History of our Company
R. R. Cortazzo is a locally owned family business operation. Frank Cortazzo initially started the company in 1940. At that time, it was a coal company in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania. He had two trucks and delivered various types of coal to homes and businesses in the Slate Belt area.
In 1946, after World War II ended, Frank bought an army surplus tanker and installed it on a Dodge truck chassis. He equipped it to deliver fuel oil and ventured into the oil business. After a few years of distributing both coal and oil, Frank decided to sell the coal division of the business. From that point on, he delivered only fuel oil and the business grew quickly.
Frank Cortazzo suddenly passed away in 1971. His son, Ray, took the reigns and purchased the company from his mother, Rose.
The 1970’s were a challenging time for fuel distributors. During most of that decade, there were allocations on heating fuels and gasoline. The cut backs reduced the amount of product available to each company to 85% of the previous year’s total. For example, if a company sold 200,000 gallons of fuel oil in January of 1974, they were only allowed 170,000 gallons for January, 1975. It was very difficult to continually supply the same amount of customers each year. Expanding the company with these restrictions in place was next to impossible. R. R. Cortazzo made it through these tough times by also providing complete heating installations and service.
Ray Cortazzo owned and operated the distributorship for the last 45 years. During this time, he and his employees installed hundreds of boilers, furnaces, oil tanks and complete heating systems. They’ve serviced thousands of heating units.
Over many years, with a lot of hard work and dedication to their customers, Cortazzo Oil has delivered millions of gallons of petroleum products.