Paragon Oil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paragon Oil was the name of an American oil company, founded circa 1910 in New York, and sold to Texaco in the late 1950s.
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[edit] Family History
Paragon Oil was founded in the early twentieth century in New York City by five brothers: Henry, Irving, Robert, Benjamin, and Arnold Schwartz. The brothers, and their sister Bess, were first-generation Americans, all born between 1896 and 1909 in Brooklyn, New York. Their parents Sam and Lena (nee Krakousky) were Jewish immigrants from the town of Belaya Tserkov (Bila Tserkva), near Kiev, today located in Ukraine, who had immigrated to the United States around 1895. The family's original surname had been something like "Cherniofsky", the Russian word for "black"; indeed, Sam was a blacksmith. However, the family had immigrated through the port of Bremen, Germany, where the name was changed to the German word for black, "Schwartz".
When they were young, elder brothers Henry and Irving went door-to-door in Brooklyn carrying around sacks of coal on their backs, peddling the coal to the nearby homes and residential buildings to earn extra money for their family. At that time, some large commercial buildings had oil-fired furnaces, but residential buildings did not. Their father Sam was a blacksmith and worked in a smith's shop, and relatives back in Ukraine had been involved in the whale oil business; the combination of these factors led to the brothers experimenting with designing and building the first oil heaters designed for residential buildings, eventually earning several patents on the design.
Around 1910, the brothers founded Paragon Oil as an oil distribution company, to supply the residential buildings that now had their new oil burners installed. As time went on, the company focused less on building the burners and more on storing and delivering the fuel. Several of the brothers' first cousins, including the sons of Sam's younger brother Barney and one of Lena's cousins, also joined the operation. However, some of them chose to adopt different surnames in the workplace, including "Harvey" and "Lawrence", so that it would not be immediately obvious that most of the people working in the upper levels of the company had the last name Schwartz, and thus were related. Avoiding public anti-Semitism was also a contributing factor to the cousins' surname changes; indeed, even some of the five brothers' first names were different than those on their birth certificates and early Census records, changed to sound less overtly Jewish. For example, Arnold's real first name was Abraham.
[edit] Growth of the Company
Paragon Oil remained a small, local operation in the New York area until the end of World War I. Europe was destroyed, and in desperate need of fuel oil. Because of their location close to the New York docks and their unique five gallon container packaging, Paragon Oil won the US government contract to supply Europe with fuel oil during the post-war reconstruction. This contract catapulted the company into national prominence. Later, during the early days of the Cold War, Paragon supplied the US government with oil for their submarines. The company operated a fleet of fuel delivery trucks around the Northeastern United States, and eventually a few oil tankers. Toy versions of the fuel delivery trucks were even manufactured by the Corgi company.
[edit] Sale of the Company
The company continued in operation until the late 1950s. At that point, the brothers were getting older and wished to retire. The company was sold to Texaco, with the sale becoming final in the early 1960s. Most of the brothers used the profits from the sale to co-found the Brookdale Foundation, whose research focused on gerontology and geriatric medicine. They also endowed many other charitable enterprises, primarily centered in the New York metropolitan area. These included the Metropolitan Opera at then-newly-built Lincoln Center, several buildings and lecture programs at New York University, several New York City and Long Island hospitals, Park Avenue synagogue, a foundation for gifted youth, and at least three well-respected graduate schools founded in the mid-1950s. Eldest brother Henry Schwartz was married quite late in life to a former nun named Caroline Di Donato, and thus also endowed many Catholic charities and organizations.
[edit] The Founders Pass On
Sam Schwartz died sometime between 1920 and 1930, Lena Schwartz died in 1941, the five brothers died between 1970 and 1985, and sister Bess Schwartz Levy died probably in the 1940's. However, one of the Schwartz first cousins who had worked for the company, the son of Sam's brother Barney, is still alive. He is nonogenarian Jack Lawrence (nee Jacob Schwartz), a well-known songwriter and former president of ASCAP.
