Vintage 1970s Pennzoil United $5,000 Bond Certificate 🛢️ 5¼% Due 1996 Blue Oil Racing Rockefeller Americana Indy 500 Wall Art

Who Signed This Pennzoil United Bond? 🛢️ A $5,000 Oil Bond Signed by the Man Who Started Zapata Petroleum With George H. W. Bush

Size: 12" x 8"

I have handled a lot of oil paper, and this one still stops me. It is a Pennzoil United, Inc. 5¼% Convertible Subordinated Debenture due 1996, face value five thousand dollars, printed in deep blue by the American Bank Note Company. But the reason I went hunting through its history is the signature on the bottom right of the sheet I photographed: William C. Liedtke, Jr. — who, with his brother Hugh and a young Texan named George H. W. Bush, started an oil company in 1953 and ended up building Pennzoil out of it.

🔍 Everything Printed on the Front

REGISTERED in both upper corners · a large engraved 5000 medallion at each side · PENNZOIL UNITED, INC. across the center · 5¼% CONVERTIBLE SUBORDINATED DEBENTURE DUE 1996 beneath it · 5¼% DUE 1996 repeated in a block at each side · FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS engraved across the middle · CUSIP 709325 AE 4 boxed at the right · a Trustee's Authentication Certificate for FRANKLIN NATIONAL BANK, As Trustee · the embossed corporate seal reading PENNZOIL UNITED INC · SEAL · DELAWARE · and officer signatures for Secretary and President.

The reverse carries the full indenture text — the debenture is one of an authorised issue of $50,000,000 under an indenture dated as of March 1, 1971 — a General Redemption Prices table running year by year from 1972 at 105.25% down to 1996 at 100.00%, a conversion notice addressed to the trustee at its Wall Street office in New York, and the printed assignment and transfer form.

🏺 Read the Vignette: This Is a Chemist, Not a Goddess

Most financial engravings of this era hand you Commerce or Industry as a draped woman with a globe. Pennzoil's engraver did something better and more specific. The vignette is a seated laureled male figure holding a test tube up to the light, examining it. At his left hand sits a swan-neck glass retort on a burner stand; at his right, on the bench, a microscope. Papers spill across his lap. And behind him, instead of a classical skyline, are oil derricks and the cracking towers of a refinery, smoke rolling off to the right.

That is not a generic allegory borrowed from a stock library. It is a picture of petroleum chemistry — the laboratory, not the derrick, as the source of the company's value. For a business whose whole identity was refining Pennsylvania crude into a premium motor oil, putting the chemist on the money was exactly the right argument to make.

🏛️ 1889: A Rockefeller Company, Cut Loose

The story starts with South Penn Oil Company, formed in 1889 as one of the original Standard Oil companies, working the Pennsylvania fields that had made Titusville and Oil City famous. When the Supreme Court broke up the Standard trust in 1911, South Penn was cut loose as one of the independent "Baby Standards."

For decades afterward it did one thing extremely well: refine Pennsylvania crude into lubricating oil. The brand name it sold that oil under — Pennsylvania plus oil — was Pennzoil, and that brand eventually became more valuable than the company that owned it.

🎬 1953: Two Tulsa Brothers, a Texas Oilman, and a Movie Marquee

Here is the part almost nobody selling one of these mentions. In 1953, two brothers from Tulsa — J. Hugh Liedtke and William C. Liedtke, Jr., both working as lawyers in Midland, Texas — went into partnership with a young oilman named George H. W. Bush. They needed a name for the new company. Viva Zapata! was playing at the movie house, so they called it Zapata Petroleum.

That is a true story, and it is the hinge of this whole certificate. Bush's side of the partnership eventually became Zapata Off-Shore and carried him toward politics. The Liedtkes went the other way — straight at the old Rockefeller company.

In 1963, Zapata Petroleum, South Penn Oil and Stetco Petroleum of Midland were combined into a single company. They named it Pennzoil, after South Penn's popular motor oil, and the stock began trading on July 8, 1963. Two Oklahoma-raised lawyers had just taken over a piece of Standard Oil and renamed the whole thing after a can of motor oil.

⚡ 1965–1968: How the Name on This Bond Came to Exist

The Liedtkes were not finished. In 1965 they pulled off the takeover of United Gas Corporation, a much larger Gulf Coast natural gas company — a genuinely audacious move for the smaller firm. In 1968 United Gas was merged into Pennzoil and the combined company was renamed Pennzoil United, Incorporated.

That name is the reason this bond can be dated so tightly. "Pennzoil United, Inc." only existed for a handful of years, and the paper you are looking at was printed and issued inside that window. In 1970 the retail gas distribution side was spun off as Entex, and before long the company went back to plain Pennzoil. This certificate is a fossil of the brief era when it carried both names.

William C. Liedtke, Jr. (1924–1991) served as president of Pennzoil from 1967 to 1977, which is precisely why his signature sits on the sheet I photographed, dated March 30, 1971.

🏁 The Yellow and Black at Indianapolis

If you know the name Pennzoil from anywhere, it is probably from a racetrack. That yellow and black became one of the most recognisable liveries in American motorsport, and the high-water mark was Rick Mears in the Pennzoil Penske, winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1984 and again in 1988. The colors came back, too: in 2012 Helio Castroneves drove Team Penske's No. 3 Shell V-Power/Pennzoil Ultra car and won at St. Petersburg, and at the 2014 Indy 500 he ran the No. 3 in the old yellow Pennzoil "Yellow Submarine" colors that Johnny Rutherford and Rick Mears had made famous. Pennzoil also became a factory-recommended oil across the American car industry, which is how a Pennsylvania refiner's name ended up on tens of millions of dipstick labels and in every corner service station in the country.

🇬🇧 2002: The End of the Line

In 2002, Royal Dutch/Shell acquired Pennzoil-Quaker State. The deal was announced on March 25, 2002: Shell Oil paid $22 a share in cash, about $1.8 billion for the stock, a 42 percent premium over the last trading price, and the merger closed on October 1, 2002. The corporate thread that ran from Rockefeller's 1889 South Penn Oil, through the Liedtke brothers and their movie-house company name, to the yellow cars at Indianapolis, ended there — folded into a European major. The brand survives on the shelf; the independent American company behind it does not.

That is what this piece of paper actually is: a financial instrument from a company that no longer exists, issued under a name that existed for only a few years, signed by one of the two men who built it.

📋 About the Group

These come from one group of the same debenture issue, and they are not identical to one another. The registered holder, the certificate number, the issue date, the transfer stamps and the officer signatures all vary from sheet to sheet — a registered bond running to 1996 was issued and reissued over many years, and different officers signed in different periods. The certificate photographed is dated March 30, 1971 and carries William C. Liedtke, Jr.'s signature as president; yours may be dated differently and signed by a different officer. The design, the denomination, the 5¼% rate, the 1996 maturity, the vignette and the color are the constants.

The life of a certificate like this can show up on the paper itself, not just in the vignette: things like a stamped endorsement, a cancellation punch or cut, staple holes from a transfer book, pencil ledger notes, or signatures across the back. Those are marks of real use, not damage — the record of an instrument that actually moved through the financial system. Seals belong on that list too: a corporate seal embossed straight into the paper, a wafer seal, and the signature-guarantee patch a bank or broker laid across an endorsement and then signed over the top of.

🛢️ About these

The supply is finite - nobody's issuing Pennzoil United bonds again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.