The future and the legacy

Jan. 1, 2001
It sometimes takes coincidence to jar us into appreciation of values that never change.

It sometimes takes coincidence to jar us into appreciation of values that never change.

Last month, the Oil & Gas Journal staff put finishing touches on this issue in which we squeeze our imaginations about what lies ahead for the oil and gas business and write what squeaks out. Also last month, an event occurred that reminds us of this magazine's roots in petroleum history.

The event was the death at age 88 of Edward P. Boyle in Oil City, Pa.

Boyle was important to OGJ for many reasons. Chief among them is a legacy defined in the first sentence of a report on his Dec. 19 death in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"Edward P. Boyle," wrote Staff Writer Rick Nowlin, "was an expert in the oil and the news business."

At this magazine, professional recommendations don't get any better than that.

But the legacy isn't just professional. Boyle was the grandson of the man who, on Apr. 10, 1910, bought an 8-year-old oil-field newspaper called The Oil Investors Journal, doubled its frequency to weekly, moved it from Beaumont, Tex., to Tulsa, Okla., and renamed his $20,000 acquisition The Oil & Gas Journal.

News and oil

While the Boyle family retains representation on the board of PennWell Corp., which publishes OGJ, Edward P. Boyle did not involve himself in operation of the magazine. This writer never met him.

Boyle nevertheless embodied that legacy that is as important to OGJ today as it was when, in its June 16, 1910, issue, the magazine declared its aim to be "to represent fairly and consistently each and every interest involved in the oil and gas business."

At his death, Boyle owned and published The Derrick of Oil City, Pa., which his grandfather, Patrick C. Boyle, acquired in 1885 after having been fired from its reporting staff a few years earlier.

Patrick Boyle turned The Derrick into a petroleum publication of national standing, with qualities of both a daily newspaper and a trade journal. In its formative years in Tulsa, OGJ relied heavily on The Derrick's staff and reputation. Under Patrick Boyle, OGJ editorialized for unity within an industry bitterly divided in the days of the old Standard Oil Trust and called on disparate factions to pursue the good of the industry as a whole.

Patrick C. Boyle died in 1920. He was succeeded as president of Petroleum Publishing Co., as PennWell was then known, by Frank T. Lauinger, his son-in-law and the grandfather of PennWell's current chairman. Ownership of The Derrick passed to Boyle's son, Edward R. Boyle.

When Edward R. Boyle died in 1938, his son, Edward P. Boyle-the man who died Dec. 19-became The Derrick's president and publisher. He was 26 at the time, already a 7-year veteran of the staff.

With Edward P. Boyle as president, The Derrick Publishing Co. expanded and modernized. In 1941, it bought The Blizzard, an Oil City afternoon newspaper. In 1956 it created Venango Newspapers Inc., with Boyle as chairman, to merge production, advertising, circulation, and accounting departments of The Derrick and the Franklin (Pa.) News-Herald. The Blizzard was folded at that time.

Edward P. Boyle thus devoted his career to a newspaper that once subtitled itself "the Organ of Oil" and to civic leadership in a Pennsylvania region where the US petroleum industry had its first boom. He served as a vice-president and director of Petroleum Publishing and a director of South Penn Oil Co., which became Pennzoil Co.

Commitment and appeal

Oil. News. Expertise. A commitment to all interests of the oil and gas business. A consistent appeal to all operating segments-upstream and downstream, independent and integrated, large and small-to think in terms of what's best for the industry as a whole.

That's the legacy on which OGJ and its rapidly developing web site, OGJ Online, try to build in service to an industry with a rich past, a challenging future, and continuing division.

There's no doubt that Edward P. Boyle watched what happened at the magazine, to which his family contributed so much, and at the web site now giving news about oil-and gas and electricity-more immediacy than it ever could achieve in print alone.

We hope Edward P. Boyle, expert in the oil and news businesses, liked what he saw happening here.