Brewster Jennings

Benjamin Brewster Jennings (June 9, 1898 – October 2, 1968) was a founder and president of the Socony-Vacuum company, which became, in 1955, the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony), which would later become Mobil Oil, and then merged to become part of ExxonMobil. Early life B. B. Jennings was born to Oliver Gould Jennings (1865-1936) and Mary Dows Brewster in New York City. Both his paternal grandfather, Oliver Burr Jennings (1825–1893), and his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Brewster (1828–1897) after whom he was named, were involved with Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller and had become his partners in running the Standard Oil Trust. Both men had gone west in the California Gold Rush and had set up a successful dry goods merchandise business, outfitting prospecting camps along the coast and around Sacramento. Through his paternal grandmother, Esther Judson Goodsell, B. B. Jennings was a grandnephew of Almira Geraldine Goodsell Rockefeller, whose husband was Standard Oil co-founder William Avery Rockefeller Jr. Jennings was raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, where his father had built a forty-room French Renaissance style home called the Mailands. The building later became part of the campus of Fairfield University and was renamed McAuliffe Hall. He attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. During World War I he served in the United States Navy as an ensign on a submarine chaser and was awarded the Navy Cross.