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Drill the Wells. He did. He "ran things" so well that Parish made him Humble's chief geologist in 1926, with a free hand to "buy anything you want." It was the chance of a lifetime—if Gene knew his geology well enough to lease the right land. He did—and from this land came oil that helped make Humble the biggest single producer of crude oil in the U.S.
To his knack of smelling out the oil beneath the cracks and domes of the earth, he added the know-how to get it out, rose in Standard like oil in a new field. In 1944, Gene Holman moved into the presidency, now gets $100,000 a year. He took his promotion calmly. On the day he was made president, Mrs. Holman got the news from the excited wife of another Standard official. When Mrs. Holman called Gene, he drawled: "Oh, yes, I meant to tell you about it when I got home."
Sell the Oil. Most of Standard's 112,000 employees have come to regard him as the boss. But Jersey Standard is too big to be a one-man show. No one man could oversee everything. Jersey Standard, which operates in 115 countries, has 245 subsidiaries with their 41 refineries, including the world's second largest at Aruba, 11,000 miles of pipelines and the largest U.S. fleet of private tankers.
Standard, top holding company for this oil empire, produced some 14% of the world's oil last year, grossed some $1,500,000,000 and netted some $180,000,000.
The job of running the empire belongs to Holman, plus the eleven-man board of directors, most of whom came up as Holman did, stratum by stratum. The board chairman is Frank W. Abrams, 57, who started in Standard as a draftsman, came up the refining side. The executive committee of the board meets every day with Holman. It is the gusher which produces the policy on Standard's worldwide problems. It is Holman who refines the policy and distributes it. Actually, most of the day-by-day problems are sensibly solved by subsidiaries on the scene. This is partly due to the Standard dictum: first get efficient and then get big. And it is partly due to the trust-busting days of 1911, when John D. Rockefeller's Jersey Standard octopus had its tentacles cut up into 34 pieces. Though most of the pieces have grown bigger than the old trust, none has garnered a big enough share of the U.S. oil business to raise the scare of monopoly. And now that the Rockefellers have sold out the bulk of their holdings, no individual stock interest is greater than 4%. But Jersey Standard, allergic to the word "octopus," thinks that the more autonomy the subsidiaries have, the less it will hear the word mentioned.
Something for Free. Standard is equally sensitive to the cry of "dollar imperialism." In foreign countries, Standard's subsidiaries work ceaselessly to become a part of the country. They keep their U.S. employees at a minimum, train natives or send them to the U.S. for schooling. Actually, Standard has probably done the best job of any U.S. company in selling free enterprise along with its oil. Nor has it been discouraged by its setbacks. The war cost it an estimated $135,000,000 in damaged properties; the expropriations by Mexico cost it more than $22 million.
And in the Balkans, the oil from Standard's subsidiaries goes to Russia.