[2] Both men had gone west in the California Gold Rush and had set up a successful dry goods merchandise business, outfitting prospecting camps along the coast and around Sacramento.

B. Jennings was a grandnephew of Almira Geraldine Goodsell Rockefeller, whose husband was Standard Oil co-founder William Avery Rockefeller Jr.[5] Jennings was raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, where his father had built a forty-room French Renaissance style home called the Mailands.

[1] After his graduation from Yale in 1920, Jennings began his career as a clerk in the marine department of the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony).

In 1939, eight years after Socony merged with Vacuum Oil to form Socony-Vacuum, he was appointed to the board of directors and put in charge of transportation.

During his tenure as chief executive officer the company experienced rapid expansion, tripling its worldwide gross crude production.