I went to high school here in Findlay and graduated in 1936. I didn’t have any money; didn’t have a scholarship so I didn’t get to go to college, so I went to work. I worked in the drug store one summer. Then I got a job with a neighbor man who had an oil distributing route and I worked for him for about six years. I was able to buy him out so then I ran the distributing business until I was 67 years old.

I had good time, I had good customers. I was the only independent left in this part of the country. I carried my own accounts and owned my own equipment. I was my own boss, except when I was home.

Then my wife took over! (Laughter) She worked at Marathon for years. So, we were competitors. I handled Ashland products and distributed around – mostly in the county, mostly farmers.

I started when I first started when people still had kerosene lamps and gasoline lamps that had white gas. That was basically the beginning of it, but then as the farmers finally changed from horses to tractors, why I fit right in with them. Then in later years we got a lot of fuel oil customers. I had about 200 fuel oil customers at one time. It was a good business. I made some good money and was happy with it.

During WWII I worked in that oil business. Since I lost this hearing nobody wanted me.

I couldn’t get in the Navy because I couldn’t hear and they didn’t want me in the Army either. So, that put a kink in the works there.

Well, I think the first delivery truck only held about 1,000 gallon. It had five compartments cause I had regular gasoline which was just beginning to be popular, I had a white gasoline, and I had two grades of kerosene. They had a lamp oil which was a better grade of kerosene, and then the regular kerosene which would compare today with number 1 fuel oil.

So, I used all five compartments. You had a big faucet on the back end that you hung your five gallon bucket on and pushed the handle down to fill it and then you carried it.


I Invent a Time-Saving Way to Deliver Fuel
(And Win-Over Suspicious German Farmers)

No pumping. I was one that had one of the first pumps in the county and the fellow that was maintenance at a refinery and I was good friends and we got to talkin’ about it one day and he said, “You know, I think we could fix up a rig on your truck.”

So we took the meter out of the gas station pump, cut it down and fit it to the back of the truck, took a pump of the same thing and mounted it underneath the truck and used the power take-off shaft to run it and piped it up. Well, they didn’t make hose reels and stuff at that time so we coupled three or four lengths of hose together, put a nozzle on the end of it and this old meter had a dial on it and it went around up to 20 gallon, but every gallon the bell rang around as it went.

So, the big thing was to count – if you couldn’t see it you had to count the bell rings. When it got to 20 it would go right on, but it has a master counter down there that would give you the total. It was kind of crude but it worked.

Within, I’d say, four or five years, everybody had pumps and meters, but that was the beginning of it. We had one of the very first, and that was one that we cobbled up from parts. (Laughs)

But it worked. I had some German customers down by Genera; it was a German settlement years ago, and they were pretty precise people and very honest and when I went in there this day with this new pumping outfit - the man’s name was Essinger, Chris, and he says, “Oh my God, I want to see that work!” So I got my five gallon bucket, set it down, and I run five gallon in there. Well, the meter showed five gallon and the bucket was full. “Alright, now you can use it.”

Prove it before you can use it, but that was the German way.

Credit Was Verboten (Forbidden) to Many of My Customers

The same man – I was there one day and he wasn’t home, which was rare, but I knew what he wanted. He always got the same thing every time, so I filled his cans up and left him the bill and it didn’t amount to, oh…maybe five or six dollars? Maybe 10?

I don’t know, but anyway the next time I drove in his lane there he had a fence all around the yard and he was at the gate and I stopped and I said, “Good morning, Chris,” I said, “What do you need to day?” “Well by God,” he says, “We got to pay this bill first.” Well I said – it wasn’t much – I said, “Wait and I’ll just add it all together.” “No, by God,” he says, “You got to pay this bill first.”

So, I got the thing up and made him a receipt and paid and, “Now,” by God he says, “You and I are still on speaking terms.” (Laughter) Those people they never ran up – they never charged anything. Credit was a no-no to them.

They all worked that way and that was – if you wanted to be in that German community you had to do like they did. So, he wouldn’t let you sell him new product until he paid the bill for…? First things first. He knew what he wanted but he had to pay that bill before he could have anything else. But that was part of the time. That’s the way those people believed.

You know they – I don’t know if he was an original immigrant or not. I think he might have been second generation, but they came into this country and they buy land. If there was a woods on it they didn’t cut those trees down and burn them up or anything, everything was logged and sawed for lumber and every stick of that was used to build a barn or a chicken coop or something. They never wasted the sawdust even.

The Story of the Belgian Bootleggers

There are other stories from customers, too. Maybe some I shouldn’t tell!

I remember we had – there was a big sugar beet plant here years ago. Raised a lot of sugar beets around here.

As a consequence a lot of Belgians were immigrants into this neighborhood and there was two classes of them. There was the upper class and the lower class and they didn’t mix. It was kind of interesting. The lower class was the ones that did the work and the upper class – well, the one family I knew, she was a school teacher and I don’t know what his profession had been when they came here, but he eventually worked at Marathon. They were nice people, but their lower class…you had to watch them. I know this one family; he was a bootlegger…

He lived back of the sugar beet plant back there and he raised potatoes. They were industrious people, they all worked at something, but he raised potatoes, but he also made bootleg. So, he had two boys and he’d send them out with the little red wagon but bootleg was in the bottles in the bottom of the wagon and the potatoes were on top and the kids delivered it around the neighborhood.

You get a box of potatoes and a bottle of whiskey. If you wanted them you could get them both. Whiskey off the bottom, see? But… (Laughs) those things went on. That was…oh, before prohibition really.

(Laughing) But that was one of the ethnic differences in the people, but they were basically good people. They worked hard. They were honest enough, as far as I was concerned. I never had any trouble with them. But they was all assimilated eventually. The beet company is gone. All that stuff changed.