Cort Dietler started up and sold more than 20 oil business companies before he died last week at age 86.

"He used to say that he started so many companies because no one would hire him," recalled Hal Logan, Dietler's chief financial officer since 1985.

The sale of his TransMontaigne pipeline company in 2006 came after a bidding war between Morgan Stanley and the privately held SemGroup, which initially offered $421 million. Morgan Stanley won out at $668 million.

That year, the Fortune 500 ranked TransMontaigne at No. 269, with revenues of $8.5 billion. But under the subsection "Most bang for the buck," it ranked third among the 500 in "most revenue per employee." With 727 employees, TransMontaigne brought in an astounding $11.8 million per person. It also ranked as the 18th-fastest-growing U.S. company, with 197.2 percent growth in earnings per share.

In other words, as I wrote in an April 2006 column, "SemGroup and Morgan Stanley battled over TransMontaigne because it's an extraordinarily efficient profit machine."

"TransMontaigne was Cort's last big hurrah," said Harry Trueblood, an independent oilman who'd been doing business with Dietler since 1952, when oil was $2.50 a barrel.

"I was working with two oil companies drilling in the Julesburg Basin near Sterling," recalled Trueblood, 83. "We found a pretty good-size oil field in Washington County. Cortlandt was running his first company, Western Crude Marketers. He would buy oil in the field and truck it to a pipeline site or to the refinery in Adams County. He started moving crude for us and did a helluva job."

Trueblood and Dietler were friends for 56 years.

"But he was a very private person," he said. "We did a lot of business together over the years and served on some energy company boards together, right up until he died. And we saw him two or three times a month socially. But I can honestly say I never really knew the inside Dietler."

CFO Hal Logan worked closely with Dietler for 23 years.

"He was always very clear in what he wanted to accomplish, and he was not comfortable with self-promotion in any way," he recalled. "Cort had very basic convictions: Do what you say you're gonna do, pay your bills and honor your friends."

Logan also said Dietler excelled at building companies because he was so good at building teams of executives. Trueblood said, "He could evaluate people as fast as anyone I ever knew. He got a real handle on 'em in a hurry."

Close behind Dietler's yen for building new companies was an urge for new surroundings.

"Every time he started up a new company, he built a new office," Trueblood said. "He loved to decorate offices. We used to joke that every time there was a new building in downtown Denver, Cortlandt took space in it."

Added Logan, "He was a master decorator, an absolute expert at it."

You can't talk to Logan or Trueblood or even Mayor John Hickenlooper for very long about Cort Dietler before his sense of humor is cited.

"He was very self-deprecating; he was always taking shots at himself," Trueblood said. "But that was so that when he took a shot at you, you couldn't get mad."

Dietler's banter with his friends was nonstop, Logan said. "But it often was a way for him to make a point. Everyone would have a laugh at something he said and then later you'd realize the point he made with it."

"I was working with Bert Ladd of Ladd Petroleum," Trueblood recalled. "We needed to haul some oil from Nebraska. Cort sold us the first truck he started out with, a 12-year-old bobtail truck he used with Western Crude Marketers. He said he got as much money from us for it as he paid in the first place, and he never let me forget it."

His friends called his one-liners "Dietler-isms." Like "You never go broke making a profit."

Sometimes, Dietler's friends would laugh all the way to his bank.

"We used to kid Cortlandt after he bought Alexander Film Studio in Colorado Springs in the 1950s," Trueblood said. "They made TV commercials there, and he bought it because it sat on 25 acres adjacent to downtown. He lost his butt in the deal, and we used to tease him by calling it Metro-Goldwyn-Dietler. But eventually he made a fortune when he sold the land. He had the last laugh."

Hickenlooper said he'll miss Dietler's sometimes crusty counsel. "Cort was very kind to me," he recalled Friday. "From time to time he would place his two cents' worth with me. He was held in such high regard by so many people of considerable influence, that the weight of his opinion far exceeded his modest frame.

"And nothing was sacred to him, certainly not a mayor."

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