This month's COMPANY OF THE MONTH is MARTIN and their affiliates. Martin was always based in Illinois. I don't know for sure but I think it first started in the Carbondale (southern) part of Illinois and soon also had established a second headquarters in Chicago. This happened about the mid 30's,same time I was born. The company lasted until sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. As I tried to learn more about the company for all of us several parts of the picture became cloudy. Product labels that are very old show dual headquarters in both cities under the name MARTIN OIL COMPANY. Later on in the mid 50's the division in the Chicago area became MARTIN OIL SERVICE while the Carbondale company remained MARTIN OIL COMPANY. MARTIN OIL COMPANY had stations in southern Illinois and a few other southern states in the middle of the country and in 1977 sold out to J.D. STREET from Maryland Heights, MO. They owned the ZEPHYR brand and the MARTIN OIL CO. stations were rebranded to ZEPHYR.And as far as I can learn thats the end of MARTIN OIL COMPANY. MARTIN OIL SERVICE, the Chicago area divsion, had grown much larger and had grown coast to coast. They seemingly had stations in selected states in no particular pattern and a list of their stations in the 60's shows stations in very unusual growth patterns. The crude oil crunch really hurt them in the seventies and they shrunk down to less than 50 stations in the 80's. I think the final remains of MARTIN OIL SERVICE was sold 1n 1994 to MARATHON's EMRO marketing. MARTIN OIL SERVICE had a fair size terminal in Blue Island, Iliinois during the time I worked for Texas Eastern pipeline company and I worked in there many hours making our deliveries to them. Since they never had any of their own crude oil or refinerys and bought their products from different firms I always wondered if getting near open market distribution points is what caused their unusual growth pattern. Their large facility at Blue Island was fed by pipeline, barges, and rail. They had 2 large loading racks for their delivery trucks. During some of the years I worked in there the terminal contained their corporate offices, later they moved to a large office building nearby in Alsip, IL. The memorabelia we collectors find today may show either location (Blue Island or Alsip) as home base. Martin Oil Service's stations always sold gas and products at the lowest prices to be found on the street and supplimented them with prizes,premiums earned instantly at the pump or thru saving cupons in their cupon books.At times their lowest priced oil was rerefined from used oil. In the early years of our marrage we bought fuel at Martin in order to get our free box of laundry soap or other item we needed included in our purchase.Martin stations always carried kerosene for home heaters that they called "Range Oil". Martin's globes,uniform patches,maps, matches,etc. were fairly attractive and I will show some to you as the month goes along. Later I will pass some more facts along as well. I hope some of you have some Martin items to post as well as some more knowledge of the company than I have. I think Martin started as a family business and in some form stayed that way nearly to the end. I also seem to remember that folks our company delt with in Blue Island had family members in the other company in Carbondale. The large office in Alsip is now home of a very large church. I found an old news article dated 3-98 that said "Kanab pipeline partners announced it's subsidiary,ST Services,aqquired the terminal in the Chicago area from Martin oil marketing on 3-12-98 including barge and pipeline connections and 752,000 barrels of storage". And there went another Oil company into history!