Sing Out the News

On television screens in nine cities last week, an announcer introduced something new in business procedure: "This is a report by Union Oil Co. It is the story of $171 million . . . where it came from and where it went."

The report, all wrapped up in a film, took the viewers (including many Union stockholders, who got letters well in advance) across oilfields, up to the tops of derricks, through refinery gates and aboard the company's seven-tanker fleet. Now & again the camera veered back into a board room and focused on Union Oil Co. of California's President Reese Hale Taylor. He gave an item-by-item explanation of the company's annual financial report, the first ever televised.

Burly (6 ft. 4 in., 240 lbs.) Oilman Taylor was out to make two points. The first was an item of interest to stockholders: despite Union Oil's whopping $18,910.860 profit, the highest in its history, the company still had to dip into reserves to pay for the year's expansion, research and development. The other point was for U.S. industry generally: businessmen must find more effective means of telling the public of their problems, successes, failures. Taylor thought this important enough to broadcast the film to cities where Union Oil has few shareholders, no employees or customers.

One-Man Campaign. Taylor's passion for telling people about the works of free enterprise has made him the West Coast's prickliest burr in the pants of traditionalist businessmen. Los Angeles-born, he graduated from the University of California (1922) and went to work for an iron company which was later merged into Consolidated Steel Corp. In 1934, when Taylor became Consolidated's president, the company was in the red. He overhauled operations, cleaned out the deadwood and put Consolidated into the black. In 1938, when Los Angeles Union Oil, oldest and second largest West Coast oil company, was in need of the same kind of overhauling, hard-driving Reese Taylor, then 38, got the job.

Taylor was shocked to discover that the oil industry was in bad repute. His discovery was backed up by a survey which showed that more than half the adult population thought the industry got together and fixed prices; almost as many believed that the oil industry was a monopoly and should be nationalized.

He tried to get his competitors into a joint public-relations campaign to straighten out such misconceptions, but they refused. So five years ago he started his one-man campaign. In newspaper ads, he plugged the theme that "America's Fifth Freedom Is Free Enterprise," with cartoons and folksy parables discussing profits and wage rate-production relationships. Taylor tried the same trick with his annual reports, now thinks that in television he has found the best method yet.

New Kind of Oil. A lusty backslapper, who likes to give a party a night in his 8-room bungalow at Pasadena's Huntington Hotel, Taylor has lately been barnstorming the U.S. to rouse businessmen on a new phase of labor relations. Says Taylor: "When a man spends about one-half of his waking hours . . . [on a job] that is so routine and boring that he can hardly stand it ... where he has no real sense of contributing to the economic life of the community . . . he is very likely to become unhappy and dissatisfied."

To forestall such dissatisfaction at Union Oil, Taylor has leased company-owned service stations to former employees, thus making them partners in the enterprise. He encourages drillers to set themselves up as contractors for Union Oil. His own employees are kept informed of company affairs by a rain of management bulletins.

Fast-moving Mr. Taylor's liking for keeping everyone stirred up sometimes palls on his underlings. Once when a visitor asked what all the uproar was in Taylor's office, a bored stenographer answered: "It's just Reese making a new kind of oil again: turmoil."

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