Wanda Jablonski

Who was Wanda Jablonski?

Wanda Jablonski 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 was at St Georges School Harpenden in England til July 1937, she gained her school certificate and got the form prize in July 1938 before leaving to study in America. 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.

Jablonski began as the oil editor at the Journal of Commerce, where she made her mark with an 1948 interview in Caracas with Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, then the Venezuelan oil minister, which cleverly synthesised the developing nations' viewpoint, in those days rarely heard in the west hemisphere.