Filling Station Fun

In the staid columns of the Chicago Journal of Commerce last week appeared a matter-of-fact little item reporting the formation and election of officers of an organization called the Grand Knights of the Hose. Its status was apparently that of a fun division of the big, serious-minded National Association of Petroleum Retailers, trade body for the nation's filling stations. Spontaneously organized at an

NAPR directors' meeting in St. Louis, the Knights of the Hose' did not get much further than choosing titles and the people to sport them.

Grand Hose Knight, a job at least analogous to president, is Frank H. Ellis, a Pittsburgh filling station operator and treasurer of NAPR. Grand Knight Ellis, who at ten lost his right leg hopping a freight train, also owns a paint and feed business in Pittsburgh's South Side steel district, once ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Sipping a bottle of beer in his office last week he observed: "Knights of the Hose is a name that fully covers our business, and any Knight or future Knight can readily see that the serious and comic slants of our business are tied together so closely that we cannot tell at times which is serious and which is fun." Grand Knight Ellis gave all credit for the founding of his organization to Chief Pump Knight E. Chat Shanks, NAPR's executive secretary who makes his headquarters in Milwaukee's Republican Hotel, and to Brass Nozzle Knight Wilmer R.

Schuh, NAPR's president. Other GKH titles: Chief Ethyl Knight, Knight Oil Gun, Knight Grease Gun. Knight Water Can.

Nebulous though their plans are at present, the Knights of the Hose will probably manage entertainment at the monster NAPR annual conventions. "Oil Conventions are pretty rough as a rule but our boys are different." said Chief Pump Knight Shanks last week. "The boys have to relax sometimes." Plans for fun at the convention in Rochester, N. Y. next autumn will be shaped by the Grand Knights of the Hose's governing body, the Free Privy Council.

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