Skelly Oil
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| Public Corporation | |
| Industry | Oil |
| Fate | Merged to form Getty Oil |
| Successor | Getty Oil |
| Founded | 1919; revived 2012 |
| Defunct | 1977 |
| Headquarters | Tulsa, Oklahoma |
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Key people
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| Products | Motor oils, lubricants, natural gas, motor fuels |
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Number of employees
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approx. 5,000 |
| Subsidiaries | Hawkeye Chemical, Vacouver Plywood, Surfco Marketing |
Skelly Oil Company was a medium-sized oil company founded in 1919 by William Grove (Bill) Skelly, Chesley Coleman Herndon and Frederick A. Pielsticker in Tulsa, Oklahoma. J. Paul Getty acquired control of the company during the 1930s. Skelly Oil became part of Getty Oil Company, Mission Oil Company, Tidewater Oil Company. It became defunct when absorbed by Getty Oil Company in 1974, and the abandoned Skelly brand logo was revived by Nimmons-Joliet Development Corp. in 2012.
Bill Skelly (1878–1957) came to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania in about 1913 where he worked as a mule skinner and tool dresser in the oil fields around Ardmore and Duncan, Oklahoma, prior to partnering with Jack Sanky to form Skelly Sanky Oil Company in Duncan, Oklahoma in 1915. An advertisement in The Pittsburgh Press on January 4, 1922, stated that Skelly Oil Company was formed to take over the oil properties of Skelly and of the Skelly Sanky company.
Chesley Coleman Herndon was a practicing attorney in Tulsa when he won several court victories against William Skelly involving oil leases on Osage Indian land. Skelly summoned Herndon to his office for a meeting after his final loss in court, and shortly thereafter, the two unlikely allies, along with Fred Pielsticker, the son of German immigrants who was orphaned at age twelve and became a renowned engineer, would form Skelly Oil Company.
Herndon was the son of Captain Thomas Herndon, a Civil War veteran who oversaw a family fortune in real estate, tobacco and banking in Tennessee. Captain Herndon's cousin William Herndon was Abraham Lincoln's law partner in Illinois.
For the next 37 years, Skelly and Herndon held the number one and two positions in the company, and are buried 25 feet apart in Tulsa's Rose Hill Mausoleum, the same distance as their desks for almost half a century. A 1932 Fortune Magazine article stated that "Skelly Oil Company is a great success because of the different temperaments of its top executives... in this company, William Skelly is the accelerator and Chesley Herndon is the brake."
The company entered into the refining business by purchasing the Midland Refining Company in El Dorado, Kansas, in 1922. Throughout much of its history, Skelly was a popular gasoline marketer throughout the Midwestern United States and was a market leader in several cities throughout its marketing area including Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Wichita, Topeka, Omaha, Des Moines, Minneapolis/Saint Paul and other cities.
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