Company today managed by 4th & 5th generations of the Crafton family
(This article first appeared in the May print edition of the Hendersonian.)
The headline atop the front page of the Sunday Gleaner and Journal on July 19, 1936, fairly screamed the news: “HOME OIL & GAS OPENS NEW STATION.”
The “super-service station” at Second and Green streets featured two mechanic bays that were manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Attendants would even come to your house at night, pick up your car, then service, lubricate, wash and polish it, and return it to you before morning. It sold new tires and could scientifically calibrate carburetors.
And its location was ideal: Green Street in those days served as the route through Henderson for both U.S. 60 and U.S. 41, two trans-continental highways in the years before the interstates were built. Motorists traveling from, say, Chicago to Florida would drive right past it. The construction of the first U.S. 41 bridge across the Ohio River and the first U.S. 60 bridge over the Green River in the early 1930s made them even more important corridors.
It was a big time for Home Oil & Gas, but it wasn’t its beginning. The company incorporated on May 15, 1925—100 years ago this month, making it one of Henderson’s oldest companies.
It launched with 30 local stockholders, some with prominent names such as Soaper and Hodge. But running the company were George D. Givens Sr. and his sons, Robert E. Givens and George Dudley Givens Jr., who had all previously worked for Hawkeye Oil Co., a large Midwestern chain of service stations.
They opened Home Oil’s first service station at Second and Green on July 30, 1925, then opened their first wholesale plant in spring 1926 on Atkinson Street beside the railroad tracks, with fuel delivered by train. On Christmas Eve 1927, they opened a smaller filling station at the corner of Dixon and Green streets that today houses Rick’s Pizza.
A century later, the company is managed by the fourth generation of the family, brothers Jim and Bob Crafton along with Jim’s son, James.
In its early days, James Crafton said, Home Oil’s gas dispensers didn’t have electric pumps. Instead, an attendant hand-pumped the amount of gasoline requested by a customer up into large glass cylinder, known as a “visible gas pump,” then gravity-fed it into the vehicle’s gas tank.
Home Oil grew quickly. “Robert Givens, my grandfather, was the general manager,” Jim Crafton said. “My grandmother said he called her and said they had sold 1,000 gallons (of gasoline) that day, sometime in the 1920s.”
“That was pretty significant at the time,” Bob Crafton said.
By 1936, when it rebuilt its original service station into the “super-service station,” Home Oil operated seven wholesale (or “bulk”) plants in Western Kentucky, owned 18 Sinclair stations across the region and supplied gasoline to more than 100 other stations. The Gleaner said it was “one of Kentucky’s largest independent oil companies.” Besides filling stations, it delivered fuel for farms, home heating and small trucking companies.
In 1938, Home Oil finalized plans for an Ohio River fuel terminal—a 300,000-gallon tank and a 100,000-gallon tank—on what is now Sunset Lane, to which gasoline from Louisiana would be delivered by oil tankers, offloaded to the tanks, then distributed by truck to the company’s bulk plants in Henderson, Owensboro, Sebree and Sturgis.
After years as a Sinclair dealer, Home Oil in 1948 converted to Continental Oil Co., or Conoco. “I heard Mr. Sinclair came down from Chicago (to talk to the Givens family) about not switching, but evidently Conoco was the way to go,” Jim Crafton said.
In 1955, James M. “Bud” Crafton joined the family when he married Robert Givens’ daughter, Sara. In their early years together, Bud Crafton worked as a school teacher and administrator. “All he wanted to do was teach and coach basketball,” son Bob said.
But in the mid-1960s, as Robert Givens’ health began to fail, he asked his son-in-law to join Home Oil & Gas. Bud Crafton agreed. “Mom said she heard about it on the street,” Jim Crafton said. Sara Crafton told her husband to join the company only if he really wanted to, though Jim and Bob Crafton believe their father did so out of family obligation.
Challenging times lay ahead. For decades, the availability of gasoline was ample and the price stable, inching up from about 27 cents per gallon in 1950 to 36 cents in 1972. But then came the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, when Arab oil producers withheld crude oil from the U.S. for its support of Israel. Gas prices shot up nearly 50% in two years, then soared to $1.38 by 1981.
Not only did the price soar, but dealers had to limit how much fuel they could sell, even to long-loyal customers, including farmers. They were stressful times, and it all fell onto the shoulders of Bud Crafton.
“Dad drove me to school when I was in seventh and eighth grade, and he threw up every morning in the driveway because of the stress,” Bob Crafton said.
After college, Jim Crafton joined his father in the business in 1979, working at the bulk plant, learning to drive fuel trucks and learning how to interact with customers. Bob came aboard in 1994 after working for First National Bank.
Home Oil pursued some changes. It sold its river terminal in about 1990 and tore down the old “super-station” at Second and Green in 1997 to build a modern convenience store with self-service pumps. But the family learned quickly that it didn’t have the necessary experience to operate a C-store; it soon leased out the property to a retail chain.
It meanwhile moved its offices from a two-story 19th-century brick home at Second and Green to a small building it purchased adjacent to its bulk plant on Atkinson Street.
Bud Crafton kept working well into his 70s. “He’d bring in the mail and open it, and sweep the floor” of the office, Bob said.
“He never did (retire),” Bob said. “He retired the day he died” on Oct. 25, 2007.
Though he had run a successful business, Bud Crafton didn’t crave material goods. “I remember my grandmother saying if he had $20 in his pocket, he was happy,” James Crafton said.
James reckons he joined the business—the fifth generation—by age 6. “I followed Dad around on weekends,” he said, and during summers off from college, he joined cousins in painting fuel tanks and buildings, and making deliveries. (James’ oldest son, Marshall — the sixth generation of the family in the business—and some of Bob’s grandkids have already started working around Home Oil during summer breaks from school.)
About 15 years ago, having outgrown its landlocked bulk plant property on Atkinson Street, Home Oil bought a warehouse building on Commonwealth Drive. “We consider it our distribution warehouse,” Jim Crafton said, saying he doesn’t know how the company managed to operate on the sliver of land it for decades used on Atkinson.
Today, Jim Crafton is company president, brother Bob is vice president/treasurer and son James is vice president/secretary. In an environment when few family-owned companies make it to a third generation, how has Home Oil & Gas survived into a fourth and fifth generation of management?
Looking after customers is certainly a factor. “The first year ConocoPhillips offered a customer service excellence award, out of hundreds of distributors, it was given to Home Oil & Gas,” James said.
Home Oil has also received ConocoPhillips’ Top Tier designation for exceeding standards in quality, safety and environmental operations multiple times.
“Dad won’t tell it,” James continued, “but I think a lot of it had to do with his decision to expand into oils” in the late 1980s—focusing on distributing motor oil, gear oils, lubricants and hydraulic fluids to big customers such as factories, coal mines and construction companies, James said.
His father demurred.
“We’ve had great people in the (nearly) 50 years I’ve been here,” Jim Crafton said. Home Oil has had employees with 40, even 50-plus years of service.
“But primarily, we’ve had great customers,” he said. “Without them, we wouldn’t have made it to 1976, let alone 2025.”
