OIL: Cowden's Refinery

Unlike the older, mightier British and Scandinavian cooperative associations, which own factories, dairies, utilities, ships, banks, U. S. co-ops for a long time limited themselves to the jobs of wholesaling and retailing. Through them consumers took aprons away from shopkeepers, but did not attempt to own and run their own steel mills.

In 1929, a Missouri cooperator named Howard Cowden organized $3,000, an old truck and two rusty oil storage tanks into a consolidated purchasing agent to supply five Missouri co-op stores with petroleum products. True to the U. S. co-op tradition, his Consumers Cooperative Association at first steered clear of any sort of production, operated simply as a wholesaler.

Then, gradually, Cowden's C. C. A. began to produce goods itself. By last year farmers were killing flies, painting barns, greasing tractors with C. C. A. products, and C. C. A. had sales of $4,425,000 (last fiscal year), of which more than half was gasoline. Also, it had 120,000 steady customers and a $200,000 warehouse-office-factory in North Kansas City (Mo.).

Meanwhile, big oil companies put up too many gasoline stations, and price cutting took so much of the profit out of gasoline retailing that even a cooperative found it hard to save much in the spread between the wholesale and retail prices of gasoline. So, last year, Cowden got his board of directors to vote for building a co-op refinery. This week, near bleak little Phillipsburg on the Kansas prairies, the new $750,000 plant is making its first run of gasoline. Middle-sized as refineries go, it will supply 40% of C. C. A.'s needs. But Cooperator Cowden was still not satisfied. In November he addressed two co-op regional assemblies, suggested the purchase of oil wells. They cheered.