Be Sure With Pure – May 1956

Are you picky about what brand of gasoline that you put in your car or other vehicle?

Sad to say, I’m not. I usually buy my gas in Vermilion from a BP station with a statue of a cartoon moose in front of it. Other times, I go to Speedway. Both companies issued me loyalty cards, and that fact probably influences my purchase habits – even though I don’t even keep track of my points.

But back in the 1950s, 60s and into the 1970s oil companies aggressively marketed their brands on TV and ads in newspaper and magazines, encouraging families to favor their brand for a variety of reasons, including better mileage, etc. 

I know that for years, my father went to Sohio, because the Standard Oil family of gas stations was huge, and we relied on that credit card during our cross-country camping trips. Much later (when Sohio no longer existed as a brand), Dad preferred Sunoco.

Anyway, one brand that was fairly prominent in the Lorain area in the 1950s was PURE Oil. The ad above ran in the Lorain Journal back on May 8, 1956.

At that time, Lorain had several PURE Oil stations: Dusky Brothers at Broadway and 19th; Duran’s Pure Oil at 2117 E. 28th Street; and Jack’s Pure Oil at Oberlin Avenue and Meister.

(I did a post about Jack’s Pure Oil back here in 2010.)

You can find a lot of old PURE Oil maps on eBay featuring this beautiful photography of a typical station.

And here’s Jack’s Pure Oil circa 1955, before the Lorain Plaza Shopping Center was built to the west of it.

As various online histories of PURE Oil note, it was purchased by Union Oil Company in 1965, who eventually converted the PURE stations to Union 76 stations in the early 1970s. This WIKI entry points out that a group of jobbers purchased the PURE brand name and it has enjoyed a limited comeback of sorts. Here is their website, which has great graphics.

That’s why it’s strange to see PURE stations with different graphics around Lorain County, such as the two below (the top one is in Amherst, the bottom one is on East Erie Avenue in Lorain). The corporate parent of these ‘impure’ stations is called Pure Friendship LLC, according to a Morning Journal article.

These stations don’t seem to have any connection with the jobbers’ PURE operations. If they did, I’m sure they would have used the well-remembered PURE graphics to enjoy the equity and goodwill of the brand.

I’ve contacted the PURE Oil Jobbers Cooperative to find out what they thought of these stations, but have never received a reply.