Walter Cline Interview - Walter Cline Interview [part 3 of 6]

PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL Topic: Drilling in North Texas Name: Cline, Walter Interviewer: Boatright, Mody C. Place: Wichita Falls, Texas Tape No.: 47 Date: August 13, 1952 Restrictions: None C.-I had completed the well, this pretty well set me up for all my necessary down payment expense, since I was planning to do most of the drilling myself, except I didn't have any cash to pay my roughnecks.

I went down to the old former State Bank at Burkburnett of which Mr. Bob Moore was president and my good friend Will Daniel, who was later associated with me in the drilling of the Fowler Well, was cashier, and again told my story of one wife and two children and no money, a contract and a desire to go to work.

And Mr. Moore and Mr. Daniel loaned me a thousand dollars with only the collateral mentioned.

We drilled the well, got along nicely and bought some other rigs and made some money contracting

and during my residence at Burkburnett, I served on the school board and was elected mayor twice.

I might interject here that I've also been mayor of Wichita Falls,

and I'd like to tell because it's true that I have never had political opposition.

I've never had to run for office nor ask anybody to vote for me.

The, uh, the plain people just riz [rose] up and demanded my services and in the two Texas communities I have been elected mayor without opposition, which means with the unanimous consent and approval of the entire citizenry.

But, the record also shows that in each community I served one term of two years each and went out just like I went in.

I, uh, I lived at Burkburnett until November of 1917, when I moved to Wichita Falls and continued to operate in and around Burkburnett.

In 1918, I had three rigs and, in the late summer, one of them was idle.

S. L. Fowler who owned a cotton farm joining the corporate limits of Burkburnett on the north wanted to dispose of his farm and buy some ranch land, but it being a homestead, it was of course necessary for his wife to join in the execution of the deed.

Now, there's been a good deal said about Miss [Mrs.] Fowler having a dream or premonition of some kind that there was oil on the land.

I don't know that Miss [Mrs.] Fowler ever said or anybody else in the family ever claimed that she had any dream or premonition.

I do know that her position was that there had been oil wells drilled and holes drilled in an attempt to find oil in and around Burkburnett in all directions

but never had been an effort made to get oil on that farm,

and that she was going to insist that before the farm was disposed of, that one well be drilled, a test well to see whether or not there was any oil on it.

There was - at that time - Mr. Hardin, J. G. Hardin, was living and Mr. Joe Staley, and Mr. Moore, Mr. Daniel, Mr. A. P. Lipscomb, and a group of men, some in the hardware business, some in the drug business, and some in the clothing business, banking business.

It was a small community and a very fine community of the finest people that I've ever lived among.

And S. L. Fowler and his brother Movle [?] were two of our neighbors and friends.

So, down in front of Luke Staley's Drugstore where we usually congregated and did our whittling and settled really heavy problems,

S. L. broke the news to a group of us that he wanted to dispose of his cotton land and get him a piece of ranch land

but that his wife thought they ought to drill a well on the land, and that he didn't have money enough, and was gonna have to get some help, and he wanted to know if any of us would be interested.

Well, there was nothing particularly favorable to encourage anybody to want to spend any money or time or effort drilling on the Fowler lands.

On the other hand, there was nothing that definitely condemned it.

So we sat around and decided that just as friends and neighbors, that we'd just do our Boy Scout good turn by putting in a little, not enough to any of us, but maybe enough to poorboy a well down.

For example, I had this idle rig. It couldn't hurt it too much to drill a couple of thousand feet with it,

so I offered to put my rig in and my services and my tool pusher's services, who was then Red McDowell,

for a thousand dollars worth of stock in the company to be formed

and that got rid of the drilling part of it and the supervision.

Then the Cicero Smith Lumber Company, as I recall it, through Mr. Graham, let them have the derrick.

Now whether they took the stock or just let 'em have the derrick with the understanding they'd salvage what they could and pay for it, I'm not clear, but I know we got a derrick without any cash outlay.

And then the boys began to put up a little money, and Mr. S. L. Fowler, I remember, put in $500 to start with.

I think his brother Movle [?] put In an equal amount,

and A. P. Lipscomb put in a $100 and W. Daniel put in a $100 and Joe Staley put in two hundred, and J. I. Staley put in a hundred, and Joe Ferguson put in a hundred

and Alday - the Alday boys were up there then and one of them was the city attorney, Martin Alday.

Martin Alday drew up the papers and he took fifty or a hundred dollars worth of stock,

and we --we got the -- somebody with the Austin Bridge Company who was then repairing the Red River Bridge north of Burkburnett.

It was then privately owned by a group of stockholders including Mr. Hardin and Mr. Staley and Mr. Willis and a bunch of fellows

and they got them to take a few hundred dollars worth of stock and some gentleman whose name I've forgotten, lived down at Grapevine, he took $200 or $250 worth.

And we got enough money there committed to look like we could afford to drill a well.

The question of location then came up and we decided there wasn't any use in pulling a whole lot of sand, going way out in this cotton patch, and we'd drill it reasonably close to town.

So we went in right north of a hog pen that was east of S. L.'s house with a lane through there and a gate.

Drove out in the field where we had driven a stake and drilled our derrick.

I'd like to interject here the statement that there's been very few discovery wells brought in that the myth hasn't started that

they decided to drill a well on a given ranch or a given farm or a given plot of ground and they started out and it rained like the devil or they broke the wagon wheel or the truck broke down

and they were already on the property where they wanted to drill and they were half a mile or a mile from the location and they said, "Oh, well, hell. Let's just unload it. One place is as good as another. We're on the right land. We'll drill it here."

Well, now, I've heard that.

I've heard it about the Fowler well and I've heard it about practically every discovery well that's been drilled in Texas in my lifetime,

and I have yet to find a single instance of where that's true.

I just don't think there's a bit of truth in it.

I know it's not true in so far as the Fowler well is concerned.

We drilled the Fowler Well right where we intended to drill it and right where we drove our stake.

And that definitely settles the drilling of the Fowler Well.

We drilled the well and this is interesting from the standpoint of the Internal Revenue Department.

We had one sheet of paper with a little green piece of wrapper on it, that marked "All Day Funnies" and "Free", and he drew up one paragraph

and it said, in effect, "We, the undersigned, agree to give the amount set opposite our name as a subscription for the drilling of a well on the S. L. Fowler farm.

Should oil or gas be found in paying quantities, a company will be formed under the laws of the State of Texas with a capitol stock of $12,000 to be known as the Fowler Farm Oil Company."

Now, that, in effect, was the original agreement. That's what we signed.

And I took a thousand dollars worth of stock as per our jawbone agreement, for the use of my rig and for me and my toolpusher supervision and whatever upkeep was necessary.

The other boys either put their money on the line or made satisfactory arrangement and we dug the well under that commitment.

Now the interesting part about it is, and you gentlemen might rehearse this in your mind, was that an investment as an individual, was it a co-partnership or was it a corporation?

We had eighteen different decisions from the Revenue Department, fought over it for ten years and they reversed themselves seventeen different times during the ten years, I'm sure.

Now, nobody knows what it was.

We was just a bunch of country boys that was trying to help a friend. (laughter)

We got the oil.

We organized the company, but we did not get the oil as an organized company.

The paragraph itself said, "If oil or gas is found in paying quantities, then a company shall be formed with a capitol stock of $12,000."

We found oil as a co-venture, a co-partnership, looks like.

And, anyway, that's the position me and my tax attorneys took. We had a heap of fun with it 'cause carrying through on the Fowler Well, it uh -

it flowed - was not a great big well like has been rumored --

it flowed at the rate of, I'd say, from 1500 to 2500 barrels a day, which was roughly -- make it estimated at 2000 barrel well, flowing well,

and uh, - it was an edge well.

And we -- my experience that I've referred to a time or two before in folks recognizing me as a kind of a formation man didn't hurt us any.

I didn't like the color of the last six inches or a foot of cuttings we got out of the bottom of that well, so before we went much further, I suggested that we look around, do a little shopping.

Everybody wanted to buy us out. We had a big farm with a flowing well on it, and oil was high as a cat's back.

The war was on and two dollars a barrel, two and a half, later went to three to three and a half or what-have-you.

And all the major companies wanted to buy it.

Without going into all the details about negotiations we finally appointed a committee.

Under our set-up, I was vice-president and general manager, and S. L. Fowler was president and then there was a board of directors.

Anyway, Movle [?] Fowler and S. L. Fowler and myself finished up in Mr. Brown's office, E. L. Brown, president of the Magnolia, at Dallas.

After drilling one more well a little south and east of that well

and it also flowed

and we sold it for a million, eight hundred thousand dollars, which is a reasonable profit on a twelve thousand dollar investment.

That's what I like about playing a game instead of a business.

That's a reason able profit. You can afford to wildcat a while on that, you know.

Anyway, we -

we sold the property and then I took a contract to drill a well north of the discovery well,

and - until a year or two ago when the moths and rats got through eating it up, I had a fur coat that hit me at the ankles.

Erv Daily and myself were about the same size and I told Erv, I said, "Erv, when we dig that well, bud, we're gonna get salt water."

He said, "You're crazy. They're gonna get oil all over that place. And we sold it out ten cents on a dollar, too cheap!"

I said, "Well, let's just make a reasonable little wager. We can't have any fun just sitting around here." (laughter)

So we went down to Joe Ferguson's place -- Joe's still living here in town.

Well, measured up and we turned out to be the same size and height, and we ordered a $500 fur overcoat, ninety-five heap of fur overcoat in those days.

Wool-lined with fur about that thick on it.

Mink skin or something, I don't know what it was, but, my God, you couldn't wear it anywhere this side of the North Pole.

We drilled the well and it doggone near flowed salt water.

My bet was that it would be a water well and his was it would be an oil well so I get the coat and he pays the check.

But the Magnolia - I played golf with Mr. Frank Falkner a year or two after we sold them the property.

He was a slow talking, easy-going, delightful gentleman; never did believe in these technical experts.

His observation with reference to all these technical men was, said, "Walter, there hain't nobody knowed nuthin' about what's down there,"

and he just didn't believe.

But he could take a map and spot more good oil wells on it with trends and things than anybody you ever saw and was a grand fellow.

But I asked him, I said, "Frank, I don't want to scratch the scabs off of anything, but how did you ever come out on the Fowler purchase?"

He said, "Walter, I've already issued instructions to all of my men -- not any man, anywhere, anytime, to ever make another trade with you."

He said, "That's your last trade with my company. We're just through with you."

But the drilling of the Fowler Well, of course, was the big kick-off.

The regrettable part about it was that in those days there was no restriction, no effort at conservation; nobody tried to help or do anything and they drilled on that [muffled sound] place.

They drilled wells on every 50 foot lot in Burkburnett and organized the companies for a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, put the stock on the board down here on Ohio Street and just broke - multiplied hundreds of thousands of widow women and working people.

Didn't know anything about (I'll get it in a minute)- in the oil business, and the ---

Up at the Baptist Church one afternoon --- I had been appointed on a Conservation Board in the oil business by the powers-that-be at Washington,

and there was - they were undertaking to stop the waste of manpower and material in steel and lumber, building derricks and setting pipe on every 50 foot lot, you know, when you could drill one well to five or ten or twenty acres and get all the oil there was on it.

And we had this mass meeting up there to appeal to these people's patriotism.

And our good friends, C. H. Clark and Roy Jones, both of whom are now dead, attended the meeting with me but, as usual, I did the talking.

And I made my very best plea, you know, purely on patriotic and economic grounds, that there was a tremendous waste during a serious war period of badly needed steel, of lumber and of man power,

drilling these wells every 50 feet when it wasn't necessary and the total recoverable oil would be less,

and everybody, inevitably, that invested in them was going to lose money. There was just not that much oil under the ground. It didn't make sense.

Well, as Mr. Ed Howard [?], the owner and editor of our newspaper, he was in the audience up there, said later, 'If they'd 'ave just been two quarts of bootleg whiskey in town, they'd 'ave hung me.'

They'd just ran me off and went on drilling wells.

There was no law to prohibit it and they had a couple of lawyers up there who advised them.

One of them asked, you know, and said "Where is Walter Cline's jail? He talked about what you can't do and what you can do."

And I hadn't talked about it at all.

But there is one other angle to it that to me is pathetic.

I had a little tin garage out on the alley back of my house. I had bought an extra lot and added to my house as my family increased, you know. We -- Mrs. Cline and myself just kept declaring dividends.

And, about the fourth or fifth one that came along, I was just crowded for space,

so I bought a little more land and enlarged my house. So I had an extra big patch of land right next to the Methodist Church.

And I had a little tin garage out on the alley,

and an old Model "T", you know, that Mrs. Cline would get up before daylight and boil a kettle of water and she'd go out and pour and I'd crank.

And, of course, it'd kick me over against the side of this building a time or two and sprain my wrist once in a while.

But I'd nearly always get it to hitting on one or two and then I could head her up and -- I'd back out of there - going out to look for oil.

And I was then drilling for Allen & Strauss over in the Wagner Brothers' lands, Jeff and John Wagner's ranch, and J. W. Culbertson [?] had an interest in it,

and I'd go over there and work all day and get back home after night, you know, just doing a little contracting and trying to get a little interest in a little lease.

Well, when this boom came on, I was living down here and had sold my place to one of my drillers up there who was still living at Burkburnett.

He leased it.

I think he got 20 or 40,000 dollars for a lease on those two corner lots.

They went out and moved my little tin garage off and drilled a well right in my backyard, right where my garage was where I had been cranking up and got a - the cussedest flowing well you ever saw.

We're smart, ain't we?

Well, the - about the only other thing of real interest, I think,

that has happened to me in so far as drilling oil wells is concerned,

was drilling the discovery well north of the Canadian River in Hutchinson County in the 1920's and I could not give you the exact year.

After the war, I hired a young mineralogist. He's still here in town. Name is C. W. Clark.

And his wife and children had been staying at my home for a while

and the Armistice came and he didn't have any job, but he did have a whale of a good education, a lot of keys and degrees and things from California, and Illinois, and Wisconsin and --

so even though he was more of a mining engineer than he was an oil engineer or a geologist,

I told him I'd take him on for a year and paid him a salary of $500 a month and gave him a Ford car and a helper.

The helper, of course, was on my payroll, too.

And he wanted to know what I wanted him to do and I told him I wanted him to go the mountains of New Mexico and start back down the Canadian River and just

meander slowly back to Wichita Falls, figuring it would take him about a year. I said, "Somewhere between here and New Mexico there's bound to be some more oil,

And I'd just like to know in the general vicinity of where it is."

And we'd try to punch a hole or two in the ground and see if we could find it.

And I went on over to Louisiana and started fishing and --

He must have worked five or six months and I got a wire from him one day saying he thought he had found something. I came in and met him here.

He hadn't plane tabled it but he did have a contoured geological map from outcroppings on the Canadian River and out on the property of the old Dial Ranch,

and some of the Whittinburg lands.

And the Dial heirs, the property was in the hands of the bank up there in Amarillo,

and we arranged to take a lease on it.

And I leased it and agreed to drill a well on it. And, by the time I got through with my leasing and commitments to drill the well, I realized I had my boat just a little bit overloaded

so my friend Roy Jones of the Panhandle Refining Company just said he'd come in on the ground floor with me and I never did build any basements in any of these things I had anything to do with.

When he came in he just looked at my books and saw how many checks I had written and gave me half of it back and that's all there was to it.

And then we started drilling the well. Well, it was a tremendously expensive operation.

We were a long way away.

We had to go clear to Dumas, you know, over there in Moore County to get across the river.

The way we got across when we went up there with automobiles, we'd - we'd go to the river right near George Whittenburg's place and he had a big powerful roan horse with a strong cow-hand line.

And he'd drive you down to the edge of the river if the water was low.

Make you kill your motor, and he'd hook on to your front axle and tie that rope onto his saddle horn and spur that old roan and he'd take you through there.

He wouldn't let you run your motor cause there's quicksand all in there, you know. You can get out there and you can sink up to your armpits before you can say how do you do.

And he'd drag you through there and charge you five dollars for crossing -- five dollars over and five dollars back. But it was worth It.

But in moving in there to operate, we had to find a bridge. We had to go in north of Amarillo, then came this long haul back.

Anyway, we finally got some oil.

By that time we had easily a quarter of a million dollars tied up.

Roy and myself decided that before we went any further, we'd better get us another partner, and we went down to Houston to try to talk to some of my friends.

Went in to talk to my old friends, Bill Parish and Lee Blaffer and they couldn't see it. They said they'd have to take it up with their geologist.

He didn't think much of it. Said he believed he could drink all the oil they'd get anywhere in that plains country.

And so we couldn't deal there. We went over to see Underwood Nazro, and Naz was a pretty good golf playing friend of ours and a congenial cuss. We -

I had done quite a bit of work for the Gulf and had some partnership properties with them.

And we went in and talked our best and showed him our map and had some of our cuttings and

a sample of our oil and everything else and he just laughed at us

and he wanted to know whether we wanted him to throw the map out of the window or throw us out or he'd take us out to the golf club for lunch and play golf with us.

Well, that wasn't what we wanted at all. We had to come back and go ahead and drill another well.

The second one flowed.

And when the well started flowing, of course, the Texas, and the Magnolia, and the Gulf and everybody else wanted to see us,

but we had suggested to Bill and Lee, and Underwood Nazro that the next time we came back, we wouldn't come at all. They could come and see us and then we'd write our ticket.

Wouldn't offer to let them write one.

And sure enough, when we made the deal, we made it with Underwood Nazro and wrote a pretty good ticket.

He wrote us a check for $500,000 apiece and then agreed to drill a group of wells,

on the books, so far as we were concerned. The company would pay for them and charge us on the books and if, as, and when our proportionate part of the oil paid the money back to the company, why,

they were even, and then we started participating again.

That's - those two are the outstanding discovery wells that I've ever had anything to do with.

I've done a tremendous lot of wildcatting and got enough fool's oil to sink a battleship and had enough heartaches and fun.

They - it never has lost its appeal to me as something to take just as it comes.

When you drill a dry hole, just get off of it, that's all.

There's no use in standing around moaning and going over talking to the banker. He knows just exactly how much you owe him.

And if you owe him too much, why, he ain't gonna bother you 'cause he thinks maybe you can work it out easier than he can. If you got enough collateral, though, he'll take you over promptly.

The -- the only other -- my -

bragging a bit - my personal experience have been very happy.

I've been rather prominent in Rotary International and

handled the convention at Ostend, Belgium, and did it to the entire satisfaction, I assume, of Albert, the then king of the Belgians.

He came over and delivered my welcome address for me and was my guest at luncheon.

Following which he had me at a luncheon at Brussels, and gave me the same decoration he gave Lindberg for flying the ocean, the Knight Commander of the Order of Leopold,

whatever that is.

It was about half as big as a pound sack of coffee.

The bank won't loan me a damn cent of money on it, I can tell you that much about it. But it's a nice compliment.

And then on one of my trips over to Europe, Miss [Mrs.] Cline was with me, and my British friends kindly

presented us at Buckingham Palace and Miss [Mrs.] Cline did her little court squatting. Got out of it without getting tangled up in her underskirt or anything.

I was kinda proud of the old gal.

She told me later - confidentially - that it wasn't any different from the way we used to play it out in the pine thicket back of our house in the piney woods of Louisiana,

kinda serious and solemn like.

But we've enjoyed our Rotary contacts and have had a lot of honors.

And with my Shrine activities, I've had all the boys could give me and as Imperial Potentate,

I had a year of handshaking and cocktail drinking and late

hours and too much eating and following that, I had a heart blowout.

And that's what sidelined me to watering the yard every other day.

But during my Shrine year - this will tie in indirectly with your Southwestern history --

when I was in Hartford, Connecticut, Colt Firearms Company's plant --

Mr. Stone, who was then president, was also a member of the Shrine, and he particularly requested the boys to let him handle the present for me.

And he had an exact replica made of the old .45 frontier Colt six-shooter.

Of course, it's beautifully engraved with pearl handle and my initials on it and in a mahogany box and a silver plate on it and all of that.

And we had a nice crowd of two or three thousand Shriners and a nice meal and a nice entertainment program and then the

time came, as the kids say that went around with me, 'for Pop to get his loot.'

You always get a present, you know, wherever you go, and they called it "Pop's loot."

And - they'd -- when they didn't go with me, you know, I'd ask the boys at each temple - I didn't want to lug it around with me, you know; I might be in Canada or Mexico or somewhere -

I'd suggest they box this and ship it down home to me.

I'd be gone a month or six weeks, and come in, you know, and the kids would say, "Well, Pop, your loot's been rolling in. You did pretty good on this trip."

But, Fred Stone called me over and opened this box and took this six-shooter out and he said, "Now, Imperial Sir,

as a president of and representative of the Colts Firearms Company,

I want to make you this present as a token of the very deep appreciation my company has for your section of the country and particularly your state."

He said, "It was the manufacture and sale of this particular instrument, this weapon or its forebear, of which this is an exact duplicate, that made possible