Growing up on a small family farm in Independence, Missouri, Spahr’s father worked at the nearby Sugar Creek refinery location of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana.
[8] When he was on Christmas holiday at home, his sister Marjorie arranged him a date with her school classmate Mary Jane Bruckmiller, who became his wife in 1937.
[9] After his time at Harvard Business School, Spahr returned to Bartlesville for roughly six months before going to work for Standard Oil in Cleveland, Ohio, where he remained for the next 38 years.
[9] Spahr claimed that in his competition for the CEO position, the board was composed of employees of Sohio and members from outside of the company.
BP had substantial area in Prudhoe Bay, but had no American refineries, which they viewed as the most important oil market in the world.
Thus it swallowed up the original oil business which was built by John D. Rockefeller in Cleveland and it has stayed for a long period of time "one of the largest and most famous companies in the world".
[9] Until that point, though Sohio had diversified through coal, and the creation and growth of a series of motels and restaurants on the new Interstate Highway system, it was still just a marketer and refiner.
The four years spent addressing political matters allowed for in-depth study of the process of building the pipeline.
Once started, time was one of the greatest challenges; there was roughly a six-week window in which materials could be moved through the Bering Strait by ship.
In his taped interview, Spahr expresses a positive attitude toward the environmental groups which were critical of the building of the pipeline.
[2] Spahr served as an Army Corps of Engineers major in charge of pipeline construction during World War II.