Primarily Petroliana Shop Talk Forums Shop Talk Petroliana Forums General Petroliana Discussion LEGACY OF THE OIL COMPANY

Good evening everyone. I couldn't find the old posting so I submitted a knew one.

I've still one big question. What could be the reason that most of the big companies aren't interested in their history.
I worked for Shell for 15 years (in the Netherlands)Once we had a opening for our new office and I arranged a exhibition with some old pictures from the 50's era.

Two months later one of my collegues called me and said "Are you interested in that complete archive, otherwise we're going to recycle them as waste paper ?"

So i took the day off and went to that office and the 3 boxes are now stored in my collection. A lot of old b/w negatives with gas stations and transportation material.

A friend of mine had the same experiance when he worked for Ford in Amsterdam and they closed the factory.

I'm glad you were able to get those archives. Often, modern corporations have little interest in their own history and even less in the histories of smaller businesses that they have bought. In some cases, valuable archives and memorabilia has been literally thrown away. Their attitude is if it isn't making the stockholders a profit then it must be worthless. If they would make an effort, corporations could find a person or organization who would take care of those historic things, possibly with the benefit of a tax write-off.

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Jim "Oldgas" Potts
Your host and moderator

I can certainly relate to that. I was asked, not long ago, to send my collection of information, notes, pictures, documents, etc. pertaining to the old INDIAN REFINING COMPANY, Incorporated, Havoline Oil Company, and The Havemeyer Oil Company to the company historian/archivist for ChevronTexaco in San Ramon, California. It turns out that I had accumulated far more information than the former Texaco, Inc. had maintained.

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Jim Hinds
Columbus, Indiana

I was also suprised that a company has no interest in their own history. I recently bought about ten thosand 8x10 black and white
photos. They Are of every store Pep Boys ever had and photos of the real Manny and Moe and Jack. You would think that they would have had an interest in keeping those. But I guess not.

thepepboys

Jim H, so what did you do??

The problem as I see it is this, employees for wages will in general never be as passionate as a true collector. This is the reason some of it is not preserved. Some companys dont want to pay for it, some do but the people getting paid to do the job are just doing the job!

Plus it costs money to store this stuff, the beancounters sometimes think if you can start another oil well and maybe you can always get this old stuff( yea right) or due to cutbacks the storage budget gets cut.

IMO the longer they wait the harder it will be to get a good grasp , with examples, of their history.

Be careful loaning stuff, people that dont care much about it tend to lose things and or damage them. I offered (to loan) some boat-racing trophies to the local museum from the 20,s, the half-hearted efforts they made to contact me made me realize that getting it back could be a nightmare! Not to even begin to mention all the stuff our government Transportation Museum sold at an auction.. stuff that serious collectors and friends of the owners could not buy because they thought that they did the right thing GIVING ( in a lot of cases) it to the Museum.

You are all right, The only ones that cared was the jobbers who had to pay for items. It took me 5 years of phone calls. book looking, to dig up Seasides history, I learned more from old Joe then most books. As far as the West Coast early Companies, Seaside,Associated,and many more, their history was lost in the earth quake fires in San Francisco, most of the early companys had their main offices there.

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Dwaine

www.vintage-logos.com

The problem is that the big (oil) companies are changing every 2 or 3 years. When I worked for Shell they want to get rid of a lot of their offices so there wasn't much space for archives etc.

Two years later they found out that they needed more office space and so they bought back the old offices. By that time all the old stuff etc. was thrown away.

In a couple of week I'll shown some of the old b/w picture there are also some images from the USA.

Great site guys

Greetings from Holland -

****** Petrol prices in our contry $6,20 per gallon !!!! ******