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a widower who had immigrated around the turn of the century, lived with them and worked as a butcher. But even as they became more involved in Asbury Park, which had a large Jewish population, in the wider world many viewed the family as outsiders: a 1920 census refers to their language merely as “Jewish.” One longtime friend said the family spoke Yiddish at home.
Mores became a naturalized citizen along with his wife, father, and eldest son, and registered with the Army as America faced World War I, but remained at home. Amid the hubbub of Asbury Park, Mores began a nondescript coal distribution business along the Jersey Shore, an effort that would be transformed into something incredible by his youngest son. Mores continued to work through the war, opening his first butchery down the street from where his father had worked. His children were taught in the public school system of Asbury Park, with life continuing normally in their increasingly crowded neighborhood, where houses and store fronts were being built up.
The Hesses now resided on Asbury Avenue, which was a haven for immigrants. By 1920, Russian and Swedish were both spoken on the 1100 block, where the Hesses lived. Their stone house, one down from the corner, stood a proud three stories tall with a welcoming porch.
Mores’s business expanded as he opened two stores and built another house on Asbury Avenue, delving into real estate. While Mores dabbled in many things but never had great success at any of them, he had strong entrepreneurial energy, trying his hand at produce, then the butchery, real estate, and ultimately coal. By 1926, Mores had moved completely into the coal industry, serving the city’s growing needs. Though somewhat erratic, Mores’s business endeavors likely set the tone for hard work and self-reliance for his sons and daughter.
Meanwhile, Asbury Park was changing. Cars were becoming popular, bringing the wealthy from the cities to the summertime resort, as the New York and Long Branch railroads continued to cart large crowds from New York City and Philadelphia. The Hess family grew up as the area was in flux, with 13 miles of streets being paved, encompassing most of the city’s major intersections. The crowds – which during the summer could reach 200,000 or more – flocked to the beach and to other entertainments, including local carousel rides and amusement parks. Even as they were buoyed by the incoming tourism, residents complained that the growing fleet of vehicles eroded the gravel roads when it rained and brought traffic accidents. Drains were placed around town so that gravel roads could be crossed in heavy rain. Growing traffic also demanded a paid fire department and a police department with a special traffic squad. Just blocks from the Hesses’ home, the first “Hertz you-drive-it” opened, the birthplace of the eventual car rental giant and a symbol of the car’s growing popularity. By 1928, the stultifying traffic congestion required Monmouth County to begin construction of a new highway to avoid a bottleneck in the center of Asbury Park.8
The crowds were not looking only for amusement park rides. On the glamorous beachfront, which had been redeveloped since the damaging 1917 fire, the nine-story Spanish-style residential Hotel Santander was built in 1928, next door to the estate of city founder James Bradley, a manufacturing magnate. Screen actress Myrna Loy took up residence in the penthouse, while Eleanor Roosevelt was rumored to have rented a floor.
The stock market crash of 1929 didn’t immediately bring the good times to an end for the beach town. While Wall Street faced panic and a selling off of assets 50 miles to the north, Asbury Park saw itself as a still-prosperous seaside retreat. The town was booming, with three local banks seeing their holdings rise to six times their value by 1931. To some degree, Asbury Park and its residents were initially insulated from the country’s economic panic.
“A summer week-end in the city finds upwards of 100,000 motor cars within a square mile, a problem with which other cities much larger than this would not desire to contend,” said a guide published in 1931, praising the city’s advances. Municipal garbage collection was starting to cut down on dumping in the city, with ten trucks carrying trash to an incinerator plant. Phones were becoming popular, with 4,130 private lines and 7,120 pay stations in the city by 1931. Gas lines were laid beneath the city, with the gas customers rising 61 percent from 1930 to 1931. Despite the city founder’s preference for gas lights, the Eastern New Jersey Power Company increased electrical output and built an 11-story office building, the Jersey coast’s tallest building.
As Asbury Park’s tourism boomed, Henry Hess, Mores’s oldest son, became a manager at Shore Amusements. Eleven years older than Leon, Henry was the first out of the house as Leon graduated from high school.9 The Great Depression would eventually reach the family. Leon would discuss going to the shore in the summer during low tide to dig up clams to sell to local restaurants and bars. The boys were lucky to make 50 or 75 cents a day from the digs. But it was another example of the family’s work ethic and the hardships they endured. While tourists all around them enjoyed the beach and holiday fun, the Hesses found themselves struggling to make ends meet in the 1930s. As his high school years were drawing to a close, Leon was brought in to help with yet another of his father’s fledgling businesses. The family was unable to send the youngest son to college, although the three oldest children had completed school. Mores went bankrupt during the Depression, and Leon hauled coal to families poorer than their own.10
The hard labor at the coal yard helped shape Leon’s ethic of working long hours as he made deliveries through the weekends. “I worked for my father in a coal yard delivering coal,” Leon recalled in a deposition five decades later. He would later joke in a rare interview that he got into oil because he was “basically lazy” and didn’t want to carry around 100-pound bags of coal,11 which were used for heat and power in the area.
Disheartened by the coal business, where the returns for hauling 100-pound bags were slim, Leon made a critical switch to delivering fuel oil. He saw an opportunity and bet on oil instead of coal as the more economical way to get energy. He would find buyers for the residual oil that refiners didn’t want. So, in his own words, he started a “little oil company” in 1933, when he was just 19 years old.
“I bought a secondhand truck, an oil truck, for $350, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and started a heating oil company and built it up over a period of years,” he said, reflecting on his early days in business during a 1986 deposition. Some other accounts peg the truck at even more of a steal – according to some, he bought the truck in North Carolina, for just $24.60. Whether it cost just $25 or more than 10 times that, the truck became the most widely recognized hallmark of his business. He would have a miniature version of it in his office, and it would be the first of the Hess toy trucks that would become ubiquitous in some family households. Ninety years later the truck would be fully restored and polished, and stand as a reminder of the past in the lobby of his multibillion-dollar company’s headquarters.
Leon had a vision that New Jersey’s steel companies, its manufacturers like Johnson & Johnson, and the state’s other prominent businesses could use Number 6 fuel oil, a product much like today’s residual oil, that others were just dumping. With just a little boiling or light refining, he found, the oil could fetch a premium price. The seven-year-old 615-gallon truck would be used to collect the fuel – which was also known as black oil – from area refiners and repurpose it as a cleaner alternative to coal.
As New Jersey faced the economic depression, Leon was among millions struggling, trying to launch his fledgling fuel delivery business. With his strategy in place for getting residual oil on the cheap to customers, he was able to turn a profit and buy up more trucks.
By 1938, Leon had amassed about 10 trucks and moved the business to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he bought a piece of land on the waterfront, purchased some secondhand oil storage tanks, and started an oil storage terminal on the Raritan River.
The Hess family moved from Asbury Park to nearby Loch Arbour, buying a $16,000 house. His sister, Rebecca, then called Betty, worked as a teacher, and Leon and Harry continued to live at home. Henry, the eldest, had moved to New York City, where he worked as an insurance counselor and lived with his wife, Ada, and son, Robert.
As Leon’s business empire expanded in Middlesex
“Asbury Traffic Relief,”
Asbury Park High School recognizes Leon Hess as a member of its class of 1931, but he identified 1930 as his graduation year in a 1986 deposition.
Thomas O’Toole, “Leon Hess: Builder of an Oil Empire,”
James R. Norman, “Leon Hess: Can the Bottom-of-the-Barrel Oil Baron Get Back on Top?”