Oil & Gas Journal stays so busy looking ahead that it's refreshing to pause and look back.
Two events, one just past and one imminent, offer good reasons to do so.
The event just past was the May 5 dedication of the Conoco Oil Pioneers of Oklahoma Plaza on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.
Located on the site of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the plaza honors 60 individuals who, according to an OU statement, "founded some of the biggest oil companies, drilled some of the most successful wells of the early-day Oklahoma oil boom, and developed techniques, inventions, research, and innovations that modernized the oil and gas industry."
Sixty names are too many to list. Suffice it to say that more than a few companies familiar to anyone in the oil and gas business bear names of the honorees.
P.C. Lauinger
For the OGJ staff, one name stands out: Philip Charles Lauinger, whom everyone here remembers as P.C.
P.C. didn't found a big oil company, drill wells, or develop oil and gas technology; instead, he provided trustworthy industry news and technical information to the people who did.
For 57 years, P.C. led or guided the company that publishes OGJ, setting standards for the magazine that challenge the staff to this day.
He became president of Petroleum Publishing Co., now PennWell Corp., in 1931, steered it through a tempest of economic cycles, and gave OGJ its shape and stature.
Those of us lucky and old enough to have known P.C. understand how he succeeded. He pursued through the magazine the virtues he lived: integrity, independence, and service.
P.C. died in 1988. He was the grandson of Petroleum Publishing founder Patrick C. Boyle, whose story recently appeared in this space (OGJ, Jan. 1, 2000, p. 15).
Of the May 5 event, a family member writes that P.C. "would have felt humbled to be included among these distinguished pioneers of the industry but honored that the big yellow book was so recognized." That's P.C. exactly.
Dedication of the Pioneers Plaza, for which Conoco Inc. donated $300,000, coincided with the 100th anniversary of the OU School of Geology and Geophysics.
OGJ centennial
The school's centennial precedes by just a year OGJ's 100th anniversary, the other event leading us to look back even as we race forward.
OGJ began life as Oil Investor's Journal on May 24, 1902, in Beaumont, Tex., promising in its nameplate "The truth and nothing but the truth concerning the Beaumont field and other Southwestern oil fields."
From that start, the magazine and the company that bought it 8 years later and that P.C. ran for so long, have expanded in many ways. As OGJ's centennial draws nigh, we'll pause occasionally to note some of them.
For now, while P.C. indeed would have finessed the May 5 honor away from himself and onto the big yellow book, he's the pioneer. The honor belongs to him and the 59 others who helped create an industry now so vital to human progress.
