‘Prophet of the Pumps’ Suffers Stroke : Oil Industry Analyst Dan Lundberg Dies at 73

Dan Lundberg, the flamboyant and fiercely independent “Prophet of the Pumps,” died Sunday after suffering a stroke while on a cruise to Santa Catalina Island.

America’s best-known analyst of retail gasoline supplies and prices was 73 and had been semi-retired for two years as publisher of the Lundberg Letter. He continued, however, to take phone calls from many of his old media contacts.

That newsletter was the first publication to accurately predict the world petroleum shortage of 1979--known later to motorists across the United States as “the days of lines and hoses.”

Lundberg’s son, Jan, said his father had just outfitted a new sailboat and was on his first pleasure cruise when he was stricken.

“He had a stroke on the island and they airlifted him back to a Torrance hospital but it was too late to save him,” the younger Lundberg said.

Lundberg was a bear of a man who in person peppered his professional pronouncements with a series of expletives heard more often in the radio rehearsal halls where he began his career than in the board rooms of the oil industries about which he later wrote.

First Predicted Shortage

From March, 1979, when Lundberg--using a staff that then numbered 30 employees in the San Fernando Valley and 300 correspondents across the country--first predicted a fuel shortage after Arabian nations cut back production, until his death, Lundberg was at the forefront of petroleum prophecy.

It was a role he didn’t always relish.

“People think that I’m prescient,” he said in a 1981 interview with The Times. “You can make projections, you can make forecasts and you can make predictions--but I don’t do any of that. I compile data and I draw conclusions. . . . That’s it. . . . I don’t have a crystal ball.”

His fame gradually subsided along with the long lines for gasoline, but name-recognition lingered. Supermarket clerks would see his signature on a check and say that they always read his newsletter. He never bothered to tell them that it cost $400 a year to subscribe and that there were only a few hundred subscribers.

Actually, the Lundberg Letter was only the latest facet in a career that began in the 1930s when he was writing radio scripts, which didn’t always pay the rent.

He turned to broadcasting--for CBS--and was a correspondent in Mexico City during World War II. While there he also wrote war propaganda plays in Spanish for Mexican radio. A chance acquaintance, Nelson A. Rockefeller, then an undersecretary of state, was the first to encourage him to pursue his talents for self-promotion.

“You’re a writer,” Rockefeller told him during those war years, Lundberg remembered later. “Write a scenario and star yourself.”

But initially, Lundberg stayed with broadcasting, covering the opening of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and writing a novel, “River Rat,” that received favorable reviews.

He moved to television after the war, hosting a talk show on KCOP, Channel 13, on Sunday nights that featured such guest stars as Linus Pauling and Ray Bradbury.

“Unfortunately,” his son Jan said, “it was opposite the old Ed Sullivan show.”

Independent Expert

Lundberg remembered those days as making him “as well known as an off-brand of toothpaste.” Somewhat discouraged, he recalled Rockefeller’s advice and decided to become an independent expert for an oil industry that he found “fragmented.”

He organized the Serve-Yourself & Multiple Pump Assn. and the California Petroleum Distributors--groups he called “the wild and woolly independents and the solemn commission agents.”

From that evolved an office in a Pasadena hotel where he began to persuade the oil corporations that he could offer them a statistical base superior to their own.

The star had found his scenario, and as it became lucrative he was able to take his family sailing on the Atlantic for five years.

The Lundberg Survey was followed by the Lundberg Letter, and between the two he was now generating an annual income of $1 million.

High-Wire Act

The shoe-string he began on was now a high-wire act.

His staff and stringers were checking not only domestic oil refineries and individual service stations for supply problems, but looking to sea for what offshore oil drilling rigs might provide in days ahead.

He used the forum that his publication offered to filter in his own views on world health and racial injustice. He issued a business report over the Public Broadcasting System and talked of both the commercial and humanitarian needs for increased cooperation among the world’s nations.

And he started the semimonthly bilingual Energy Detente to help shore up the “economic fortress” of the Western Hemisphere.

“He was,” said son Jan, his successor at the corporation, “a man of many facets.”

The successes brought the white-goateed Lundberg an identity that even he had never envisioned. Lundberg was now quoting Lundberg on the international petroleum scene.

“Who in the hell else is there to quote?” he would ask rhetorically.

Lundberg’s wife, Mesa, and his three sons and two daughters suggest that contributions in his name be sent to the Cousteau Society, 930 W. 21st St., Norfolk, Va. 23517.