Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
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Source: January 1992 Volume 30 Number 1, Pages 3–10

Some Random Recollections of the Mack Oil Company

Herb McCorry

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It is appropriate to ask at the beginning why my dad, Frederick J. "Mac" McCorry, ever came down here to Berwyn in 1931 to go into business. I assume that some of you may remember the year 1931. It was preceded by 1929 -- and the start of the Great Depression.

And that is the prime reason why he came down here.

My dad, and his two brothers, were all associated with the oil business for many years, as had been my grandfather and, I think, my great grandfather before him. My grandfather, John McCorry, was born out in Butler County, south of Titusville, where oil had been discovered just eight years earlier in 1859. He drilled and pumped oil rigs all his life; his first rig was a wooden walking-beam rig operated by muscle power.

My dad's oldest brother, Uncle Lenn, went into the oil business at the age of 11, helping his father and his grandfather. When he retired at the age of 65, he was still installing pumping stations down in Oklahoma and Texas. (He passed away two years ago at the age of 99 and was also, by the way, a historian, both of Butler County and of the petroleum industry. He had every oil well that was ever drilled in western Pennsylvania documented; he would sit there and recall when each well came in and how many thousand barrels of oil it produced. He was also something of a genealogist, and for the last 35 years of his life he did nothing but work with archives; it was his whole existence.)

For his last 25 or 26 years he was also my contact with the Butler area.

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I would journey back there and sit and talk with him. He could tell a lot of stories, but inevitably he would end up talking oil. His sister, my Aunt Wid -- she was one or two years younger and passed away about five or six years ago at the age of 87 -- would go with me to visit him, and her opening statement was always, "If you two are going to start talking about oil -- I'm leaving!"

My dad left home and also started to work at an early age. After his mother passed away at childbirth my grandfather married a second time, but his second marriage wasn't that good. So all five children, three boys and two girls, struck out on their own. My dad went to work in Butler, working in a factory that produced tank cars, catching hot rivets in a bucket. He got three or four dollars a day. Then he went to work for a refinery, when he was about 18. In the interim, he was also going to night school at Butler Business College.

In 1931 my dad was working at a refinery in western Pennsylvania in a small community called Bruin. It had about 600 population, and was about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, up in the Allegheny Mountains. In that area, every three or four miles there was a small community, each with a big refinery. That was their reason for being. The next town to the south was called Petrolia, for obvious reasons -- petroleum. Most of them were along the Allegheny River, for transportation purposes, with barges, scows, and whatever used to transport the oil.

We lived in a company house, right outside the refinery where my dad was working, for thirteen years. I was born there. (Incidentally, where I was born, near the refinery, is the third most polluted area in the whole United States, and is called the "Bruin Lagoon". You are looking at a survivor! I used to wade in the acid creek, and played all around the area.) We had a beautiful view -- there must have been eight or ten half-million gallon storage tanks in the back yard! We lived in the house right outside the gates; it was the first house coming down the road.

During the early part of the Depression the company told my dad, "Mac, don't worry; you can stay on." That was in 1930. But in 1931 they said, "You'd better move."

So we moved back from the refinery to a house about ten blocks away, a dilapidated house with no inside plumbing, none of the real amenities, and no one had any money.

It so happened that at this time there was a receivership sale. In 1929 the Butler County Oil Refinery Company had gone into bankruptcy. The receivers had tried to rescue it, but after two years they gave up. The company had thirteen bulk plants, two of them in this area. One of them was in Norristown, and the other was in Berwyn.

My dad somehow had contacts with a lot of people in the refining business and knew one of the receivers, a Joseph Beck. He was the president of the Pennsylvania Refinery Company in Petrolia. He said, "Mac, there might be something down there that you might be interested in. Why don't you go down?"

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So my dad came down to the sale, took a look at the property, and thought to himself, "Well, why not?" So he bid in on it. I have an inventory of the property: several tanks, pumps, two Reo trucks that you had to start with a crank. (They listed the value of the trucks at $150, but my dad bought them for $60. He was a very capable salesman!)

He bid in $3019.06, and that was for everything. They accepted it. The humorous part is that he knew exactly what he was going to bid -- and how he was going to get the money to pay for it. One of the persons on the notice of the sale happened to be Ida Litzinger. He borrowed $1500 from Mrs. Litzinger, and another $1500 from Joseph Beck, one of the receivers. No money down -- you can't get a better bargain than that!

So he drove back home from the trip. He had an excellent car at the time -- - a Hudson Super-6. The last time it had been painted it was painted by a carriage-maker; it had a green body and yellow, wooden spoke wheels. (We were noticeable at that time!) Anyhow, he came back to Bruin and told my mother what the story was, and, needless to say, they elected to move.

My dad later described the business he had bought. "It consisted," he noted, "of four small storage tanks alongside the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks; two used 428-gallon trucks, and a corrugated shed just big enough for a rolltop desk and a coal stove." (The tanks, incidentally, had been installed, according to an old railroad atlas, in 1911. I was told that at that time a gentleman by the name of A. C. Quimby hauled kerosene in wooden barrels by horse and wagon out of that terminal, but whether or not that is true I don't know.) There was a siding from the railroad, and that is how we originally obtained our product.

We came down on August 25th in 1931. It was a 12-hour drive, through every little community on the Lincoln Highway, Route 30, from Butler down to Paoli. I still distinctly recall first meeting Mr. and Mrs. Charles D'Ambrosio -- they were later the Paoli Rug people, but not then -- when we arrived. At that time they were renting out rooms. So we stopped there. There were five of us, my mother and dad and three brothers; one, Ronald, was 13 months old, my brother Harold was six, going on seven, and I was thirteen, the "old man" of the group. I think the room cost us a total of at least three dollars for all of us to stay overnight! My mother had brought along a hot plate and three cans of Campbell's soup and two boxes of crackers, and that was our dinner -- our entre to the Main Line.

We moved down to Devon. Some of you may remember where the old Benjamin C. Betner bag company used to be, on the south side of Lancaster Avenue at Devon Hill. We moved into a double house there. We didn't have any money, and no one else had any money.

We spent roughly about a year there. The daily procedure was to get up in the morning and ride with my dad in the Hudson Super-6 to Berwyn.

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He'd let us off at the bulk plant and we'd walk over to St. Monica's School; I entered the eighth grade and my brother entered first grade. And that was our routine. Coming home, we'd walk back to the bulk plant. At that time the banks stayed open -- if they were still open -- to maybe 5:30 or sometimes 6:00 o'clock. My dad would take up the day's deposit and leave my brother and me in custody of the gasoline pump. It operated by pushing a lever back and forth to pump the gasoline -- four or five gallons or whatever -- up into a glass cylinder, and then opening a valve to let gravity take care of the delivery. Gasoline at that time was around ten cents a gallon, and that included two cents tax.

Kerosene was our big seller, and it was also $.10 a gallon. It was used for heating; for cooking and in ranges; for lighting, illumination of all kinds; and for tractor fuel. The tractor fuel was the main sales item.

And that was the beginning of the business. When my dad passed away in 1970 I found the first check book. In it is a record of the details of the start of the business, with a list of the deposits "to the account of F. J. McCorry" and the checks drawn against the account. The first deposit was $14.23; the second, $41.41; and so on. For September 15, 1931 there is an entry "Transfer of Account from F. J. M. to Mack Oil Co. $500.24". That was every penny that he had.

Some of you may remember the Yohn family that used to live here. Elizabeth Yohn was my dad's secretary. She made $8.33 for the four-day period from August 26th to the 1st of September. The salaries are almost impossible to imagine today: Sparky Kilgore, it is recorded, worked those four days for $4.23 a day, a total of $16.92; Myles Fisher made $65.00 every two weeks. Those are some indications of what the salaries were. And occasionally you'll find that my dad would take out a five dollar a week draw, and that was the going wage so far as he was concerned.

The first accounts of Mack Oil Company

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Those times, as you probably know, were difficult times. But there is something that always comes out of difficult times; there is always some good that comes out of adversity. I think that's really what prompted the success of the business.

In December we entered into the fuel oil business. Most homes still used coal, but we sold 4,029 gallons the first month, and in the first year we sold 16,425 gallons of fuel oil altogether.

The difficult part about it was that the business was labor oriented. We didn't have a delivery truck that had a pump until 1937, so we put the oil in five-gallon cans. A can, plus the weight of the product, weighed about 45 or 50 pounds. If you were at a place where you could walk -- in some areas you couldn't -- we'd carry a can in each hand, on either side, and that was our delivery system, ten gallons at a time, with a funnel to pour the oil into the tank or drum. Most of our customers had a 50-gallon drum, on its side, with a large spigot. They then would address the kerosene stove or lamps or whatever by taking the oil from the drum.

It was when we had to go through a narrow space that we had a bad situation. We delivered over in Conshohocken, and there would be four or five row houses and then a separation about eighteen inches wide. What we had to do was to go between the houses with one can in front of us and the other can behind us. Inevitably, a little of the product in the back can would slosh out onto a certain portion of the anatomy. Two of us would sometimes deliver as much as 2200 gallons in a day, and at the end of the day we would have a relatively large "birthmark" on the upper part of the hip, sometimes really painful.

And that was our delivery system in the initial years of the business. The so-called "bucketing and labor" bit went on for about six years, until 1937, when we bought a new truck with a pump. It was, incidentally, an Autocar, made in Ardmore.

But before that we bought our first new truck in 1931. It was a Chevrolet truck chassis, and we purchased it from J. W. Fell, who operated a Chevrolet agency down in what is now the Tri-Metal Building, on the highway in Berwyn. My dad gave him $100 and a 55-gallon drum of oil as a deposit; the total cost of the truck was $750. There was only one thing wrong; after you pulled the hose out you had to crank it back in again by hand, so there was still a good bit of labor involved.

The two Reo trucks we took over in 1931 each had four 107-gallon compartments, eliptical in shape, which we put on the new chassis. There used to be an apple tree, out back of our old office and bulk plant, where we had a block-and-fall. We took the new truck back there, and put oak beams across the frame to anchor the tanks. Then we hoisted the tanks up and dropped them on the area of the truck chassis. When they were in place, we tightened steel bands around them and put an inch and a half or two inches of piping, with spigots, in the back. There was no meter, but we did have a little counter we could move to keep track of the number of gallons.

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Sometimes this was not enough, but since the truck's rear end was always dirty we would go "one-two-three-four-slash" with our finger on the back of the truck, and that's how we determined the number of gallons. Everything, including all our records, was handwritten.

By 1941 our fuel oil sales had risen tremendously, from a little more than 16,000 gallons our first year to 1,730,000 gallons in 1941. It was great progress in just ten years.

I worked at the plant all through grammar school and high school and all through college. I graduated from Villanova in 1941 -- and you know what else happened in 1941: World War II. That was my only absence from the oil business, and I came back out of the service after about four years.

During World War II I served in the Navy as a pilot. (This is a funny story too. Actually, it has very little to do with Mack Oil, but it is tied in somewhat.) Talk about a come-down! When I came back from overseas I was sent to American Airlines School, and after graduating from there I was assigned to fly an admiral, Admiral Henderson, around the naval air bases from Portland, Maine to Boca Chica in Key West. (In the Navy I had signed a contract giving me $500 a year for every year of flight duty, but it meant that I had to serve in the reserve.) But anyway, I was eventually discharged --actually separated -- from the service on December 25th as aide and pilot to an admiral. Two days later I was driving an oil truck for Mack Oil.

(Wally Weaver has reminded me of my last days in the service -- and that is another amusing story, though again it has little to do with Mack Oil. When I was about to be separated from the service I had a trip one day down to Key West, and coming back we stopped at Norfolk. I was flying a plane you probably are all familiar with: the Navy called it the R4D, but it was also known in the Army as the C-47, and later as the DC-3 on commercial airlines. It was a very safe aircraft, and inasmuch as I had gone to the American Airlines School, I was capable of flying it. It was the Admiral's plane. I had about 10 or 12 people on board, and I thought it might be well to salute the home-town. So I flew out of Mustin Field at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and went up the Great Valley. I then circled around and came back down along Route 30 and the Lincoln Highway, and started coming down lower and lower and lower over Berwyn. That was the first time -- and I got pretty low. Then I went up the Valley again and came back down a little lower yet, almost too low! Anyhow, I just missed some lady's chimney down on Warren Avenue. When I got back to Quonset Point (R.I.) I was met by the Shore Patrol in a jeep. They said, "Come with us. NOW! The commandant of the base wants to talk with you." It so happened that the chimney I almost took down belonged to Mrs. Kriebel, the school nurse at T/E, and she had copied the numbers off the plane and phoned them in. And that's why the commandant wanted to see me. He said, "What were you trying to do?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You know what I'm saying: what were you trying to do?" And I said, "Well, sir, I'm being separated from the service in about another two or three weeks, and I thought it was only fitting that I should say 'good-bye' to my home-town."

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He said, "Do you have your orders?" I said. "Yes, I was up in Boston about a week ago, and they're in my pocket." [I have to report exactly what he said.] He said, "Get the hell out of here." And that was the end of my flight career!)

But anyway, I have been with Mack Oil Company ever since then -- about forty-five years.

Here is the chronology of our organization and proprietorship. My dad, of course, in 1931 was the single proprietor. He remained as the sole proprietor until 1946, when my younger brother also came home from the service. From 1946 to 1955 there was a partnership of my father and two sons. Then in 1955 my youngest brother had also joined the firm, and it became a partnership of the father and three sons. Finally, in 1965 we incorporated.

By 1961, and our thirtieth anniversary, our fuel sales had risen to the 6,900,000 gallon mark. And in 1968, Mack Oil Company as a separate entity moved more than ten million gallons of product to some 5,000 customers, 96% of them residential.

Over the past thirty years or so we have purchased seven other distributorships. We now have two other offices: J. C. Hayes in Parkesburg and L. L. Meloy & Sons in Coatesville, and, of course, Mack Oil Company, the parent company here in Berwyn.

In 1964 we built a new bulk plant out in Exton, and we now have storage capacity there and here for 509,000 gallons. Over the years we have also expanded our other facilities considerably. We now have a fleet of forty service and oil trucks to serve our 10,000 customers, and 42 employees. We have delivered many, many million gallons of product. Our records are no longer handwritten, and all three corporations are totally computerized on IBM #36.

The corporate structure of the company still exists today. My dad, unfortunately, passed away in 1970; he had been in business for 39 years. My brother Harold, the second oldest of the three of us, passed away in 1972. My other brother, Ronald, passed away four years ago, at the age of only 56, in October 1987. I happen to be "the last of the Mohicans".

On August 26, 1991 we celebrated our 60th year in business, a business in which I personally was involved for about 56 years. So I thought I had been shot at enough times, and chased around the counter enough times, and that it would be well if I turned the presidency over to Tim McCorry, a nephew, my youngest brother's third eldest son. My son has also been working here for sixteen years, along with two other nephews. So now we have the third generation running the business, and I am Chairman of the Board.

And that, in essence, is the story of Mack Oil Company.