Carl J. Lawrence
Special Correspondent
Some of us are born to fill a certain place in our company. Early last month, John M. Spears, the greatest advertising salesman in the 100+ years of Oil & Gas Journal, died. John was one of those destined for outstanding achievement.
This sounds like salesman talk when you say someone was the "greatest," but the numbers are available to support the claim for John Spears. He represented OGJ in Houston for more than 40 years, selling advertising space to some of the biggest oil and gas supply and service companies in the business.
John was a star salesman when OGJ carried more advertising pages than any magazine in the country. He could rack up 40 or so pages an issue since many of the weekly issues contained three or four times that many pages. His market share would run 25-35% or more year after year after year.
John's performance sounds almost unreal in light of the number of pages in current issues of the Journal, but John was working in a different world when he moved to Houston shortly after the end of World War II and started his career with OGJ. In some years in the 1960s OGJ would top 6,000 pages—and John always got his 20% share or more. He was important to the Journal's enduring success.
More pages
One of my early jobs with OGJ was as layout man for the News section. The first page of News often started on p. 105 or 107 or some other far-out number. Most of the pages preceding the News section were advertisements. This was in those busy post-WWII days when much of the industry moved from New York and Tulsa and other points across the country to Houston, John's backyard. The market was expanding as companies built refineries and pipelines to handle growing US production of oil and gas. And the government encouraged the construction; today, it's difficult to build a doghouse on the rig floor without getting an environmental impact statement.
In that climate, John Spears became successful just by being John Spears.
John was honest, hard-working, and intelligent. He knew his customers and what they had to offer the industry. He was an expert at putting on the right face to satisfy Journal customers. John would bring an extra white shirt to work on a hot summer day in Houston because he knew he would need it by afternoon. He wanted to look as fresh when he made the day's last call as he did when he made the first. He also always drove a mid-sized car. He could afford a Cadillac, but didn't want to drive something bigger and more expensive than his agency and company contacts might drive. John wrote the book on customer relations.
He also knew what kind of information his customers needed. John called me during every federal lease sale of tracts off the Gulf Coast. He wanted to know what companies made the biggest bids, what tracts drew the most money, and what companies got the best tracts and at what price. And he wanted the data ahead of the publication date so he could get it to his customers ahead of anyone else.
Fortunately, John passed on a lot of his business savvy to young salesmen who joined OGJ as his assistants. Several became important players at OGJ. Tom Terrell, a former OGJ publisher, was one of his proteges. So was Bill Wageneck, another former publisher. He also trained his successor, the late Don Dove, who had big shoes to fill. Eric Jeter, who was international sales manager for the company for several years, also started under the wing of John Spears.
Hill Country
John, who was 92, a WWII Navy veteran, and a University of Texas graduate. He was buried in Kerrville in the Hill Country of Texas he loved.
We know you can't take anything with you to heaven, but if John could, he would have packed a clean white shirt so he'd look fresh for the former OGJ clients he would meet.
Editor's note: Carl J. Lawrence retired in 1992 as a senior vice-president of PennWell after 38 years with the company as an OGJ editor and executive.
