Why don’t we put chains on our tires?”

Mama laughed.

“Why would we do that?”

“Well, because the Texaco Man did it, that’s why!”

As far as I was concerned, the Texaco Man had established the proper procedure, and Mama simply needed to catch up.

Honestly, I don’t know how we managed anything around that place without me keeping an eye on things.

That was how much I trusted him.

If he said something needed fixing, it needed fixing.

If he knew what to do, then that was what you did.

He wore the star — the big, bright Texaco star!

And apparently, that was all the proof four-year-old me required.

On another one of those scarf-wearing days, I stood in the middle of the living room watching the love of my life on our little black-and-white television when a question popped into my head.

“If I ran into the road and got hit by a car, do you think the Texaco Man would save me?”

I must have said it out loud because Mama looked horrified.

“Wally Faye! That’s never going to happen!”

For a second, I wasn’t sure whether she meant I was never going to get hit by a car or the Texaco Man was never going to save me.

I decided she meant the car.

“But if it did happen, do you think he would save me?”

“Well, of course he would.”

I needed to know more.

“But do you think he would come into the road and pick me up in his arms and carry me to safety?”

Mama’s face softened.

“Well, I’m sure he would. But why would you ask such a thing?”

The answer seemed perfectly obvious to me.

“I love him, and I want him to come and save me someday. I’m going to marry him when I grow up.”

There it was.

I was four years old, standing in the middle of our living room, already planning my future with a man I’d never met and whose name I didn’t know.

But I knew the important part.

If something bad happened to me, he would come to my rescue.

He would pick me up.

He would carry me to safety.

The next time the Texaco commercial came on, Mama walked into the living room and stopped in front of the television.

She didn’t say anything at first. She just stood there watching me watching him.

Then she reached down and ran her fingers through my dark brown curls. No scarf today.

“I like the Texaco Man too,” she said.

I looked up at her.

“Someday you’ll find him.”

Then she added, “Just don’t go out in the middle of the road looking for him, okay?”

I don’t remember what I said.

I only remember how sure I was that she was right. Someday I would find him.

Somewhere out there was a man who would know what to do. A man who would come when I needed him.

A man who would pick me up and carry me to safety.

Years later, I began to understand that childhood teaches us what to expect in adulthood long before we have words for any of it.

What’s familiar feels normal. It can even feel safe — even when it isn’t.

I never knowingly chose men who would hurt me. I never walked into a relationship thinking, “Well, this ought to end badly.”

The mistreatment always surprised me.

It wasn’t until therapy and support-group work that I began to understand how much of my life had been shaped by patterns I didn’t even know were there.

I thought I was the one driving this vehicle.

Turns out, there were some very old subconscious patterns sitting behind the wheel with me.

And some of them had been there since I was a little girl, learning what love and safety looked like, and who I could count on.

That was difficult to see. But seeing it gave me the power to make some very different choices.

Today, as I’m writing this blog, it’s October 3, 2026.

Sixty-four years have passed since that little girl stood in front of a black-and-white television hoping the Texaco Man would someday come to her rescue.

It took me a long time to understand that Prince Charming was not coming.

I had to learn to stop handing someone else responsibility for my safety and my power.

But that wasn’t the end of the lesson either.

Standing in my own power doesn’t mean standing alone.

As I write this, the news is full of Cornell University and the horrific story of a young woman identified as Jane Doe. She has shared her account of being drugged and raped by seven young men at a fraternity house in 2024.

I believe her.

I’ve lived long enough to know something about power, silence, sexual abuse, and what happens when the person who was harmed is expected to prove herself worthy of being believed.

And something remarkable is happening around her.

Women are standing up to say, “I am Jane Doe.”

One woman speaks, and others step forward to say, “You do not have to stand there by yourself.”

That’s not rescue. That’s solidarity.

I hope that when someone reads this memoir months or years from now, they discover that we changed something.

Discovering that Prince Charming was not going to come and save me was shocking. Learning that I could stand in my own power changed my life.

But I was never supposed to do all of this alone.

There are people in this world willing to surround one another, stand beside one another, and say, “You do not have to face this by yourself.”

Maybe that’s what sixty-eight-year-old me finally understands about the four-year-old little girl wearing the scarf.

She wasn’t wrong to want someone to protect her. She was four.

Back then she was telling me what she needed. And now, all these years later, I can finally hear her.

This memoir began after I watched January 6 unfold before my eyes and recognized pieces of the world I grew up in.

I was raised in the Deep South inside an evangelical culture that taught me very early who was supposed to have power and who was supposed to submit to it.

That old patriarchy didn’t stay inside the church.

I’ve watched it show up in families, relationships, politics, institutions, and in the ways women are still expected to carry the consequences of what men do to them.

I see it in Jane Doe’s story.

And maybe that’s another reason this little girl in the scarf matters to me so much today.

She was already looking for someone powerful enough to keep her safe.

Sixty-four years later, I understand that the answer was never supposed to be finding the right powerful man.

Sometimes we get ourselves out of the road.

Sometimes somebody reaches for us.

And sometimes we are the one reaching out.

That’s not giving away our power.

That’s what we were supposed to learn to do with it.

I hope that by the time someone reads these words years from now, we have.

Audio narration coming soon you YouTube.