Walter Cline Interview - Walter Cline Interview [part 5 of 6]

PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL Topic: Drilling in North Texas Name: Cline, Walter Interviewer: Boatright, Mody C. Place: Wichita Falls, Texas Tape No.: 48 Date: August 13, 1952 Restrictions: None

C.: I think the fact that Belew had a widespread reputation over the southwest as being a bad man--he was a deputy sheriff, however, in Oklahoma--and reportedly had killed a number of men.

I don't know anything about it.

I do know that he came over here and got a little unruly and it was necessary for--to have a little shooting over him and he got the worst of it.

But that attracted a lot of attention.

That got more publicity than the killing of a half a dozen ordinary, mill-of-the-run citizens would because he was supposed to be a professional killer.

Whether that's true or not, as I say, I do not know, but he had that reputation, and the killing of a fellow like that is news.

And I think a few things like that--we did have a section in the northwest extension from Burkburnett and--I don't know whether it was--some kind of a town they called it out there.

There was two or three little towns that sprung up, but it finally developed into a kind of a segregated toughy division of the Burkburnett oil development.

It seems like nearly all the--the real undesirable characters drifted out there in one little section.

And they, however, didn't create too much trouble and were not too much of a problem.

We--we brought Rangers in here a time or two--mostly over the dispute over the title for the river beds.

You know--in between us and Oklahoma.

But I'd say that for the tremendous opportunity and the amount of easy money and the number of new people that we had, the reports about crime and depravity and immorality and crooks and thugs and thieves and murderers is a good deal like Mark Twain's proposition.

It's been exaggerated, it's just grossly exaggerated.

We did have some trouble.

That's inevitable.

We have some trouble here now.

We'll always have some.

You have some in every community of this size, and we have some bad boys in town and some bad youngsters out at Sheppard Air Force Base, but our percentage, I don't think, runs any higher than anybody else's.

And I've never had any trouble.

We do have this in this community and always have had until we begun to import some of these fellows from Detroit, and Philadelphia, and Chicago and New York, and the Army.

We had the best behaved group of Negroes that I ever saw.

They were the finest Negro citizens that I know.

They were given a lot of help by the white folks.

We built them as good a school as our own school.

We built them a football stadium and put lights in it.

We built them a park.

We built them a branch library, and we tried to furnish them everything that us people had.

But they've always been quiet and well-behaved.

Ninety percent of the disorder and law-breaking in the Negro section in the past several years has been imported.

The Negroes, some of them, came in here from Ft. Worth and Dallas, but most of them came in here in uniform where the attitude, the social attitude, of the whites and blacks is a little different.

And either they haven't undertaken to adjust themselves to it or they don't want to, but we've had a little trouble with some of them.

But our local darkies are the best group of Negroes I ever saw.

They're just fine.

B.: The exaggeration, you think, has been largely responsible for that [muffled sound]?

C.: No, I doubt that.

I think they--people are just prone to assume that you're gonna have a lot of stinkers and--and they--they anticipate trouble that you may not have and start reporting a lot of things and amplify the little incidents--the little unpleasantnesses and the little law-breakings, for example.

You take my attitude, for example.

When I was mayor--I don't mind saying this and putting it on the record--I notified my Chief of Police and Police Department to let the Negroes play Coon-Can and Blackjack and shoot craps until the time when we got ready to break up the poker games in the hotels and rooming houses and the bridge games for keeps out in the residential districts of the white folks.

They're just as entitled to gamble a little bit if he wants to.

And this thing of raiding every Negro crap game or Coon-Can game or Blackjack game just in order to pick up a fine because he's more or less helpless, just don't go down good with me and I just said,

"Well, let's just treat them all alike.

If you're gonna let them play on one side of the track, let them play on the other."

We didn't have any trouble.

Nobody got hurt on either side of the track.

Everybody was happy.

Answering the question about the attitude of the average farmer or ranchman or town dweller that owns potential oil land, they all run pretty true to a recognized pattern among we oil operators and the men who think we know something about the oil business and try to operate it on the square.

The truth is that you frequently hear, after you've drilled a dry hole, that some major company got to the driller or the tool pusher or the operator, if he's a small operator, and told him to pass up anything they found so that they could buy the piece of the land and later come along and get a larger plot and then they'd develop it.

You also hear that the major companies deliberately drill and run surveys and find table risings and then plug the well, figuring on coming back later.

I can't, of course, say whether that's true in any specific instance or not, but I do want to put into records my own experience of more than forty years as a driller, as an independent operator, as a partner in operation with nearly every big firm of independent operators and the major companies that operate in the Southwest.

And without exception, no man at any time, anywhere, has even hinted or suggested to me that they wanted to do anything except get oil if they could when we stuck a bit in the ground.

I know of no exception to that.

And the major companies, if you got a contract for them or if you're in partnership with them, and start to drill a well, they check you as close as they can, but they depend on you and they depend on you to get oil if you can.

I don't know why on earth anybody would drill a well unless and until he had enough acreage to justify the drilling of it, and if he's gonna spend enough money to drill it, in order to get oil and finds oil, why in heaven's name don't he produce it?

It just don't make sense and I just don't think it's true.

You'll hear it and hear it and hear it.

I've heard it ever since I've been in the oil business.

I imagine I've been accused of it, and I doubtless have because I've drilled and had to do with the drilling of a lot of exploratory or wildcat wells, test wells, and I'm sure I've been accused of selling out to major companies and of being a liar and a crook and trying to beat some poor man out of his birthright.

But I'll say again that without exception, no man in the oil business has ever even hinted or suggested to me, directly or indirectly, that he wanted anything except oil if he could get it out of any well that I've ever had anything to do with drilling.

[break]

The inquiry about my observation of the land owner, the royalty owner, if, as and when oil is found on his property, what happens to him and what he does with his money.

The--the truth is that, in my judgment, they run pretty well true to form.

The--the good, honest, well-intentioned, hard-working, we might even say church-going and Christian, man, almost without exception will run true to form.

He'll take his money and build a Sunday School room onto the local church or maybe tear it down and build anew church as Uncle Gash Hardin [John G. Hardin] did at Burkburnett when he got an immense amount of royalty.

He just built the Baptist a new church and then helped the Methodists build one and helped Hardin-Simmons College.

He helped our own Midwestern University, known as Hardin College for awhile through his bequest.

He helped Mary Hardin College at Belton.

And that was a typical old gentleman with no family, immensely wealthy, couldn't take it with him, and he undertook to do the most good for the future for churches and educational institutions that he could with a substantial part of his wealth.

That's the fine side of it.

There are innumerable examples of that.

We have a dozen oil men living in Wichita Falls today who are making very substantial gifts and bequests to educational institutions, to churches, to foundations for the relief of human suffering, even through the furtherance of medical research or actual, physical help.

And that goes on all the time.

That's running true to form.

There is, however, always, the fellow who has always been a stinker.

He--he's at heart a loafer and a cheat and due, usually, to the thrift and determination of his wife who works side by side with him, he finally acquires a plot of ground of various sizes, and you go out and drill a well and get oil on that stinker's property and he runs just as true to form as the decent fellow does.

He shows up down in the lobby of some big hotel in a few weeks all dressed up like a sore thumb and grinning like a jackass eating briars, with a fishing head or a blonde headed girl on his arm and leaving the old lady home to continue to throw water down to the calves and feed the horses and look after the farm and keep the children in school.

That is the stinker's part.

And there's some of them.

I am surely not gonna stick my neck out by naming any of them but I know some.

And some of both kinds and I think it's well for the record to show that. I t's my judgment that they carry on pretty well what they have been doing or what they want to if they'd had money enough.

Now some of them are not indiscreet because they can't be.

They can't afford it.

It costs too much money, but when they get the money, brother, they put their tail over the dashboard and start.

And they--they just forget to be indiscreet, discreetly.

[break]

The type men that forty years ago were either roughnecks or derrick men or drillers on a rotary rig or tool dresser and drillers on string cable tools, were somewhat different from the type men you have now.

First of all, the tool joint had not been patented.

There was no Wilson or any other kind of crank tongs.

The only way we could break out a joint of pipe was with two sets of Vulcan tongs or cleats nailed on the floor and put about two men on each side opposite of each other and pull.

And if some sand had gotten into the joint and had stripped the threads off, we laid down two joints and tried another one.

And if we bent the pipe to where we thought it was unsafe, why, we laid it down.

There were--cathead was not used for any purpose, breaking or setting or anything else.

And there were no safety devices at all.

We drove the rotary with a [muffled sound] iron chain that would break at the slightest provocation and if you were standing anywhere within six or eight feet and in front of it, it would wrap around your leg or your belly or your neck, flop you around a little bit, but it was usually sufficiently greasy and short that nobody to my knowledge was ever killed.

Some of them had little skinned places on their shanks and their arms or hands where they were pulled into the sprocket before the driller could reverse his engine.

And there was no guards, nor guides, nor nobody that knew anything about steel helmets, brass toed shoes;

and nobody bothered to turn over a board if it had a nail sticking up in it, or pick up a loose piece of pipe to keep people from stepping on it.

There just was no thought given to the personal safety and there was no safety devices and the men who were in the oil business had to be big and they had to be tough.

And they had to do work.

A little fellow now can run a rig and do the heaviest part of the work because they've learned to let the machinery do the lifting and do the pulling and do the work.

And we used to do it with manpower and the men being big and rugged and hard, lived pretty hard.

They drank more than you'll find the average boy drinking now.

In the average boom town there was a main street and a side street or two and it was usually occupied by a saloon and then a cafe, a dirty spoon, and then one of these houses of ill repute and then a pool hall with a poker game and a crap game going on in it, and then another saloon and a repetition of the four or five different people who were engaged in business.

And at the nearby railway station or junction point somewhere, they sold hardware and groceries and things like that, but didn't bother with them much out in the fields and out in the cross-roads and places where the men congregated.

As a result, there was a good deal of misunderstanding.

Sometimes, [it was] settled too seriously and quite a few unnecessary funerals, but a lot of fellows survived it.

And there was one outstanding characteristic of those men and women.

The women were as tough as the men or they wouldn't have been out there.

But whenever trouble came, whether it came to one of their gang or not, didn't make any difference whether it was a fellow dealing in a poker game or a crap game or the bartender or one of these girls.

If trouble came to anybody, the best place to go to get money to help them was from that group of people.

Now, whether--whether being tough themselves and being used to the hard knocks softened them up to other people's troubles or whether the money came easy and they just spent it easy, I don't know.

You can philosophize and analyze it any way you want to, but the truth is that you could raise more money out there in that clump of so-called degenerates and immoral misbehavers than you could by going up town to the drygoods store and the grocery store and the hardware store, 'cause those people would say,

"Well, shoot!

They're a bunch of toughies.

They're rough.

One of them girls got killed.

Why, bury her out there on a hillside somewhere.

I wouldn't even help buy lumber enough for a box.

I'm not interested. Ought not to be that kind of people in the community."

But you could go down to the bartender and this old dealer in the gambling house and he'd say,

"Sure.

If Millie or Suzie (or whatever her name was) had a little tough luck, we'll ship her back to Kentucky (or Florida or Pennsylvania or wherever she came from.)

How much money you want from me?"

And I have helped raise and shipped out a good many folks.

Of course, it was necessary due to the conduct of some of the boys and girls to send a good many of them to Hot Springs in those days.

Well, that was a recognized procedure when one was sick, had to go to Hot Springs.

Why, just pass the hat and the rest of the folks who remained paid the bill themselves.

There was a good spot--the point I'm making is--that there was a tremendously good spot in all those tough people.

And I've run, as some of you know, as many or more campaigns than any man living or that ever did live in Wichita Falls, and have raised more money.

And I can tell you that I still go to the tough people in town, I mean the recognized sort of out-of-bound folks, and in proportion to their ability to give, they're liberal, just as liberal as anybody.

And the present day worker in the oil fields is an entirely different chap.

First of all, he's had the opportunity and availed himself of it.

He's better educated.

He's physically and mentally more alert and cleaner.

And he's better trained.

A good many of them with college educations or at least a high school education with some vocational training in mechanics of some kind, and the companies and the larger operators have become more cautious in their employment due to the imposition of a bunch of leeches claiming injuries and getting them a damage suit lawyer and a back injury here and there and a few hernias that they had when they went to work for you.

Why, they've gotten smarter.

That is, smarter than they were.

They still haven't gotten smart enough to beat it, but they're trying to cut down their percentage of losses in order to keep their insurance premiums within the bounds of reason so the ordinary operator can afford to pay it.

It's getting consciously high.

And consciously higher than I have ever seen it.

And it's due entirely to these claims of injury, some of which are genuine and real and a substantial number of which are just pure big claims for the benefit of the fellow that makes the claim and a lawyer.

And the companies now require a complete physical check-up, just--just about like going into the Army, I imagine, almost as thorough and complete and if there's any physical imperfections or if they don't show up with good eyesight and mentally alert, they just can't go to work.

And that's reducing the number of casualties.

The other thing is that it's necessary for fellows to be better educated and better informed than we old-time well diggers were.

A lot of us were pretty dumb, and you can't afford to be dumb now with 150 or 250,000 dollars worth of fast rotary machinery and a lot of things around regardless of all the safety devices, and safe guards and warnings and things that you can do for a fellow, he's still in some danger out there and in order to operate the intricacies in the mechanism of the present-day machine a fellow has to be smarter than the old boys I broke in with.

As a matter of fact, I doubt very seriously even with 25-30 years of drilling experience, whether I could walk out here and operate one of these present-day rigs.

I don't think I know enough about them.

I don't think I'd know which lever to pull or button to push.

There's just too much machinery there for me.

I can't run it.

And I doubt whether my friend Cotton Young or any of us old timers could operate one of these high-powered modern rigs.

I'm quite sure I couldn't.

I'm not even gonna try.

But the type and character of the men, in my judgment, has in the aggregate, just a mean average of forty years span is vastly better.

It's lighter physically and much heavier mentally and much cleaner and I think the oil business is being run by a much brighter bunch of young fellows than I broke in with.

[break]

During my days on the Rio Grande border, east of Laredo, while we were developing this little gas field, we frequently used the combination rig, setting pipe near the gas pay with the rotary and then drilling it in with a cable tool.

I had among our employees at that time a man named Titus.

He was a descendant of the original Titus for whom Titusville, West Virginia, is named and it being one of the pioneer communities in the development of the oil industry, it made Dad Titus a very colorful and a very interesting character to have in camp.

He was quiet with a keen sense of humor and had a lot of fun with the younger fellows around camp.

Possibly the most pronounced eccentricity he had was the habit of wanting to work the graveyard--what we know as the graveyard shift.

That is, working from twelve o'clock at night until twelve o'clock noon.

And he wouldn't work the afternoon shift, though he had the experience and the priority and the right to that tower if he wanted it.

Our boarding house keeper was an excellent cook and she used to prepare a very wholesome and bounteous meal for the men who went out at midnight to eat between eleven and eleven thirty and then packed their breakfast baskets for them so they'd have something out of their lunch pail for breakfast at seven o'clock the next morning.

Well, Mr. Titus was a pretty fair, two-fisted eater and I'd usually push tools between midnight and seven o'clock in the morning.

I didn't care very much to drive by one of my rigs at ten o'clock in the forenoon or four o'clock in the afternoon, it being reasonable to assume that everybody would be on their toes and fighting the bottom of the hole at those hours, but it is interesting sometimes if you want to make a little money in the contracting business to drop around between twelve o'clock and seven AM.

So that frequently I'd saddle up my little broom-tail pony and ride around to the rigs and on two or three occasions, I had noticed that when Dad Titus would come out with his lunch pail and go into the tool room close to the band wheel on his standard cable tool rig, change his clothes, come out and get on his work stool, before he started letting out any screw or trying to make any hole, he'd get his lunch pail, put it in between his knees, look in the top layer, then lift that out and look under the bottom, and if there was an orange in there, he laid it out.

And if there was a banana or an apple, he'd put it out;

a piece of pie, he'd lay it out.

Cake, he'd put that out.

Or a particular tasty salad or something, he'd put it out.

Well, I'd sit in the brush sometimes and watch him and sometimes I'd walk up on the derrick floor.

The procedure--the procedure was always the same, and unvarying.

So about the third or fourth time I'd dropped by his rig just as he went on tower, I asked him, I said,

"Dad, what the Sam Hell is the big idea of eating all you want up there at the boarding house which is a delicious and wholesome and well-cooked meal, and then bringing a well-packed pail out here for your breakfast and sitting down before you ever hit a lick of work and picking at everything that's tasty and good in it and eating it?"

The old man looked at me and smiled a kind of a dry smile and his eyes twinkled and he says,

"You know, Son, I'm a good deal older than you are, and I--I've been around drilling rigs longer than you have.

You'd be surprised how many things can happen to your lunch."

He says,

"You know, the rig can burn down, you don't have anything to eat.

The ants can get in it."

He said,

"It can fall off the nail and a stray dog, the hogs around, they,"

said,

"There's so many different things that can happen to It, that I've made up my mind, and have been practicing it for years and it works out all right."

Said,

"Even though I eat a good meal up at the boarding house, when I get out to the rig, I look through my pail and see what there is that I know I'd like to have if I could save it until breakfast time the next morning but I just can't afford to take the chance and I eat it right then."

Another one of his interesting remarks that he made to me--and this is strictly from a family man's viewpoint--at the time he was working for me, our first two babies had come along, a boy and a girl.

And, of course, I was very proud of them and was bragging to Dad Titus about it and he said,

"Well, that's a nice family, Walter, and raising a boy and a girl with the present expense is a pretty big load."

He said,

"I expect you'd better slow down now and stop your production for a while till you see how you get along.

You're still working for a salary."

I said, "No.

I tell you what my wife and myself made up our mind to.

I ordered a boy and--the first time--and he came as per my order.

Then my wife wanted a girl and, of course, I stood aside and let her have her way and the girl came along.

And now I want another boy.

I'd like to have two boys, so we're--we're gonna go ahead and have another boy, and then slow up."

The old man looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and he said,

"Now, son, I keep reminding you that I'm older than you are, and I've seen more living than you have."

He said,

"You and your wife are kinda set on another boy?"

I said, "Oh, hell, yes.

We've definitely made up our mind to it.

We're gonna have another boy."

"Well," he said,

"you're both young and that's all right if that's what you got your mind made up to, but I'll tell you and you might remember this.

That's a hell of a good way to raise a big family."

As a result, our next two babies were girls.

We had to have the fifth one before we ever got that second boy.

[break]

After the Fowler Well came in and I made about all the money I thought I could afford to pay taxes on, I thought it would be nice to help some of my poor kinfolks and friends, so for several months, I did a little trading in the name of my wife's father, and my wife and my mother--my dad was dead--and my brother.

She had a kid brother in the Army and I had a kid brother in the Army and I did a little trading for them.

And, as a result of which, they were in and out of the oil business before they came home but each of them had $12,000 deposited to their credit and in the bank in cash.

And my mother had fixed up our home and built a piece of rental, property next to her, and my wife's mother and dad had rebuilt their home.

And all my brothers and her sisters and everybody else were in good shape so I felt pretty good about it and had a little time left on my hands and decided I'd just spend it fishing.

I had a boat over on Lake Pontchartrain and I went over to Ms. Cline's home over there at Enid, Louisiana, and got my fishing buddies together and we went down to the boat and went [down the] Tickfaw River until we found one of our favorite camping grounds and parking places and tied up and started fishing.

We were doing fine.

We were near enough a farm house that we could send a big boy down and get some fresh vegetables and grapes and eggs and milk, sweet and sour milk, and country made butter and kill a few squirrels.

And with the fish we caught--the Negro was a pretty good cook--we were doing fine and I was really enjoying it.

And a little bow-legged black boy on a mule came riding up one day and said he had a telegram for me.

I opened it.

It was from my brother-in-law, Martin Rowe who had remained in Wichita Falls.

He said they've brought in a big well on the Bob Waggoner ranch northwest of Burkburnett, another boom on.

Well, that's like a firebell to an old fire horse, you know.

I didn't have a bit of business over here regardless of the number of booms, but if they was gonna have one, I wanted in on it.

And I pulled my boat back and anchored it, turned it over to the boys to take care of, caught the train and came back to Wichita Falls.

Well, it took me two days to get my business in shape over at Enid, get back to Wichita Falls, and by the time I got here, the play in the northwest extension was pretty hot and very high.

I got a map and begun to look around.

I wanted to get my feet wet somewhere, get in.

The only thing I could find was a 27-and-a-half acre lease that John Gilmer of Tulsa, Oklahoma, had optioned

[missing audio] and John had found that he had bought quite a little property pretty high, and possibly he had more option money up and more commitments to write checks than he had bank balance in Tulsa.

[end of tape]