"The people who work in this business are not sissies, and they don't like sissies either," says a Canadian oilman who once worked with John Kenneth Jamieson, Exxon's chairman and chief executive. "Jamieson is .one of the toughest and most evenhanded men I have ever met. When you are supposed to get something done for Jamieson, you had better get it done."
"Ken" Jamieson is a product of the rough-and-tumble earlier days of the Canadian oil business. His father, now 96, is the oldest living veteran of the North West Mounted Police. Jamieson, 63, was born in Medicine Hat, then a frontier outpost on Alberta's bleak prairie with a population of 5,600. Once he shot a bear that wandered too close to the family domicile. He went to the University of Alberta, but determined to become an engineer, transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On his return to Depression-struck Alberta in 1931, he took any work that he could find: straightening tracks on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and prospecting for gold along the Eraser River.
Finding no gold, Jamieson signed on as a laborer in a small refinery near Calgary. Because of his engineering background, he was made manager of a refinery in Moose Jaw, Sask., the first of a remarkable series of jobs that during the next 30 years put him into every facet of the petroleum business. During World War II, big (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.), craggy-faced Ken Jamieson was appointed an Ottawa-based oil liaison officer between the Canadian and U.S. Governments. When peace came, Imperial Oil Ltd., the Canadian subsidiary of Standard Oil (New Jersey), made him a lucrative offer, and he accepted even though he had reservations about "just ending up in the back office."
At Imperial, he became assistant to Michael Haider, who was fast rising to the top of Jersey's hierarchy. Clearly impressed with Jamieson, Haider took him along as he moved up. Jamieson succeeded Haider as president of Jersey's International Petroleum Co., which handled some of the firm's Latin American refining and marketing. After that Jamieson became president of Humble Oil, the Houston-based subsidiary that ran all U.S. operations. —Humble had long been dominated by independent-minded Texans, and Jamieson's job was to bring it under more direct control of Jersey's central management. He melded the operation of five U.S. affiliates into a smoothly functioning division and cut the work force from 40,000 to 28,000. The division was later renamed Exxon Co., U.S.A. The consolidation left scars; some longtime Humble employees still call the Exxon Tower in Houston "Yankee Stadium." Jamieson became a U.S. citizen in 1964. "It only made good sense," he says, "because when you're dealing with U.S. Government people, you can't deal with them adequately if you're a foreigner representing a U.S. company."