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Paul Garrett Blazer (September 19, 1890 – December 9, 1966) was President and CEO of Ashland Oil and Refining Company (Ashland, Inc.) located in Ashland, Kentucky. ==Biography== Paul G. Blazer was born on September 19, 1890, in the small Mississippi River town of New Boston, Illinois to David N. and Mary Melinda Blazer (née Janes). His 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 fifteen, Blazer began selling magazine subscriptions for The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal. After high school he enrolled at William & Vashti College in Aledo, Illinois. While in college, Blazer joined the Educational Division of Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia as manager of all its school subscriptions.〔 His responsibilities included devising advertisements that ran in the Saturday Evening Post to attract recruits to sell subscriptions. While in Philadelphia, Blazer became very active in the progressive Bull Moose Party and former President Theodore Roosevelt's unsuccessful campaign for the 1912 republican nomination for President (vs. the more conservative, incumbent Taft). Blazer ended up on the platform with President Roosevelt for his April 10 whistle-stop train tour stop in Philadelphia. Roosevelt overwhelmingly won Pennsylvania delegates with the campaign theme of improved treatment of employees by their corporate owners but he lost the nomination at the June, 1912 Republican National Convention in Chicago to William Howard Taft. 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. In 1917, during World War I, Blazer entered the 123rd U.S. Army Hospital Unit organized by the university but later that year an accident 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 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. Georgia Blazer was active in her own right in promoting education in Kentucky. In 1939, Governor Happy Chandler appointed Mrs. Blazer the first woman trustee on the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees. She served from 1939 to 1960. In 1962, Blazer Hall was opened as the Georgia M Blazer Hall () for Women in tribute to her twenty-one years of service as a University of Kentucky trustee. She also served on Kentucky's Council on Public Higher Education. In 1920, 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, in charge of constructing and managing the operations of Ashland Refining Co. in Ashland, Kentucky. Managing the company was more than a vocation for Blazer; 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". (1933-1936). The committee focused on national petroleum pricing, production, refining, and a cost survey of crude oil production. The Board was abolished, effective March 31, 1936, by Executive Order 7076, June 15, 1935. It was succeeded by the Department of the Interior's Petroleum Conservation Division. Blazer later became a charter member of the Petroleum Industry Council for National Defense. 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." Blazer served as Chairman of the District II Refining Committee. J. Howard Marshall would later join the "Ashland Family" as Vice Chairman and President of the company from 1944-1952.〔J. Howard Marshall, ''Done in Oil: An Autobiography of J. Howard Marshall II'' (College Station : Texas A & M University Press, 1994)〕 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. Blazer was given a phone from Adolf Hitler's bunker after the war by Marshall, who had been loaned by Blazer to the Committee on Reparations at the request of Roosevelt. The phone is on display at the Highlands Museum and Discovery Center. 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 (1946-1947).〔 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 (1945-1950) and served two years as chairman (1949 and 1950).〔 Blazer was an invited member of the Newcomen Society of the United States and gave the keynote address at its Lexington Kentucky conference in 1956. The Newcomer Society's mission is "the study and recognition of achievement in American business and the society it serves." Blazer kept Ashland Oil and Refining Company active in the Ohio Valley Improvement Association (OVIA) which was located in the Cincinnati Federal Reserve Bank Building. Ashland President J. Howard Marshall served on the Board of Trustees in the 1940s and Ashland Vice President William J Hull served as Chairman of the OVIA Legislative Committee in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the OVIA and Ashland Oil & Refining Company and with the congressional leadership and dedication of Congressman Michael J. Kirwan (Ohio 19th congressional district), 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 (current list of locks and dams of the Ohio River). 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. The top was completed and dedicated as the Jesse Stuart Memorial Bridge in the 1980s. 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. The National Waterways Conference is the only national organization to advocate in favor of national policy and federal laws that recognize the vital importance of America's water resources infrastructure to our nation's well-being and quality of life. In 1964, Blazer became the thirty-fourth inductee of the Oil Hall of Fame by the National Petroleum News (NPN) magazine. "Candidates are honored for their contributions to industry progress and their influence on the course of marketing." In the NPN interview, at the age of 74, Blazer closed with the comment "I still consider myself a marketer and salesman." In reply to Kentucky Congressman William Huston Natcher's September 15, 1964 congratulatory letter, Blazer wrote: "This recognition, of course, belongs more to the Ashland Oil organization than to me personally". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paul G. Blazer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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