by Bruce Wells | Sep 7, 2024 | Petroleum Art
How a red Pegasus soared into Dallas petroleum history.
The Mobil Oil Pegasus perched atop the Magnolia Petroleum building in Dallas from 1934 until 1999, when rust and growing structural issues forced its removal. On the first day of 2000, a carefully crafted duplicate returned to the Dallas skyline.
Thanks to its widespread popularity, Mobil Oil’s high-flying trademark returned to its Texas home with one red Pegasus on each side of a sign painstakingly recreated by the American Porcelain Enamel Company. As the year 1999 drew to a close, the duplicated Pegasus soared again. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Aug 22, 2024 | Petroleum Art
Postal Service commemorates U.S. petroleum history centennial with 120 million stamps.
A centennial oil stamp commemorating the birth of the U.S. oil and natural gas industry was issued on August 27, 1959, by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who proclaimed: “The American people have great reason to be indebted to this industry. It has supplied most of the power that has made the American standard of living possible.”
As the sesquicentennial of the first U.S. well drilled to produce oil approached in 2009, a special “Oil 150” committee sought U.S. Postal Service approval for a commemorative stamp. The committee and historians in more than 30 petroleum-producing states petitioned for a stamp similar to one issued for the industry’s 1959 centennial of the first commercial U.S. oil well. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jul 31, 2024 | Petroleum Art
Caveman cartoonist Victor Hamlin worked as an oilfield cartographer in Permian Basin.
The widely popular Depression Era newspaper comic strip character Alley Oop began in the imagination of a young cartographer who drew Permian Basin oilfield maps in Texas.
The club-wielding Alley Oop caveman appeared for the first time in the summer of 1933 when Victor Hamlin, a former Ft. Worth Star-Telegram reporter, published fanciful tales about the Stone Age Kingdom of Moo. Hamlin began syndicating his daily cartoon in Iowa’s Des Moines Register.
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by Bruce Wells | Jul 5, 2024 | Petroleum Art
Did L. Frank Baum’s 1880s oil business inspire the Tin Man?
The Tin Man in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can trace his roots to the earliest U.S. oilfields where L. Frank Baum operated a lubricant business before becoming the famous children’s book author. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jun 21, 2024 | Petroleum Art
Alexandre Hogue and other artists depicted America’s oilfields during the Great Depression.
“Oil Fields of Graham,” a 1939 mural by Alexandre Hogue, can be found in its original Texas community’s U.S. Postal Service building, a Graham museum preserving the work of oil art.
During the Great Depression, when President Franklin Roosevelt created public projects like the New Deal Federal Arts Program, Alexandre Hogue and other artists received commissions to illustrate scenes of America and its history on the walls of public buildings.
Among his paintings, the artist’s petroleum-related work include “Oil Fields of Graham” (1939), a 12-foot mural now on exhibit in the city’s historic U.S. Post Office building.
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by Bruce Wells | Jun 18, 2024 | Petroleum Art
National Museum of American History once featured oil derricks, pump jacks and other oilfield technologies.
The Smithsonian Institution’s “Hall of Petroleum” in Washington, D.C., opened in the summer of 1967 inside a museum wing devoted to the history of oilfield technology. The collection in the museum building’s west wing included cable-tool and rotary drilling rigs and many oilfield-related geology and engineering exhibits. (more…)
