On this page are photos available for publication. There is varied availability, since some don't have negatives, in which case, we'll send them to you on CD.
At the bottom are recent press releases, for press people to copy from.
Photos available for scanning for BOB boxes or promotions. Please let me know which one(s) you want, or download these if they suit your needs.
Photo 1 Pop in second station, oil cans draining in background. circa 1962.
Photo 2, Forgnone Chevron from street, circa 1965
Photo 3, Gerard climbing out of dune buggy, with Pop there to help, at gas station, circa 1963. This photo shows that I really did grow up at the gas station. I remember this day. The seat in this dune buggy was eventually used inside this station as a customer's waiting/socializing chair.
Photo 4 Bob Forgnone, circa 1987
Photo 5 Bob Forgnone, April 1986
Photo 6 Pop's third gas station, circa 1986. This was just a general photo of the service bay. Of course, there was a can draining in the background, as usual.
Photo 7 Gerard Forgnone, Inventor of BOB. Available currently as a color print.
Photo 8 Gerard Forgnone, Inventor of BOB, in front of South Carolina Capitol Building, Columbia, SC. 1998 Available as color print.
Photo 9 BOB Product shot. Available as color print, or on CD as a 32 Meg color TIFF format.
Press Release for
Why Didn't I Think of That?"
That's what everyone says. "Why didn't I think of that?" The concept is very simple: Let gravity do its job on stubborn motor oil bottles that won't give up their last remaining ounce of motor oil. Although it appears easy at first glance, it takes some unique thinking and hard work to design something small and lightweight, at an affordable price. How does one get the determination to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of one's life just to put a simple little product on the market?
I did it all just to honor my late father.
Growing up in a service station, I got all the simple chores, like picking up trash, and cleaning restrooms. One of my favorite jobs was making sure all the motor oil cans got drained before disposal. My father, Bob Forgnone, did this to prevent the oil from leaking out of the trash cans.
Pop died August 16, 1992, at the age of 67. I was 31 years old, and his death really affected me. In fact, it changed my life. On the way home from his funeral, at the highest point in the drive, I was overcome by a great feeling of loss, then frenzied inspiration. It was as if Pop was telling me something. "Make a tool to hold plastic motor oil bottles upside down." The only name I could have given it was BOB, for "Bottom Of the Bottle," in honor of my father. The company name became POP, for "Plastic Oil Products."
The basic design, the name of the tool, and the name of the company came very quickly--just five minutes. Those five minutes were the pivot of my life. Nothing would be the same afterwards.
My first wife thought I was crazy. (She eventually divorced me, partly because of my drive to get the BOB onto store shelves. I'm lucky that my current wife, Andrea, shares my passion.) A patent search determined that nobody else had ever thought of anything using my configuration. An injection mold was made using inheritance money, and marketing began in January of 1996, after I had quit my job as a payload engineer at Vandenberg Air Force Base. It's not rocket science, but it took a rocket scientist to figure it out!
The gadget is surprisingly simple, yet elegant in its adaptability. The BOB can be configured to stand on its own, or hang from walls, including pegboard. The stand has a flat area for instructions and advertising, a very important feature for people who want to resell it or use it for a promotion. Each unit holds five bottles, and if you want to drain more than five at a time, simply insert the outlet of one unit into the back of another unit.
Mail order and municipal sales are approaching 250,000 units. We are now ready to get the BOB into stores with a recently introduced retail box, on which is printed the story of the product's conception, some interesting facts about recycling, as well as instructions and eye-catching graphics. Now, millions of home do-it-yourselfers will be wondering, "Why didn't I think of that!" as they pick up the bright yellow container.
It's amazing what this $9.95 plastic tool can do. There are over 3.43 billion quart motor oil bottles sold every year in the United States, and people typically leave 4% of the contents in each. That residual oil amounts to about 137 million quarts (nearly 3 ½ Valdez oil spills!) each and every year, needlessly thrown right into your local landfill, because it takes over one hour to thoroughly drain a motor oil bottle. Who wants to wait that long? The BOB is the only product on the market today that can inexpensively help do-it-yourself mechanics save time and money, and prevent pollution.
I still miss my father so very much. I can only hope he's watching now, and that he likes what he sees.
Gerard Forgnone
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