Paul G. Blazer


Paul Garrett Blazer was President and CEO of Ashland Oil and Refining Company located in Ashland, Kentucky.

Biography

Paul G. Blazer was born on September 19, 1890, in New Boston, Illinois to Presbyterians D.N. Blazer and Mary Melinda Blazer. Blazer's father's childhood home was station number three on the Underground Railroad that began at Quincy Illinois and was described as being on "the avenue to freedom in Canada for runaway slaves from Missouri and Kentucky and hundreds of them passing through to freedom were harbored at the Blazer home." Blazer's father, his father's brother and father's sister were school teachers. His father left the teaching profession as a school principal and soon thereafter became the publisher of the nearby Aledo Times-Record regional newspaper.
At the age of twelve, Blazer began selling magazine subscriptions for The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, and he eventually hired a full-time secretary. Blazer was a star on his high school football team and a track star in high school and in college. After high school, he enrolled at William & Vashti College in Aledo, Illinois. After one year of college, Blazer joined the Educational Division of Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as manager of its school subscriptions. His responsibilities included devising advertisements that ran in the Saturday Evening Post.
While in Philadelphia, Blazer became active in the progressive Bull Moose Party and former President Theodore Roosevelt's unsuccessful campaign for the 1912 Republican Party presidential nomination. Blazer ended up on the platform with President Roosevelt for his April 10 whistle-stop train tour stop in Philadelphia. Blazer left Curtis Publishing and Philadelphia in 1914, and returned to his magazine business in Illinois. On a Curtis Publishing scholarship, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, earning an associate degree in Philosophy in 1915. The scholarship was conditional on maintaining four hundred magazine subscriptions. Blazer further expanded his subscription business when he purchased a renewal subscriptions business with 960 customers in 1914 and another renewal subscription business in 1916 with 1900 customers from a Curtis distributor in Chicago, further expanding his magazine business in Chicago and into Milwaukee. While attending University of Chicago, Blazer was the student coordinator for the student sports program and business manager of the Cap & Gown yearbook staff. Under his direction they achieved record income.
In 1917, during World War I, Blazer entered the 123rd U.S. Army Hospital Unit organized by the university but an accident that occurred later that year resulted in his receiving a medical discharge. He worked a short time for Chittenden Press in Chicago before going to The Great Northern Refining Co. as advertising manager. He quickly moved into the sales department and in 1918 and became sales manager.
In April 1917, Blazer married Georgia Monroe, whom he had met at the University of Chicago. The Blazers had three children: Paul Garrett Jr., Doris Virginia, and Stuart Monroe. In 1939, Governor Happy Chandler appointed Mrs. Blazer the first woman trustee on the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees. In 1962, Blazer Hall was opened as the Georgia M Blazer Hall for Women in tribute to her twenty-one years of service on the board. She also served on Kentucky's Council on Public Higher Education.
In 1920, Paul Blazer went to work as vice president of the Great Southern Oil & Refining Company in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1924 he joined the Swiss Oil Company of Lexington and was in charge of constructing and managing the operations of Ashland Refining Co. in Ashland, Kentucky. Blazer's work managing the company meant that from 1924 to 1957 he was regarded as head of the Ashland family.
In 1930, Blazer became Vice President of the newly established Independent Petroleum Association of America, a position he held for ten years. During Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first presidential term in the summer of 1933, J. Howard Marshall, a young assistant solicitor from Yale Law School working for Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, launched on a Code of Fair Competition for the Petroleum Industry. The oil industry sent representatives, including Blazer, to Washington D.C.. Blazer served as chairman of the United States Department of the Interior's Petroleum Code Survey Committee on Small Business Enterprise, referred to as the "Blazer Committee"..
While working for the Department of Interior Blazer lobbied the Department of Interior's New Deal agency the Works Progress Administration for Kentucky projects, including Ashland's new sewers, new public library and a concrete athletic stadium.
Blazer later became a charter member of the Petroleum Industry Council for National Defense. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt was giving his Declaration of War speech before the joint session of the United States Congress in Washington D.C., Blazer was several blocks away in preparations for war meetings. After the 1941 outbreak of World War II and the United States imminent inclusion many members of the Council, including Blazer, went to work for the Petroleum Administration for War Council as "dollar-a-year men" again under the Secretary of Interior Ickes, Director Ralph K. Davies and now Solicitor J. Howard Marshall. Its purpose: "...mobilize most effectively all resources and abilities of the petroleum industry to deal with the emergency conditions under which the industry must operate, and to provide a competent, responsible and representative body." July 11, 1941, Secretary Ickes appointed Blazer to District 2's General Committee, the Supply and Distribution Committee and Chairman of the District 2 Refining Committee. He served from Council's official creation December 31, 1941 to its dissolution December 6, 1946. During this period the Department of Interior disbursements for the construction of aviation gasoline facilities amounted to $235,836,850.80, which included the 1942 $6,000,000 expansion of the Catlettsburg refinery.
Blazer was on Kentucky Governor Simeon S. Willis' WWII Postwar Planning Commission and he was the Chairman of the Transportation Committee. He later served as Chairman of the unsuccessful state legislative mandated Campaign for a Kentucky Constitutional Convention.
Blazer was a director and member of the American Petroleum Institute and a member of the National Petroleum Council. He served as a director the Cincinnati Branch Office of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and served two years as chairman.
The National Petroleum Council was established in 1946 at the request of President Harry S. Truman to represent industry views on Department of Interior matters relating to oil and natural gas. Blazer served on the council from 1946 to 1957.
Blazer kept Ashland Oil and Refining Company active in the Ohio Valley Improvement Association which was located in the Cincinnati Federal Reserve Bank Building.
Blazer and Hull were among those instrumental in bringing about the Department of Interior's and the United States Army Corps of Engineers' 1953 $200,000,000 Ohio River Navigation Modernization Program, the first such projects since 1929. The projects approved construction of nineteen new dual locks and high-lift dams. The Program contained eight new projects in the portion of the Ohio River owned by Kentucky, and contained the rare structural plans for a bridge over the top of the Greenup County, Kentucky dam. The Greenup Dam is just down river from Ashland was known at the time as The Paul G. Blazer Dam, received site priority. and was built in the 1950s without completion of the bridge top.
Blazer appeared before the U.S. Congress on several occasions testifying on proposed regulations affecting the oil industry and in 1956 testified against a proposed tax on use of the nation's waterways. Blazer, at age seventy, was elected chairman and president of the newly established National Waterways Conference in 1960 and re-elected as Chairman in 1961.
In 1964, Blazer became the thirty-fourth inductee of the Oil Hall of Fame by the National Petroleum News magazine.

Blazer and education in Kentucky

Blazer recognition and awards (1946–1960)

Other recognitions included:
In 1957 Blazer again played a significant role in the Ashland area's higher education opportunities with his work towards the University of Kentucky taking over the teaching and day-to-day operations from the Ashland Independent School District's Board of Education for the Ashland Junior College.
The Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus disaster occurred February 28 barely two months after Blazer's acceptance of the Ashland School Board's request to name the new high school after him. Twenty-six school children and the bus driver died when a school bus plunged into the Big Sandy River outside of nearby Prestonsburg, KY. At the time, it was the deadliest bus accident in United States history.

Death

Blazer died on December 9, 1966, at the age of 76.

The Stuart Blazer Foundation (1952–1975)

After twenty years of Ashland area grants, the Stuart Blazer Foundation was terminated in the 1970s. On the recommendation of Paul and Georgia's son Paul Jr. and daughter Doris, one half of the remaining funds paid for the initial restoration of the Paramount Movie Theater Ashland KY and one half of the remaining funds paid for the building and one year's operation of The Ashland Tennis Center before being given to the City of Ashland.
The Blazer family funded the Blazer Lecture Series at the University of Kentucky in memory of their son Stuart.