Early History

Chapter One: LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

Though the company motto avers that Usher Oil has been "safely recycling since 1930"applying more than seventy years of products and services to a diverse clientele--the company's origins actually date from the eve of the First World War. Four generations ago, Charles Usher typified the life of those who lived in the small communities scattered throughout the vast empire that, for nearly one thousand years, was czarist Russia. He plied his trade as a carriage maker, making wooden bodies for the wheeled, horse-drawn passenger vehicle (called "droshsky" in Russian), that was the mode of travel before the advent of the automobile. Because he had relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles was fortunate enough to emigrate in 1912. Unlike most new immigrants, howsoever--in especial, those who disembarked on the shores of the United States between the years 1880 and 1920--Charles Usher did not pass through Ellis Island. He arrived at the home of a distant family relation who was living in Winnipeg, Alberta, Canada.

Like so many immigrants who had come before, like the thousands who continue to come to this very day, Charles understood that the United States was, and is, the proverbial "land of opportunity." Equipped with a profession by which he hoped to gain entry into this country, Charles set out to pursue every immigrant's dream: making a better life for himself and for his family. Having left a wife and young son in Russia, Charles needed employment which would guarantee not merely his own income, but which would provide for their safe passage to the West. He was determined to secure a vocation in the most promising field that the United States had to offer: the brand new automobile industry.

The hub of this new industry was in Detroit, Michigan. With scant knowledge of the English language, with not a penny in his pocket, how would Charles get from Winnipeg to Detroit? By the late summer of 1912, he had been in Alberta long enough to learn that there were many cattle ranches scattered throughout Canada's western provinces. Raising cattle was a profitable enterprise; domestic bovines rendered all manner of valuable products for export. Under the cover of darkness one moonlit night in August, Charles hopped a cattle train that was carrying its quarry from the plains of western Canada to a slaughterhouse in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly thereafter, he made his way to Detroit, Michigan.

Charles Usher found his first job at the old Packard Motor company plant. He performed "piece work" by hanging doors on Packard's motor coaches, and was paid according to the number of doors that he hung every day. In time, he had saved up enough money to send for his family and, on the eve of the First World War, his wife, son, and a brand new baby boy, born in Russia during Charles' absence, arrived in the United States. The Ushers decided to give their newest son the Anglicized name, 'Morris.'

After a few years at Packard, Charles went to work for the Ford Motor Company. He secured employment as a stevedore on Ford's docks at the mouth of the Detroit River, where he remained throughout the 1920s. With the stock market crash of 1929, Charles Usher--along with more than one-third of this country's labor pool--found himself out of work. In addition to standing in the bread lines and accepting hand-outs from the soup kitchens, most men continued to try to obtain some sort of employment wherever they could find it. Charles Usher was no exception. He had an enterprising nephew, Leon Kay, with whom he partnered while their families each struggled to help the other through America's Great Depression.

Leon was a chemical engineer. Out of work himself, he proposed various marketing ventures to Charles--all of which failed miserably in the climate of 1929. After a very dire twelve months, 1930 found Leon Kay helping William Fisher in building a "re"-refinery on the corner of Oakwood and Schaeffer. Known originally as the Keystone Refinery, this facility processed used oil in the same way in which a refinery processes crude oil. [ Keystone was later converted by Mr. Fisher’s son, Max M. Fisher, into a crude (new) oil refinery named Aurora Oil Company. Aurora’s refinery at Oakwood and Schaeffer was sold in 1959 to what is now the Marathon Oil Company-ed.] Leon told his uncle Charles that the newly completed re-refinery would need feedstock, and suggested that Charles obtain a truck to collect used oil. What would there be to lose? The economic outlook continued to deteriorate under the Hoover administration. Most of the country had only just begun to hear something from, and about, the little-known governor of New York State. Albany's chief executive, nephew to Theodore Roosevelt, was highly critical of the manner in which Hoover was attempting to deal with America's worst domestic crisis since the Civil War.

Charles once again found himself gainfully, and gratefully, employed in the midst of the Great Depression. Toiling alone for the next half-dozen years, Charles Usher drove an 800-gallon tank truck around to service stations and garages. At the end of the work- day, after delivering used oil to the Keystone Refinery, he drove home in the collection truck and parked it outside the family's house for the night. In the early nineteen-thirties, as this country's economic climate worsened, it might have been difficult to envision that such arduous daily labor would eventually lay the foundation for an expansive new industry. Charles worked diligently to support his family, which by now embraced another newborn son, David.

Morris Usher had come of age in a country where he had seen both the best of times and the worst. His youth, spent amidst the prosperity after World War I and into the 1920s, had given way to maturity during the long years of economic collapse. Working families continued to struggle at subsistence level by the time Morris was about to complete his college education at Wayne State University in 1932. He had originally settled on a course of study that would enable him to become a pharmacist, but with America gripped in the throes of economic hardship, Morris decided that there might be a more secure future in his father's oil collecting business than one that depended upon academic study. Two years later, after a brief and unsatisfactory apprenticeship at one of the local pharmacies, Morris left that profession and sought his own truck with which to begin used-oil collections. In 1936, the father-son operation was officially launched. This duo of enterprising collectors delivered used oil to the Keystone Refinery every single evening, where it was turned into brand new motor oil.

There was a second, more lucrative, source of income that the Ushers derived from the used oil that they collected. During the first half of the 20th century, the roads and highways in this country bore little resemblance to what we find today. Well into the war years, those fortunate enough to possess automobiles drove their cars on a myriad of rough-hewn country lanes that were not paved. Roiling, choking clouds of dust were left in the wake of these vehicles, giving rise to the practice of "road oiling." Used oil was sprayed onto urban roadways as a 'dust suppressant' throughout the spring and summer months.

In the early 1940s, the Ushers rented a small tank farm that was used to store some of the oil collected during the winter months. The father-son team could then engage in road oiling once the area's snow-covered passages had cleared. A third truck and driver were added to their small business venture, and Usher Oil Company was on its way to achieving a growth and prosperity that would span the next five decades.

Shortly after the Ushers had taken on their third truck, the Keystone Refinery closed. With the United States now fully engaged in the military effort overseas, industrial production was at capacity levels in this country's steel mills. Those mills quickly replaced the local refinery as a primary source of revenue. Used collection oil was desired not only because it provided critical economic savings, so necessary during a time when all products and services were rationed, but also because it lowered the viscosity of heavy residual oils. Used oil was easily converted into fuel for the huge blast furnaces in America's steel mills, thereby enabling Usher Oil Company to strengthen its own foundations, begun during the Great Depression. By the end of World War Two, Usher Oil Company had a little 'fleet' of four trucks.

Next: Post-War Prosperity