Vintage Sinclair Collectibles

Along with the Texaco star, the Shell scallop, and the Mobil flying horse, the Sinclair dinosaur is one of the most identifiable symbols in petroliana. The first Sinclair dinosaurs appeared in 1930, when the company was trying to promote its new Wellsville, Pennsylvania, lubricants, which were derived from crude oil that had been forming since the Mesozoic Era, the 180-million-year-long period when dinosaurs dominated life on earth. Although Sinclair used a dozen different dinosaurs in its advertising, it was an image of an Apatosaurus (then called a Brontosaurus) that captured the public’s imagination. Named Dino and colored a swampy green, the Apatosaurus proved so popular that Sinclair made Dino the company’s official mascot and had it trademarked in 1932. The road to the Sinclair Dino was an unlikely one. In fact, the company was an accidental product of investments made by Harry Ford Sinclair, a failed Kansas druggist who was born in a suburb of Wheeling, West Virginia, but grew up in Independence, Kansas. When his attempts to run a pharmacy went south at the beginning of the 20th century, Sinclair made ends meet by selling lumber to oil-well operators, who used his materials to build their derricks. Thanks to his position as an oil-industry insider, Sinclair embarked on what today would be called a side hustle, buying and selling oil leases. He was successful enough to eventually attract a few key investors, and in 1904, a drilling syndicate he had formed for some leases in Kiowa, Oklahoma, earned Sinclair $100,000 (about $2.5-million in 21st-century dollars). That windfall led to bigger investments, including one in the Glenn Pool oil field, which spawned the Oklahoma oil boom—oil in Oklahoma ultimately rewarded speculators with more money than the California Gold Rush and Colorado Silver Boom combined. By 1907, Sinclair was the richest man in Kansas, and by 1916, his eponymous oil company was one of the top-10 oil producers in the United States. Sinclair’s company grew for a number of reasons. In part, it was due to Sinclair’s uncanny ability to bet on productive oil fields, but Sinclair was more than just lucky—he was a savvy businessman, who invested in his own pipelines to maintain independence, and who bought and stockpiled oil when it was cheap before selling it when prices rose, which happened a lot in the 1910s. Given this combination of instinct and business acumen, the 1920s should have been a period of unblemished growth for Sinclair. Indeed, highlights of the decade include the establishment, in 1922, of the country’s first full-service gas station, where one could get an oil change and basic repairs done in addition to filling up their tank. In 1926, Sinclair became the first U.S. producer to offer a high-octane gasoline, which it branded as H-C for Houston Concentrate, although many assumed the letters stood called High Compression. But for Sinclair, the 1920s was also the decade of the Teapot Dome scandal, named for a rock formation in Wyoming. In 1922, the U.S. Navy awarded the Mammoth Oil Company—a subsidiary of Sinclair—and the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company contracts to develop oil reserves at Teapot Dome. The awards were made by President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, and there was no competitive bidding for the lucrative contracts. That in and of itself was not the scandal: The problem was that Edward Doheny of Pan American Petroleum was found to have bribed Fall, whose suddenly lavish lifestyle had been a clue that shenanigans were afoot. Sinclair was also implicated. In the end, Fall was found guilty of taking a bribe, although Doheny was acquitted of making it. As for Sinclair, he would go to prison for roughly 6 months on the change of jury tampering. Even without Teapot Dome, the 1920s were difficult for Sinclair’s company as gas prices plunged due to competition for legions of new automobile drivers. The stock market crash of 1929 also did not help. Still, Sinclair managed to grow his company during the Great Depression, establishing the largest pipeline system in the country. And then of course, there was Dino, who debuted in 1930. By 1933, Dino was recognized enough to be the oil company’s ambassador for the 1933-1934 Chicago World’s Fair, which was themed “Century of Progress,” Hollywood’s P. G. Alen built an enormous Sinclair dinosaur for the oil company’s exhibit, drawing more than 24,000 people per day. Other Dino-themed promotions during the 1930s included the issuance of dinosaur stamps and an accompanying stamp album in 1935. Stamps were issued weekly at Sinclair stations, but the first Sinclair stamp albums, all 4 million of them, disappeared in just two days. By the late 1930s, war clouds were gathering again in Europe. Anticipating the worst, Sinclair sold its European subsidies before they could be seized by Hitler. But Sinclair’s response to World War II was not merely reactive. The company also developed a 100-octane fuel, which positioned Sinclair to be a supplier of aviation fuel to U.S. military combat planes. If war was good for Sinclair, then the peacetime prosperity that followed in the 1950s was not. For the first time in the company’s history, Sinclair was now importing more oil than it was producing. Sinclair needed another lift, which it got in 1963, when Dino made his first appearance as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The following year, at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, Sinclair erected an entire Dinoland Pavilion. The exhibit recreated the Mesozoic Era and featured nine, life-size fiberglass dinosaurs, each designed by wildlife sculptor Louis Paul Jonas, who spent three years building dinosaurs based on research of conducted by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Featuring then-state-of-the-art animatronics, the dinosaurs drew crowds along the Hudson River, as they floated on a barge to their home in the Dinoland Pavilion, where they were seen by some 10-million people. Today, Sinclair’s 70-foot Apatosaurus and 45-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex live at Dinosaur Valley State Park near Fort Worth, Texas. In 1975, the Dino balloon from the Macy’s parade was named an Honorary Member of the Museum of Natural History, although 1976 would be Dino’s last year until his return in 2015. In the interim, Sinclair and its Dino mascot regularly found their way into popular culture—for example, in the 1991-1994 TV series called “Dinosaurs,” the surname of the show’s dinosaur family is Sinclair.