But that recognition came to Gray relatively late in the day, after he had made his mark as a crusading journalist and oil company executive: during the 1950s and early 1960s, Gray was best known as a prominent player in the Alberta oil patch, first as the controversial editor of the Western Oil Examiner weekly and then as manager of public relations for Home Oil.

Gray became editor of the Calgary-based Western Oil Examiner in the spring of 1955, when the 30-year-old publication was changing from a weekly tip sheet for oil investors to a weekly petroleum industry trade journal that hoped to attract advertising from the various service and supply companies operating in the oil patch. Gray was then 49 years old. He had spent the previous eight years working as the editor of a Calgary-based agricultural journal, the Farm and Ranch Review, and thirteen years before that as a staff writer and columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press.

Because Gray had written extensively for the Farm and Ranch Review on such energy-related topics as the allocation of mineral rights to farmers and the export of Canadian natural gas, the owners of the Western Oil Examiner viewed him as the ideal choice for editor of their revamped publication. The publisher was Arthur (Scotty) Shoults, a Calgary advertising agency executive, and the chief investor was Robert (Bobby) Brown Jr., a shrewd oil patch operator who had pulled off a major coup in 1951 when he gained control of Home Oil — then Canada’s largest independent oil producer — by the simple device of quietly buying its shares on the open market.

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