the elephant wrote:Ahh, the flawless accuracy of the Internet . . . We had no Humble stations in San Antonio. Only Enco. Go figure. Humble must have been in those Yankified cities (300 miles to the north of us): Dallas and Fort Worth!! I guess that San Antonio is not part of Texas to the Wikipedia crowd. Hmm!
Humble Oil and Refining Company was a Texas-based producer, based in Houston (and before that in the east-Texas oil field near Humble, just north of Houston). For years and years the Humble Building was, at 55 stories, Houston's tallest building (as had the Gulf Building been at one time, and as the Shell Plaza building was to become--I've lost touch since then).
When Humble was bought by Standard Oil of New Jersey, the stations were changed to Enco, but most of them still had "Humble Oil and Refining Co." on the station's building somewhere. The Humble logo was the same shape and color as the later Enco logo. They were everywhere in Texas, including San Antonio, but the Humble part would have not been obvious after about 1960.
Gulf was also a home-grown company in Texas (not surprising, give Houston's status as the oil capital of the world), until it was bought by Standard Oil of California--another of the "baby Standard Oils" that resulted from the 1911 antitrust suit. That became Chevron in later years, and removed a long-time landmark--the huge neon Gulf sign atop the Gulf building--from the Houton skyline. The same thing happened to the Phillips 66 sign in downtown Dallas.
The Texas Oil Company was originally Standard Oil of Texas, and became Texaco. Of course, in recent years Texaco and Chevron sort of merged, but sold off a lot of their retail operation to Shell to avoid antitrust issues.
San Antonio was and still is (as best I recall without doing any research) the home of Shamrock Oil, now Diamond Shamrock.
Rick "who thought all cities had skylines dominated by oil companies while growing up in Houston" Denney
