Alexander Balfour Patterson Interview - Alexander Balfour Patterson Interview [part 1 of 5]

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  • PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL Topic: Drilling in South Texas Name: Patterson, Alexander Balfour Interviewer: Owens, William A. Place: Nacogdoches, Texas. Tape No.: 126 Date: 8-4-53 Restrictions: May not be quoted in any form without written permission of A. B. Patterson.
  • O.- This is an interview with Mr. A. B. Patterson at his home in Nacogdoches, Texas. What is your full name, sir?
  • P.- Alexander Balfour Patterson, Sr.
  • O.- And where were you born?
  • P.- Montreal, Canada.
  • O.- In what year?
  • P.- January, '82.
  • O.- Long time back.
  • P.- Yes, quite a little while.
  • O.- Can you tell me something about your parents?
  • P. - Uh. My father's people were Scotch and my grandfather Patterson came over from Scotland to Chicago and was in the newspaper business and Father was born in Chicago. Later, my grandfather went into Tennessee and had his newspaper office and his printing press. And he was very bitter against slavery. And he use to write some of the most terrific editorials against slavery. And the community made threats of damage to him personally and to the press and would give him, at different times, an ultimatum to leave the community within 24 hours.
  • O.- What community was he in? Do you remember?
  • P.- He was around Memphis, I guess.
  • O.- Uh-huh.
  • P.- So, on one particular day -- this was before the Civil War, the war between the states -- the press was dismantled and put on a raft and set on fire and I don't know just what would have happened to Grandfather, but Grandmother took charge and said she'd see that he left Tennessee. They went to Montreal, Canada. And up to the time Grandpa Patterson died, he was with the Board of Trade.
  • O.- What was his full name, sir?
  • P.- James Ballentine. And his - his wife, my grandmother, was, of course, from Scotland also. And Mother's people moved from Georgia to Montreal and that's how Father met my mother.
  • O.- That was for business reasons that they moved there?
  • P. - Yes, they moved for business reasons. And Father went to McGill University, and then at graduation he was the Associate Editor of the Montreal Gazette. And in some way he came in contact with Alexander Balfour of Liverpool, England, and they made some business connection and affiliation and so my father moved to Liverpool, England. Prior to that, two sons had been born in Montreal. So, during his stay in Europe, two more sons, my brothers, were born in Liverpool, England. And then Father contracted a cough
  • that they thought might become tubercular and he bought some land right on the edge of San Antonio in Texas, sight unseen, and left for there. And Mother left for Montreal. And I arrived in January of '82, and I'm the only one of seven sons that didn't have a family name. My godfather was Alexander Balfour of Liverpool, England.
  • At three months of age, I came to San Antonio, Texas, and until 1893, I lived there. I left in '93 to Montreal. Father changed all his business affiliations and connections and moved to Montreal.
  • O.- You had part of your education in San Antonio though?
  • P.- All my education in San Antonio, Mr. Owens, was with an English governess. And Father had a system of up to twelve or thirteen years of age, we were home students and then boarding school students. And the reason he sent us to Canada was because our grandparents were in Montreal. So some of them -- two of the brothers went to a place called Lenixville. Two of them went to a Bourche Grammar School called Bourche-en-haute, and I went to a private school in Montreal, Tucker's School.
  • Then I came to Baltimore in '93 -- uh, in '95. And went to the Morrison Preparatory School. Then I finished the preparatory school education and then, for definite family reasons, while I had matriculated into college in the University of Maryland, I didn't go but came South, back to the old southern country, thinking I might
  • go into the lumber business, but I ended by going to work at Sour Lake.
  • O.- How did you happen to come to Sour Lake?
  • P.- Well, I went to Beaumont first and everybody was talking oil. And I had letters to the Kirby Lumber Company and the idea was that I would go out and learn the lumber business from the ground up and try to become an estimator of timber which could, subsequently, lead into having my own lumber area where I could sell for myself, and so forth. But, anyway, everything was so enthusiastic there in Balti -- in Beaumont, that I just decided I'd try to learn the oil business.
  • We didn't have engineers and geologists in those days. And alot of you gentlemen that know something about the oil business know the old type expression of "all you needed was a strong back and a weak mind." And I had it. And I went to work in 1905 for a firm called Keefer and Gordon and their holdings were in what is known as the old Shoestring at Sour Lake where those strips of land were twenty feet wide and were many hundreds of feet long, so that you just walked from one derrick to another.
  • My first day was digging a little ditch for a little pipeline with a shovel. I stayed there and did various work - worked as a tool dresser. They had some cable tools there at that time. And first
  • rotary rigs. But I left in 1906 to go home and see the parents and friends in Baltimore.
  • And I went in 1906 and stayed several months and then on -- in January '07, I was back in Beaumont and had thought I'd go back into the field and work.
  • But I met Mr. F. A. Leovy who was then with the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company and he convinced me that the proper thing to do was to become affiliated with the Guffey Petroleum Company In Beaumont in the office.
  • O.- Before we get into that, sir, I'd like to go back and get a fuller description of your experience at Sour Lake. First of all, I'd like to ask how you went to Sour Lake on that first trip. Can you describe what happened?
  • P. - Well, the first trip I took a train from Beaumont up to Nome and then there was a little jerkwater line that ran from Nome to Sour Lake, seven miles. And I went up there and went out into the field, contacting these independent operators and there were lots of them, and finally met a Mr. Keefer. And he -- he hired me.
  • O.- He didn't ask you about your experience?
  • P.- Not one bit. And he just - he gave me a slip of paper and told me to go to a warehouse and get a tool and I remembered it to the day -- to the present day and I'll always remember it until the day I die. I always call a shovel a Number Two L. H. R. P. That means Number Two, Long Handled,
  • Round Point. That was what was on the slip.
  • So I went to work with that and about eight days later, Mr. Keefer came by me and I was working with a few men there, making some connections with some fittings. He asked me if I could fire a boiler. And I told him, "Yes, sir." And I had fired a boiler one summer in the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in Baltimore when I was a youngster.
  • My father had me go there to keep me out of mischief in the teen-age. And we had to, in alphabetical order, fire the boilers that operated the machinery and furnished the steam for the blacksmith shop and the machine shop and the carpenter shop and so forth. So, anyway, he told me to come along with me and he took me to one of the cable tool rigs. I found out, however, that I didn't know anything about firing a cable tool boiler.
  • O.- What was the difference?
  • P.- Well, it wasn't stationary in the sense where you had certain controls. You had an even full demand for horsepower, and in drilling rigs you have those high points and low points and the water supply to the boiler was given by a little donkey pump that was on the engine and operated from an eccentric [sic] and a strap that the work just plunged the pump ... [break]
  • O.- Could you continue with your description of the boilers?
  • P.- Oh, well -- the water supply feature was something entirely different than we'd ever had in my school experience and you had to watch the boiler. Sometimes, you'd get more water and you'd be running your steam engine on hot water Instead of dry steam and after me -- my -- I was always afraid of burning the boiler. And I'd run back and forth and finally the old driller told me, "Son," he said, "Everythings all right. I'll let you know when to go out there." So, in reasonable time, I became familiar with the little old 42 horsepower boiler and made a reasonably good tool dresser for a short time. And it was while I was doing the tool dressing work that I left and went back to Baltimore in 1906.
  • O.- You were with that one company the whole time?
  • P.- Absolutely.
  • O.- Yes, sir. Well, where did you live while you were there?
  • P.- In a little old shack that had three or four rooms in it and a boarding house connected with it and I think I paid 18 dollars a month for room and board, three meals a day and a reasonable place to sleep. No very modern accommodations.
  • O. - Uh-huh. No sanitary facilities there?
  • P.- Absolutely not, and most of the baths we took were out In the field, either water out of the end of a joint of pipe at a rig or some little knocked-up-quick shower bath with maybe a tin can with perforated bottom to it so the water would spray out of It.
  • O. - Yeah. P. - But it was -- we worked 12 hours a day. We'd go on at midnight or -- one tower would be midnight to noon; the other tower would be noon to midnite. And, of course, everybody knows cable tool. There's just two men to the crew, driller and tool dresser. But, as I say, when I left in 1906 and stayed in Baltimore a month or two and then I came back to Beaumont. And then I met Mr. F. A. Leovy and went to work in the Gulf office in Beaumont in the old Weiss Building.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- And that was January 1907.
  • 0,- Yes, sir.
  • P.- Later, in that year, I did one or two phases of operation. In those days, the selling of crude oil, which was sold for fuel. On the bigger contracts, each company wanted to know more or less where oil was stored, the quantities stored and when these bids for fuel oil deliveries came up, one company would know whether it had the oil or whether it might be able to outbid another and so forth. I went out on several trips then to try to find out how much oil there was In storage of other organizations than the Gulf. I did some confidential work, that reports went direct to the Pittsburgh office.
  • O.- What kind of confidential work, or is it possible to talk about it?
  • P.- Well, I've never known, Mr. Owens, whether that would be -- whether it was ethical or non-ethical. It was done by everybody but the thing was, a refinery out of Dallas, a Texas Company refinery, and it seemed to me that they wanted to know the kind and type of oil that was coming down from Oklahoma and some form of an exchange of that oil for the Navarro Oil Company in Corsicana. And the Corsicana Oil was being then pumped south to some of the Port Arthur facilities and visitors and -- were all right to go into some of those refineries, but not as - to investigate what was going on.
  • And -- so I really never talked about those things and for me to get into that refinery, I had to use an outside person to do the talking for the admittance and I was just a friend without any statement of identification that I was with an oil company. And this particular party got me into the refinery and I was able then to ask certain questions. And I also, on the Q.T., opened a petcock on one or two of the pumps and found out the type of oil, whether it was Okla-homa crude or so forth. Now, I don't know whether that's unethical to talk about it -- It was something that -- In other words, I got into the refinery sort of subtley.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P. Yeah, and -- uh - well, I went from that, to -- that sort of work and scouting and a little lease work. I remember I took one lease in -- out of Lafayette, Louisiana, at Anse Le-
  • bute in which I had Senator Martin of St. Martinsville as my interpreter. And the native Frenchman insisted on one-tenth royalty and we told him one-eighth, but he figured one-tenth was larger. And I had to put in the lease one-eighth and have Senator Martin read it as one-tenth.
  • O.- I've heard that story dozens of times--
  • P.- I tell you that--
  • O.- You took it.
  • P.- I took that lease. Yes, it was an old man named Hebert, and I became-- I did some work then under J. F. Fisher. John F. Fisher was the general superintendent of the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company.
  • He had the pipeline and the production properties under him as a general direction [sic]. They had their pipeline supervisors; they had their producing super-visors. And the executive head at that time, then, was Mr. Markham. And Mr. F. A. Leovy. Charles H. Markham. So I went out on a number of trips as his special representative to transmit instructions to some of the men in the field and also to confer with them as to some of their ideas and why they couldn't do this and why they couldn't-- And in return, bring that back to Mr. Fisher. And I had an office in his quarters and had my little office secretary and so forth.
  • Then I went out and scouted at Markham in Matagorda
  • County, Texas. My first trip down there was with instructions to get some men placed on some leases that the Gulf Company thought they had and the Texas Company thought maybe they had. So it was a case of possessory rights of somebody on the property.
  • And we built little lean-to's just to shed the top where a man could sleep and had to have somebody to bring food out to these different locations and water because if that property was found without a Gulf representative, then a Texas Company man would make a claim that he was on it. And I slept on the Houston Post, covered up with a Chronicle on the ground a number of nights down there. Mosquitoes were something terrible. And I handled the shipp-ing in or transporting of the first drilling rig for the Gulf Company. Now, prior to that time there was oil in the Markham Field, or known as the Clemville Field, the Hardy Oil Company, and this was outlying acreage that the larger companies were trying to acquire.
  • So, anyway, I was there and made scout reports and sort of what they might call a junk rustler for any of the operations out there for just a month or two and then I was brought back into the Beaumont office.
  • And then my neat assignment was as vice-president of the Evangiline Oil Company in Jennings, Louisiana. It was a subsidiary that was represent-- controlled by the Texas Company and the Guffey Petroleum. And one vice-president was the
  • Texas Company representative and the other vice-president was the Guffey representative. And the president was Mr. George Davidson, the head of the __ [muffled] interests, the oil interests in Pittsburgh.
  • And I continued in that operation for a short time until we decided to liquidate the company. They had a pipeline from the Evangiline Oil Field to Plaquemine, Louisiana, and loaded oil in barges that delivered to the ice plants and lighting plants and had very little production, the Evangiline Oil Company did. It was a property that was purchased, from my memory, from Bass and Benckenstein. Bass was a man that had operated in Spindle-top. Charlie Benckenstein came into the oil business about that same time and later was the head of the Denton Petroleum Company at Denton.
  • But from -- from the liquidation period of the Evangi-line Oil Company, the Gulf Company wanted me to go to Shreve-port as their representative there, what they called their "agent." They were drilling, no oil at that time. And the Texas Company was drilling, which was then the Producers' Oil Company. I mention Texas Company. It was the operating field end. The production was the Producers' Oil Company until 1917.
  • So I didn't go to Shreveport. I - I told Mr. Markham that I was going back into the oil fields and learn the operations cause I might have my own production someday and if I didn't, somebody else could.
  • And then I started to study geology and some mathematics I could see a lot of the things we were doing in the field was because the man ahead of you told you that's the way to do it. It was sort of precept for precept and there wasn't much - there wasn't anything scientific about it. Most of the work we just did because the man over you told you that's the way to do it. He may have gotten some of it in Pennsyl-vania or West Virginia or what not.
  • So I started to study and tried to figure, "This is gonna be my career and my life." And I continued in that until 1910, maybe 1911 or '12 I don't recall right now, Mr. Owens. But I had blood poison-ing in my right arm from a scratch that I got from an old drilling cable and I thought it was a boil and I waited till I got to a point where I almost lost my arm, but, so the doctors told me, to get out of the field and wait till I got my system back in shape.
  • And I went to Mr. Leovy of the Guffey Company and told him my problem and what I had to do-- stay out of the oil fields and get proper food and proper rest and proper medication if necessary. So he arranged for me to write as the Oil and Gas Journal representative of Oil City, Pennsylvania, the operations of that Gulf Coast area. I had to write them once a week and the different companies would give me the dat a of the drilling operations, production figures, and what
  • was confidential, they'd tell me so, and I wouldn't write an article along those lines. Mr. Leovy also arranged with the Wilson Hardware Company of Beaumont to give me the assignment as oil field supply salesman. I was no salesman. I never solicited a day of sale that I know of. But I did write the articles. I made trips to all the fields for the Oil and Gas Journal. I went to the different offices and some of them gave me the emergency, what they called the "Overnight Orders" for material. It was a very material account that I was able to handle for the Wilson Hardware.
  • That didn't last but just a few months and then I be-came affiliated with three oil companies. They were inter-locking directories.
  • There was Dr. Brown of Orange, and Lutcher Stark of Orange and some others and those companies were the C. L. Smith Oil Company and the McNamara Oil Company and the Gray Oil Company and those operations were at Goose Creek and Denton and Sour Lake and in the Caddo area of North Louisiana, up around Louis in the chalk rock. And I got a salary from each company and I got a bonus for each well that would come in, but I-- will you cut that off a minute? [break]
  • O.- All right, sir.
  • P.- I left the connection with these three various companies that I was affiliated with in the year 1914, and became assistant General Superintendant was the title at that time, pf the South Texas and South Louisiana division of the producer's
  • 0il Company with headquarters in Houston. The Gulf Company by that time had moved to Houston headquarters. So had the Texas Company and the Producers Oil Company. And the operations took everything in southern Louisiana and all of the south of Texas.
  • And I continued in that position and capacity until the summer of 1918, and then I moved to Wichita Falls as assistant to the manager of that area, and went through the Burkburnett boom. I think we drilled a hundred and four wells, in that period of the boom, and of course, we had rigs running in Wilbarger County and Clay County and Young County and I came back to Houston in the spring of 1920 as the assistant to the vice-president in charge of production.
  • Now, the Producers Oil Company, as the Producers, passed out of its name and title in 1917. It was due to charter features and so forth. At one time, the Texas Company had a right to refine and sell and transport, but not produce. Later, it was produce and refine and sell but not transport.
  • And then the Texas Pipeline came into existence. And I stayed in that position until the -- the head of the operations of the Gulf coast had a stroke of paralysis, and during that interrum, where they didn't know whether he would ever be active again, I was called on to take charge of the Gulf Coast area. And which I did, and in a number of months it was
  • found that Mr. W. H. Lynes who had been the general super-intendent or who would be now called the Division Manager, would not be able to return to active duty and I was advised from New York that I was to take charge permanently. I protested a little because I felt I had been in the field long enough and I thought I enjoyed the executive end of it and I had started with that Idea, as the assistant to the vice-president and, however, I went on in '21.
  • And in the fall of '22, I became affiliated with the Producers and Refiners Corporation with headquarters in Denver, Colorado. The proposition proposed to me, and which I accepted, looked as though it would be better than anything I might have by continuing with the Texas Company.
  • So I moved to Denver in October of '22, at a very materially increased income, and definitely promises of continued advancement financially. But inside of three months I was very disappointed with the arrangements. It wasn't panning out. The executive heads weren't living up to the agreement so I resigned in the early spring of '23. But nobody would give me any relief. They wouldn't replace me and I went along threatening to leave.
  • And finally, the head of the Texas Company in New York heard of my decision that I wanted to leave and they put a proposition up to me to "come back home," as they called it, and hang up my hat and take charge of the operations in the
  • Rocky Mountains, which I did in the summer of 1923. We were operating in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. And I remained there and enjoyed the operations -- we brought in a number of wells In some new areas -- un-til the fall of 1928.
  • And then I was instructed to leave for southern Louis-iana. And that they were going to start some operations in the bay waters of the coastline, and wanted me to operate and handle that. So I was permitted to pick my own head-quarters. My geology was a little bit rough and I didn't think there might be any production east of the Atchafalaya River, but I did think there would be on the west side of the Atchafalaya River, so I moved to Lake Charles, opened up the office there.
  • However, it turned out that everything we drilled and every area we drilled east of the Miss--- of the Atchafalaya River on the properties of the Louisiana Land Exploration Company, in which we were connected there, with their properties. Every dome came in productive. The result was I was spending a great deal of my time east of the Atchafalaya River.
  • So in 192- I guess the latter part of 1930, I moved to Houma, H-o-u-m-a, Louisiana, and then I could handle, of course, the operations there, east of the Atchafalaya and those of Biffen and Jennings and Opelousas and wherever we had the production. And the operations were going on. And I remained there until the fall of
  • '34. I take that back. I guess it was '33. And I was in-structed to return to Houston as the assistant division manager of the Gulf Coast division. Now, during all these periods of the earlier days, why, southern Louisiana was taken away from the South Texas division and put into the division with headquarters in Shreve-port which was called the Louisiana-Arkansas division. And so, anyway, I moved into Houston in the fall of '33, and was practically there up till the day of my retirement from the Texas Company due to age limit in January of 1947.
  • In the meantime, I did some special phases of operation I went to Trinidad for a short stay as a loan to one of the companies there to work out what they considered a problem which developed to be no problem. And Instead of having to stay seven or eight months, why, it was all straightened out in a month or so. And during that same period, which was 1938, I went over to Venezuela to confer with the Texas Company operators there on something they wanted my counsel and advice on. So, outside of those trips, my headquarters, of course, were in Houston as the Assistant Division Manager.
  • Now, after I left the Texas Company due to retirement, I was satisfied that for five or six months, I would take it easy and maybe travel and relax and the third day, I was almost a psychiatric case. And, anyway, the Hughes Tool
  • Company told me they'd take me with them as a special representative. I told them I was no salesman, but I did know their equipment. And they told me they wanted me to make the contacts of the people I knew and some that some others could not make, maybe. Well, I only continued in that for four months, because my love, of course, was the general operations of a producing organization, everything that went to make up -- the engineering, and the geological and the seismograph, geophysics and the lease acquisitions. It was a general rounded organization and I loved that phase of it.
  • Well, the opportunity came through a Mr. H. S. Cole, Jr. who, at one time, had been with the Texas Company and was a marvelous -- was an outstanding engineer. And he, however, had left the Texas Company and had operations of his own. He had a gasoline plant, a cycling plant at Nordheim, Texas, and he sent for me and said he was going to organize a drilling company in Venezuela and offered me a very lovely opportunity to be the vice-president and operating head under him.
  • So in the summer of '47, well, we made our trip to Venezuela and incorporated under the laws of Venezuela and the contracts for drilling were with the Texas Petroleum Company out of Venezuela and subsequently had to do with the Creole and I continued in that operation until the summer of
  • 1950, and the only reason I withdrew was because I was away a great deal from Mrs. Patterson and my home.
  • The work was fascinating because it was pioneering work. In that particular, area that we went, they were taking eight and nine months to drill wells that - our first well was drilled in four months and subsequent wells were drilled a great deal faster. And it speeded up the general operations of that particular area because there was something that they could copy after. Our little company could do a little bit more about operations than those maybe that --- So I left that organization in summer of '50, so that I could be home more.
  • Our children were grown and independent of us and Mrs. Patterson and I had reached a fairly ripe age where companion-ship was worth something and I did what was called consulting or counseling with certain independent companies. That gave me possibly an average of eight or ten or twelve days a month where I was doing some advisory work, and sometimes supervision of actual field, some special operation.
  • In 1951, Mrs. Patterson felt that she'd like to come back to her old home community which was Nacogdoches, Texas, and I sold our home in Houston and purchased a home in Nacogdoches and moved to Nacogdoches in 19- December of 1951. And I had thought I might not be as active in the counseling end or advisory capacity end of the game as I had been out of Houston,
  • but I would still be somewhat active. It hasn't developed that way. It hasn't turned out that way. I'm a little far from the real active areas. When people want some informa-tion that they think another person has and want it quickly, they can't wait, and they're too many men in the business that could do what I can do as far as I'm concerned.
  • So I'm, I'd say, semi-retired and very happy. My health is fairly good and I miss tremendously the association of so many of the old-timers that are still alive and, of course, the memory of the old-timers that are gone. That, in the early days, meant so much to each one of us because the industry was not large numerically and everybody knew everybody else and the associations were rather close.
  • O.- Fairly soon, I want to ask you about some of those associations, but first of all, I'd like to ask you to make a comparison between the boom that you saw at Sour Lake and the boom you saw at Burkburnett.
  • P.- Well, the difference was that, first thing that would pop into your mind would be the advancement of equipment.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- And we had better equipment than they ever had in those boom days of Sour Lake. We had rigs at Sour Lake that one team could move a rotary rig a hundred or a hundred and
  • fifty feet in a daylight day, the boilers, the pumps, the rotary, the drillpipe, everything in a day. It doesn't take much imagination to know the difference there is.
  • And at Burkburnett in 1918, when the first big Fowler Well came in out there in Burkburnett, the equipment wasn't as large as it is today, but there was certainly a lot more of it. And I think there must have been as high as six or seven hundred rigs running in Burkburnett. The company that I was with, of course, we drilled over a period of less than two years, 104 wells in the Burkburnett boom on several leases.
  • The conditions were not similar to Sour Lake in general, but some of them were definitely similar. We had mud. We had no roads. We had to have teams plus trucks. We bridged slews and gulleys and mudholes. We would give permission maybe if it was on our lease, to some one or two men to bridge that. They could charge everybody that went over it 25 or 50 cents a trip. Our operators would go over free. It saved us lots of money.
  • O.- That was Burkburnett?
  • P.- Oh, yes. O.- Not in Sour Lake?
  • P.- No. Oh, Sour Lake, Mr. Owens, Sour Lake, you are up to your mud above your knees, it seemed to me, all the time I was there. It was black mud. We figured it had about 70
  • percent muselage or glue in it. We used oxen down at Sour Lake. We moved the boilers on sleds, just scows. You couldn't use teams. Sometimes one or two joints of light four-inch pipe, which was lightweight in those days, that was a load for a horse, except mule teams and -- but we had lots of mud at Burk. We had the same sort of sleeping shacks. Our company built camps where we could take care of a good group of men and have a dining room facilities and the individual beds.
  • The cable tool game, you know, up there -- up to that time, a cable tool rig out on a location or a wildcat con-sisted of a shack with one double bed. And the driller and tool dresser slept together. When they went on tower, the other driller and tool dresser went to the same bed.
  • O.- Is that right?
  • P.- Yes. And your cook, maybe, had a little cot. We changed all that as the years went on, but I often felt that I had something to do with it because in North Texas it was the first that had ever been done when I changed our bed facilities for the different crews. And we did that at Damon's Mound, even before the Burkburnett Boom where the night crew had one set of quarters and the day crew had other sets of quarters. The living conditions used to be pretty lacking, but I -- I must say for the industry as a whole, when I went to work and had
  • to find your own facilities, and nobody seemed to care very much about where you slept or where you ate; I saw without any particular agitation from any source the definite picking up of executive heads, taking an interest in their employees.
  • O.- Without the use of ...?
  • P.- Without any organization whatsoever. The Producers Oil Company started vacations for field men before any company that I know of.
  • O.- About what time did they start?
  • P. - Back in 1909 and '10 they were giving their tool-pushers vacations. The same -- under the same arrangement, they would give an office man. They didn't give the roustabouts and the helpers, but they were beginning to give men of lower operators status these vacations. They paid maybe a little bit more than some of the other companies. And I just saw that gradual interest in the men's care and their facilities -- building places so the men could have their families with them, and long before there was ever any union feature connected with the producing branch of the oil industry. But Burkburnett, as most all booms, after they're over, then the good roads come in and the conveniences are built up.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P. - And everything's fine,
  • O.- Well, what about the problem of lawlessness, a comparison on that?
  • P.- There -- there was lawlessness both places, of course. In the early days -- when I say early days, let's go back 1905, '06, '07, '08, '09 - the type of men were not the type that we have today. There was more drinking. There was more immorality. Certainly, there was more profanity, I think, than I hear present-day. And if we want to just say 'class,' we have a better class of men. More education; they demand more of a man's character. In those days, you were glad to get anybody you could get to go to work. And the - it was bad.
  • Now Burkburnett, we had to have private detectives on the properties for the protection of theft-- material, equip-ment. You could lose a boiler, you could lose pumps, you could lose any equipment that was not housed in a warehouse. And with so many rigs running -- it wasn't ethically right, maybe -- but contractors, if they needed bits or needed another pump or an engine, no questions asked. They'd buy whatever -- if that piece of equipment they needed, they'd buy it. They wouldn't ask where you got it or anything. And so that we did have night policemen. We had Rangers out there at one time. When I saw "We," that's industry.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- And, trying to watch. And I know of some of the most ridiculous and comical cases of theft.
  • O.- Can you tell some of those?
  • P.- Well, I know -- I know of one instance where a boiler was moved at night. Had a steam powered generator bolted on the top of the boiler and the boiler hadn't even cooled off. It was shut down for the night and the watchman maybe wasn't watching as he should or he'd gone off to get some beer or some other reason, and when he came back, that boiler was gone. And ---
  • O.- You actually saw that?
  • P.- Oh, I know that happened. Oh, yes.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- One of the -- one of the common stunts was for men to throw into the slush pit unused tool joints -- Hughes tool joints maybe, or anybody else that made them, mostly Hughes. And the well would be completed and the rig would move off and the well was on production. And then, giving the pits time to evaporate and dehydrate, and you get your cracked mud or cracked dirt, at the right time, at night, somebody would come back and get the tool joints that had never been used, worth considerable money, and take them off and sell them to whoever needed the tool joints. That was a very common stunt.
  • And the company I was with had one engine stolen on a lease that was a long- long lease. And the pumper left one end of the lease at night and everything was steam engines then, didn't have so many gas engines and oil burning engines on
  • these pumping rigs. So he walked all the way through his lease checking the oil and the strokes per minute of his walking beam, his pump, and went on up to the end of the lease and then to his pumper's shack and made out some reports and guages and when he started his next round, why, there was an engine gone off of a rig up at the farthest part of that lease. And you can never find them.
  • O.- Is that right?
  • P. - Oh, no. They steal drilling pipe off of racks and maybe they'd make ten or twelve miles that night and get out on roads that you couldn't track any trail because they were dirt roads and everybody's wagon or everybody's car made a mark. So those things -- there were some bad instances.
  • I know of one case where one of the guards of one of the companies was trying to catch a man that was doing hi-jacking at nights. He'd knock people down and take their money and -- So he did his arm and hand up in a false splint with a pistol in it and he deliberately had a big role of bills in his pocket and he went into a little restaurant where he'd followed this man at night and he ordered coffee. And he made a display. He just took a big roll of bills out of his pocket and removed the rubber band with his teeth and then he pulled a bill off of that roll with his teeth and then he got the man behind the counter to put the rubber band back on
  • and he put that back in his pocket. And when he left, it was a very short time when he went around a rooming-house, just an old oblonged, straight walled, wooden shack, tin roof, that this hi-jacker told him to put up his hands. And he just aimed that splint and let go with a pistol and that was the end of that hi-jacker.
  • O.- That was in Burkburnett?
  • P.- That's an actual experience. Yes. Will you--- [break]
  • P.- One instance of definite protest against private guards or Rangers by these hi-jackers and thieves was a case of where we furnished our guards with horses. Each man had maybe one or two horses so that they could alternate in the use of them and not tire them out riding the property night and day. And in one case we found one horse one morning in very bad physical condition. Some "brute," I guess would be the proper word, had gotten a large syringe and filled it with crude oil and injected it in the rectum of the horse. He was taking out his protest or anger against the guard on the poor innocent horse. The horse didn't die. We had to have it treated by a veterinarian. But it lost weight and it was always thin and I imagine the crude oil in some way affected its internal or-gans, its stomach and intestines. But that just illustrates,
  • Mr. Owens, how -- just one case of some of the phases of action by characters that are not very -- very high in the oil fields.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P. - Of course, in the early days, we had lots of fights. Liquor, of course, was the basis of most fisticuffs.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- I know I - when I was working at Sour Lake in the field for Keefer and Gordon I went into Beaumont once or twice to try to get away maybe from the activity and I didn't have much money. They didn't pay large pay. But I would get off at Nome, off the train, and to save a dollar for the hack ride that seven miles, I'd walk the track and time myself. Walk so many miles, you know, a mile every fifteen minutes.
  • And I've seen numbers of cases of when I'd get in near Sour Lake where they'd had some men in fighting and some of them cut up and they'd just hear of them every day. You'd hear of some catastrophe. And it was that way at Humble.
  • At Humble in the early days, on the old Corduroy Road going out to the Hill, I imagine they picked a dead body up almost every day for a year maybe. Oh, yes, it was a vicious time, more like the early day mining episodes that you'd hear about. Terrible type of men. I'd -- but those things are not today. And most companies
  • you know, don't permit men -- they don't say, "You can't drink. You can't smoke. You can't play cards." They just say, "Anything that you do abnormally that brings an obnoxious report to the company and effects the company, we don't want you. You just can't do it." And men now, the drillers, they like good men with them. They like men that they can associate with, men whose -- that have wives, their wives can associate with. We got a wonderful personnel, I think, all through the oil fields today. You'd be surprised to see the different type of men. Now, of course, with all our highly trained technical men, that's helped to bring up a higher degree of morality maybe.
  • O.- Yes, sir.
  • P.- There's the ___ [muffled sound], the geologist, the geophysicist, and men of education. And all likable, fine men, so that it's a very different situation today than the days when I went in in 1905.
  • I had the pleasure always of going to areas in general where the activity was starting and my pleasure in life was the climbing the lad [sic] of experience - ladder of experience, of helping maybe originate some of the practices that are in active operation today. And you had to do a lot by trial and error. I went to the Rocky Mountains and everything used to
  • freeze up at nights or in the winter. And it was a problem. I started burying lines five feet deep and we never had gas lines freeze and we never had water lines freeze. And a lot of the tanks, we put inlets in the bottom with steps like a cellar down underneath, storm cellars, instead of any lines overhead.
  • And it was that sort of thing I always called pioneering, so I went up into the Rockies, I had been to the Burkburnett boom. We had the Humble boom in 1914-15. That was the second boom. That wasn't the early days. We had 21 rigs running there In the year I915. We produced over eight million barrels of oil in the year 1915, our company.
  • And -- so I been In at the start of a number of them and down at the water operations, outside of Goose Creek, where in the early days we built little cribbing out in those shallow two and three and four or five feet of water and a runway out where you could go out to the rigs. There hadn't been any water development.
  • O.- Yes, sir,
  • P.- So in January '29, that was my assignment,
  • O.- Yes, well, on the next tape, I want to ask you for a pretty full description of that water operation, if you don't mind. Just now, I'd like to ---
  • P.- Now wait, Mr, ---
  • O.- Owens.
  • P.- Owens. This is off? [end of tape]