stages of drilling; the next 24 hours would prove whether
the well was a producer or a dry hole.
I was still very young and quite green. My nervousness
and excitement rose to an intolerable pitch. I became more
hindrance than help to the men on my drilling crew. To get
out of their way and ease my own tension, I beat a strategic
retreat to Tulsa, the nearest city of any size. I decided to
wait there until the drilling operation was completed and
the results were known. In Tulsa, J. Carl Smith, a close
friend who was considerably older and far less excitable
than I, volunteered to go to
the drilling site and supervise
the work there for me.
There were no telephones in the remote area where my
well was being drilled. The single line between Stone Bluff
and Tulsa seldom worked. Hence, J. Carl Smith promised
to return to Tulsa on the last train from Stone Bluff the
next day and inform me of the latest developments.
On the following day, I was at the Tulsa railroad depot,
anxiously pacing the windswept passenger platform more
than an hour before the train
was due to arrive. At last, it
pulled into the station. Endless seconds later, J. Carl
Smith’s familiar figure emerged from one of the coaches.
His face beamed, and my hopes soared.
“Congratulations, Paul!” he boomed when he saw me on
the platform. “We brought in your well this afternoon. It’s
producing thirty barrels!”
I automatically assumed he meant thirty barrels a day,
and my elation vanished instantly. Thirty barrels a day—
why, that was a mere trickle compared to the gushers other
oilmen were bringing in at the time.
“Yes, sir,” J. Carl grinned. “We’re getting thirty barrels
an hour . . . “
Thirty barrels an hour!
That made a difference, a world of difference. That
meant the well was producing 720 barrels of crude oil daily.
It also meant that I was in the oil business—to stay.
As the son of a successful oilman, I had been exposed to
the virus of oil fever since childhood. My parents, George F.
and Sarah Getty, and I first visited what was then the
Oklahoma Territory in 1903, when I was ten. While there,
my father, a prosperous Minneapolis attorney-at-law, found
it impossible to resist the lu
re of the Oklahoma Oil Rush,
which was then in full swing. He formed the Minnehoma
Oil Company and began prospecting for oil.
M y father, a self-made man who had known extreme
poverty in his youth, had a practically limitless capacity for
hard work, and he also had an almost uncanny talent for
finding oil. After organizing Minnehoma Oil, h e personally
supervised the drilling of 43 oil wells, of which 42 proved to
be producers!
I served a tough and valuable apprenticeship working as
a roustabout and tooldresser in the oil fields in 1910 and
1911, but I didn’t go into the oil business for myself until
September 1914. I had but recently returned to the United
States after attending Oxford University in England for
two years. My original intent was to enter the U.S.
Diplomatic Service, but I deferred that plan in order to try
my luck as an independent operator—a wildcatter—in
Oklahoma.
The times were favorable. It was a bonanza era for the
burgeoning American petroleum industry. A lusty,
brawling pioneer spirit still prevailed in the oil fields. The
Great Oil Rush continued with unabated vigor and was
given added impetus by the war that had broken out in
Europe that year. Primitive boom towns dotted the
Oklahoma countryside. Many bore bare-knuckled frontier
era names such as those of the four “Right” towns:
Drumright, Dropright, Allright and Damnright.
Streets and roads were unpaved—rivers of mushy clay
and mud in spring and winter and sun-baked, rutted tracks
perpetually shrouded by billowing clouds of harsh red or
yellow dust in summer. Duckboard sidewalks outside the
more prosperous business establishments and gambling
halls were viewed as the ultimate in civic improvements.
The atmosphere was identical to that which historians
describe as prevailing in the California gold fields during
the 1849 Gold Rush. In Oklahoma,
the fever was to find oil,
not gold, and it was an epid
emic. There were few, indeed,
who were immune to the contagion. Fortunes were being
made—and lost—daily. It was not unusual for a penniless
wildcatter, down to his last bit and without cash or credit
with which to buy more, to drill another hundred feet and
bring in a well that made him a rich man. A lease which
sold for a few hundred dollars one afternoon sometimes in-
creased in value a hundredfold or even a thousand fold by
the next morning.
On the other hand, there were men who invested all they
owned in leases and drilling operations only to find that
they had nothing to show for their money and efforts but a
few dismally dry holes. Leases purchased at peak prices
one day proved to be utterly valueless the next. It was all a
supremely thrilling gamble for staggering stakes, and I
plunged into the whirl hopefully. I had no capital of my
own; my personal budget was $100 per month. My first
year was anything but profitable. Large oil strikes were
being reported regularly, and other wildcatters were
bringing in gushers and big producers, but fortune seemed
to elude me.
Then, in the late fall of 1915, a half-interest in an oil
lease near Stone Bluff in Muskogee County—the Nancy
Taylor Allotment—was offered for sale at public auction. I
inspected the property and thought it highly promising. I
knew other independent operators were interested in ob-
taining the lease, and this worried me. I didn’t have much
money at my disposal—certain
ly not enough to match the
prices older, established oilmen would be able to offer. For
this reason, I requested my bank to have one of its repre-
sentatives bid for me at the sale without revealing my iden-
tity as the real bidder.
Surprisingly enough, this rather transparent stratagem
accomplished the purpose I intended. The sale, held in the
town of Muskogee—the county seat—was attended by sev-
eral independent oil operators eager to obtain the lease.
The unexpected appearance of the well-known bank
executive who bid for me unnerved the wildcatters. They
assumed that if a banker was present at the auction, it
could only mean that some large oil company was also
interested in the property and was prepared to top any and
all offers. The independents glumly decided it would be
futile to bid and, in the end, I secured the lease for $500—a
bargain-basement price!
Soon thereafter, a corporation was formed to finance the
drilling of a test well on the property. I, as a wildcatter with
no capital of my own, received a modest 15-percent interest
in the corporation. I assembled a crack drilling crew, and
my men and I labored to erect the necessary wooden der-
rick and to rush the actual drilling operations. I remained
on the site night and day until the drilling went into its
final stages. Then, as I’ve related, I found it impossible to
stand the nervous strain and fled to Tulsa, where my friend
J. Carl Smith brought me the news that the well had come
in.
The lease on the property was sold to a producing oil
company two weeks after that, and I realized $12,000 as
my share of the profits. The amount was not very
impressive when compared to the huge sums others were
making, but it was enough to convince me that I should—
and would—remain in the oil business as a wildcatter.
My father and I had previously formed a partnership.
Under its terms he was to provide financing for any explo-
ration and drilling I conducted and supervised for the part-
nership. In return, he would receive 70 percent of the
profits, while I received the remaining 30 percent. After my
first success, we incorporated the partnership and in May
1916 formed the Getty Oil Company, in which I received a
30-percent stock interest.
Many fanciful—and entirely erroneous—accounts of the
business relationship between us have appeared in print.
Contrary to some published reports, my father did not set
me up in business by giving me any outright cash gifts.
George F. Getty rejected any ideas that a successful man’s
son should be pampered or spoiled or given money as a gift
after he was old enough to earn his own living. My father
did
finance some of my early operations—but solely on the
70/30-percent basis. Insofar as
lease purchases and drilling
or other operations I conducted on my own account were
concerned, I financed these myself. My father neither pro-
vided the money for my private business ventures nor did
he share in the profits I received from them.
Incidentally, there is another popular misconception I’d
like to correct once and for all. It has been said that my
father bequeathed me a huge fortune when he passed away
in 1930. Actually, he left me $500,000 in his will—a con-
siderable sum, I’ll admit, but nonetheless a very small part
of his fortune. It was a token bequest. My father was well
aware that I had already made
several million dollars on
my own, and he left the bulk of his estate to my mother.
After Father and I incorporated our partnership in 1916,
I went right on prospecting and drilling for oil. My enthusi-
asm was not dampened when my second well proved to be a
dry hole. By then, wildcatting was in my blood and I con-
tinued to buy and sell leases and to drill wells. I usually
acted as my own geologist, legal advisor, drilling
superintendent, explosives expe
rt and even, on occasion, as
roughneck and roustabout. The months that followed were
extremely fortunate ones. In most instances, the leases I
bought were sold at a profit, and when I drilled on a
property, I struck oil more often than not.
There were no secrets, no mystical formulas behind
these successes. I operated in much the same manner as
did almost all wildcatters—with one important exception.
In those days, the science of petroleum geology had not yet
gained very wide acceptance in the oil fields. Many oilmen
sneered openly at the idea that some “damned bookworm”
could help them find oil. At best, the vast majority of
oilmen were skeptical about geology as a practical science
and put little stock in geologists’ reports. I was among the
few who believed in geology. I studied the subject avidly at
every opportunity, and applied what I learned to my
operations.
The independent operator had to possess a certain
amount of basic knowledge and skill. He also needed
reliable, loyal and experience
d men on his exploration and
drilling crews. But, beyond these things, I believe the most
important factor that determined whether a wildcatter
would succeed or fail— whether he would bring in a
producing well or wind up with a dry hole—was just plain
luck.
There were some who didn’t consider it luck, among
them T. N. Barnsdall, one of the great Oklahoma oil
pioneers. Multimillionaire Barnsdall often expounded his
favorite theory about what he thought made the difference.
“It’s not luck,” he maintained stoutly. “A man either has
a nose for oil or he doesn’t. If he does, he smells the stuff
even when it’s 3,000 feet down!”
Perhaps. But I rather doubt it myself. Personally, I was
never able to sniff out the presence of a subterranean oil
pool. Nor do I recall that I ever tingled with an oil dowser’s
extrasensory response while tramping across a potential
drilling site. I still think my early successes were due
mainly to pure luck.
However, lest there be those who imagine wildcatters
had little to do but wait for the wheel of fortune to spin and
then reap their profits, let me say that the oil business was
never an easy one. It has always entailed work—hard
work— and it has always been fraught with innumerable
financial pitfalls, especially in the early days. Wells
sometimes blew up, and profits—and often capital—were
devoured with appalling speed by costly efforts to
extinguish the resulting fires.
Dry holes, equipment failures and breakdowns at crucial
periods, squabbles and litigation over leases and rights-of-
way— these were a few of the myriad problems and
setbacks which frequently drained the independent
operator’s financial resources down to a point well below
the danger mark.