During the summer of 1942 when I became 15 years old, I started to work as a Swamper for Heldt Bros. Trucks. A Swamper had to do some real rough and dirty work, but the Truck Driver I worked for was real nice and watched out for me so I wouldn't get hurt or killed. One time a drilling rig was about to have a blowout and they were getting drilling mud hauled in from all over South Texas as quick as possible to prevent the blowout. I and about 10 others went to Sullivan City, loaded a big flat bed truck with 100# sacks of drilling mud and then went back to the well. There were lots of other trucks there and we were grabbing sacks of mud and taking them to the roughnecks at a "hopper" as fast as they could take them. I weighed about 90 lbs. at the time and carrying 100# sacks wasn't too easy, but I did it. Got a real good introduction to oil field work that summer.
The summer of 1943 after I had graduated from high school, I went to work for Halliburton Oilwell Cementing Company in Mission, Texas, as a Dispatcher. Got the shift working from midnight to 8am. Had to sit by the phone waiting for someone to call in for service. I would then call the Halliburton men needed to go on the job. The oil business was booming in South Texas then and the phone rang pretty often. Another of my duties was to hose down the cementing trucks when they came back in from a job. I had just washed a truck one night when the boss called. It was around midnight and from the background noises I could tell he was at a party or some place in Reins, Mexico having a good old time. He asked me if truck number so and so had come in and I told him it had. He told me to go out and clean it up. I told him I already had. Then he said for me to go do it again! And I said "Come clean it up yourself. I quit!". And I did. A lot of the Halliburton employees there quit during that summer because the boss was such an SOB. I think they finally fired him.
September of 1943 I started to Edinburg Junior College, in Edinburg, Texas. It's now called Pan American and I think its a four year school. I really dreaded going back to school because of my experience of two years in the McAllen High School. I was really surprised and happy however, that everyone treated me so nice. When the school year began I lived at the school in a place kinda like a dorm called the Executive House. One wing on the lower floor was for teachers; the other wing was for male students; and the upper floor was for female students. There were about six other boys who had all gotten jobs as waiters in the dining room. There were about twenty single female students living there and I had to eat all my meals with them at the student's table. I was the only boy. Manners were of the utmost importance there and no one could leave the table until everyone was finished. Every meal I would find all those girls staring at me, waiting for me to get thru eating. They never did say anything, but I sure got stared at a lot. I think that was when I learned to eat a lot faster!
I made pretty good grades there in everything except English which previously had always been my best subject. The professor apparently just didn't like my approach however and about the best I could get was Cs and Ds. One time we were assigned to write an essay and he warned us not to copy anything....that he had read everything. That was just the challenge I needed because by that time I didn't like him one little bit. I found a good article in The Oil & Gas Journal written by someone who had a Ph.D.in Petroleum Engineering. I copied the article word for word; turned it in and got a C with the notation that it was poorly organized! Later on when I went to Texas A&M, English was the only course I did good in...got straight As, but then after I left A&M and went back to Edinburg; took Freshman English again under the same ole teacher and managed this time to get straight Fs! That and the fact that I wanted to get into the armed services and the war, was why I just quit school.
The summer of 1944 I got a job as a Hot Shot Driver for Houston Oilfield Equipment Company (HOMCO) in Sullivan City. Sullivan City was right on the Mexican border and consisted of just a few Oilfield Supply Houses like HOMCO, one cafe, a small grocery store and just a few houses. I was really in hog heaven getting to drive that pickup taking oil field supplies to different places. However, I had no drivers license. My boss, Jack Duncan, kept saying that we would take off one day and go take the drivers test but we just stayed too busy. Sometimes I would work over 24 hrs. without going to bed. One night I had gone to Raymondville to pick up some stuff to take to a drilling rig at Sun Field; stopped on my way back in Edinburg to get a cup of coffee. When I got back to the pickup a policeman was waiting on me. I think he thought I might be overloaded, but when he asked me for my drivers license I immediately got a ticket for that. He let me leave and I took the supplies on out to the drilling rig then back to Sullivan City. By this time I had been up for over 24 hours with no sleep. I called Jack in Mission and told him what had happened and that I was supposed to appear before the "judge" that morning. He told me to come on in to Mission and we would go to Edinburg to see the judge together. On the way in to Mission I went to sleep and woke up driving down the ditch on the left hand side of the highway and I was missing telephone poles just by inches! I sure didn't get sleepy after that. Jack and I went over to Edinburg to meet the Judge. Jack went in with me and being such a super salesman, he flat talked the judge out of a fine. Jack assured the judge I would get a license immediately but to make a long story short we just stayed too busy and I didn't get a drivers license until 5 yrs. later.
One day I was on my way in from delivering supplies to a drilling rig. A car full of Sun Company Roughnecks (a drilling rig crew) was right in front of me. We came up on a Coca Cola truck parked on the side of the road. The car in front of me slowed down and when I hit the brakes they didn't do much good. I tried to go in between the car and truck and hit the truck that was standing still. It pretty well messed up the HOMCO pickup; ruined the radiator for one thing. The roughnecks had a chain and used it to pull me on in to the store in Sullivan City. I got them to pull it around back of the store so Jack wouldn't see it as soon as he drove up. A short time later he did drive up and came running in telling me he had an order that I had to load up and deliver right away. Talk about scared! I had to tell him what had happened and expected to get fired immediately. He was probably pretty upset but didn't show it and didn't even chew me out. In fact, when I left to go to A&M he told his bosses I was going into the armed services and got me a bonus of several hundred dollars.
I had tried to tell my parents that I didn't think I was ready to go to Texas A&M but they wouldn't even discuss it. I guess they thought all I had to do was go and everything would turn out all right. I loved the ROTC part of A&M but I was just too immature to know how to study. And I wanted to be in the army more than I wanted to be in school. The only course I got all A's in was English; the rest of them, Zoology, German, Chemistry I think I got some C's, mostly D's and some F's. One of the honchos at A&M gave me some bad advice. Instead of telling me how to get some help in my courses, he said I really ought to resign and come back "next year". Said if I didn't resign and "flunked" they wouldn't let me come back. Don't know if that was a lie or not, but at any rate after Thanksgiving I resigned and went back (in my mind, a disgrace), to Sun Field. I had begged my parents to let me stay with Mama Jewel (my grandmother) in Brenham and go to Blinn Junior College, but they wouldn't hear of it. Insisted that I start back to Edinburg Jr. College. I did but didn't try and quit within a month after the semester started.
I went to work for Sun Oil Company in February of 1945 as a Roustabout. At the time Mom was working for them in the office and Pop was a Warehouse Supervisor. He got a promotion to something called a "Mud Engineer" and shortly after was transferred to Delhi, Louisiana. Mom and I stayed at Sun Field. A couple of months later Pop was transferred to Forsan, Texas as the Foreman in charge. Then Mom moved to Forsan and I moved into the bunkhouse at Sun Field. There was another roustabout about my age named Lester, an older man and the Gang Pusher that composed the roustabout gang at that time. I don't remember why, but sometimes they would send me, Lester and the "old man" out on jobs without the Gang Pusher. The old man was "in charge", but Lester and I used to kid him a lot. We would be way out in the boondocks working and were supposed to work until quitting time. The old man didn't have a watch and we would tell him it was later than it really was so we would get back to the office sooner than we should.
One day we were leaving the office to go work on a 210 bbl. tank when the Foreman told me to be sure and quit early enough to get back for a Safety Meeting. We were up on top of the tank when I told the 'old man' we need to quit and get back for a safety meeting. He thought we were lying to him again and said we weren't going to leave until quitting time. Lester and I tried to convince him we were telling the truth but he wouldn't believe us. So we told him we were leaving and he said "go ahead, I'm staying here." Lester and I climbed down the wooden, and only, ladder. Lester pulled the ladder down and said, "You ole fool, if you like it so well up there just stay" - and we left. At the safety meeting the Foreman asked me where the 'old man' was and I told him what happened. The Foreman got a big bang out of that and said, "I'll just leave him up there for a while." He finally went back out to the tank after dark, shined his spotlight up on top of the tank. The old man was sitting up there as the Foreman said "like a hoot owl." Needless to say it was a few days before the old man would speak to Lester and me.
About a month later I was transferred to Kermit, Texas. Lived all alone in a small room in the back yard of the Foreman's house. Worked "all over" West Texas and New Mexico for a short time. Out in New Mexico one day we were supposed to clean out what they called a "gun barrel" tank. It was a special tank filled with pipe used to treat oil before going into the regular storage tank. It was filled with deadly Hydrogen Sulfide gas so we had to wear a mask hooked up by hose to a box outside where someone had to turn a handle to pump fresh air to whoever was in the tank with the mask on. I volunteered to go in first and after about 5 minutes I started smelling gas and got myself out of there as quick as I could. The Gang Pusher (boss) just laughed and said I had just gotten scared. He said he would go into the tank himself and show me how it was done. After he had been in there a couple of minutes we could hear him banging around in there trying to get out. He made it out OK, but then we discovered that the air hose had a hole in it and when the hole in the hose got inside the tank it started sucking the poison gas in the hose. The Gang Pusher never laughed at me again!
until next time!
Doug