Wanda Jablonski

Wanda Jablonski (23 August, 1920, in Czechoslovakia - 28 January, 1992, in New York City) was a journalist who covered the oil and petroleum industries.

She was the daughter of Polish petroleum geologist Eugene Jablonski, and was immersed in the oil industry throughout her childhood. She and her parents travelled widely, and although she became an American citizen, she developed great sympathy for other cultures - an attribute which as an adult enabled her to make deep contacts across the world oil industry, from the major oil companies to the heads of state of the big oil producing countries. She earned a B.A. from Cornell University in 1942 and an M.A. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism the following year.

She began as the oil editor at the "Journal of Commerce", where she made her mark with an 1948 interview with Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, then the Venezuelan oil minister, which cleverly synthesised the developing nations' viewpoint, in those days rarely heard in the west. She moved to "Petroleum Week" in 1954 and cemeted her reputation, speaking on equal terms with oil ministers and company chairmen. A rare woman in a man's world, she was known throughout the oil industry simply as "Wanda". She then founded "Petroleum Intelligence Weekly" in 1961, which came to be known as the "bible of the oil industry", and ran it until 1988.

She is credited with arranging the 1959 meeting of oil ministers Abdullah Tariki, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, and others to sign the "Gentleman’s Agreement," a precursor of OPEC.

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