and college in California before going on to Oxford and
then, later, starting my business career in the Oklahoma
oil fields. I loved California and the easy, informal and
extremely pleasant life that prevailed there in those days.
Thus, it was only natural that I should choose Los Angeles
as the place to enjoy the money I’d made in the oil fields.
“I’ve made my fortune—and I’m going to retire,” I an-
nounced blandly to my startled parents.
Neither Mother nor Father was pleased with my
decision. Both of them had worked very hard in their own
youth. When first married, my mother had continued to
work as a schoolteacher to help provide my father with the
money he needed to put him through law school. Both of
them firmly believed that an individual had to work to
justify his existence, and that a rich person had to keep his
money working to justify its existence. My father tried to
impress upon me that a businessman’s money is capital to
be invested and reinvested.
“You’ve got to use your money to create, operate and
build businesses,” he argued. “Your wealth represents
potential jobs for countless others—and it can produce
wealth and a better life for a great many people as well as
for yourself.”
I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to him—then.
Later, I was to realize the truth of what he said, but first I
had to try things my own way. I owned a spanking new
Cadillac roadster, good clothes and had all the money I
could possibly need. I had made up my mind I wanted to
play, and with these prerequisites, I encountered no
difficulty plunging full tilt into the Southern California-Los
Angeles-Hollywood whirl of fun and frolic. Although the
United States entered the
war, my call-up was first
delayed, then postponed by bureaucratic snarls, and finally
I was informed that my “services would not be needed.” I
consequently spent the World War One years playing and
enjoying myself.
It took me a while to wake up to the fact that I was only
wasting time and that I was bored. By the end of 1918, I
was thoroughly fed up. Early in 1919, I was back in the oil
business—not a little abashed by the “I told you so” smile I
got from my father when I informed him that, having
retired at 24, I was coming out of retirement at 26!
In 1919, oilmen’s attention was already shifting from
Oklahoma to Southern California, where new producing
areas were being discovered and developed. A great new Oil
Rush was in the making, and I was among those who
wanted to be in on it from the beginning. My initial oil-
prospecting venture in Southern California was a fiasco: I
drilled my first California well on the Didier Ranch near
Puente, but the well proved to be a dry hole.
The luck that had stayed with me in Oklahoma had
taken a brief holiday, but it hadn’t deserted me.
Subsequent tries were considerably more successful. I
drilled several wells in the Santa Fe Springs, Torrance,
Long Beach and other Southern California areas, and most
of them proved to be producers, some of them sensational
producers.
I spent most of my time in the field working on the
drilling rigs with my men, a habit which paid many
handsome and unexpected dividends. Not the least of these
stemmed from the drilling crews’ reactions to the presence
of a working boss on the job. The men felt they were
partners with the boss in a mutual effort, rather than
merely employees of some corporation run by executives
they never saw and who had probably never set foot on a
drilling platform in their lives. Morale— and production—
soared as a result.
This was important, for with new wells being drilled by
the hundreds throughout Southern California, there was an
acute shortage of experienced oil-field workers. The person-
nel managers of most large companies engaged in wild
scrambles to find the necessary manpower for their opera-
tions. They bid frantically ag
ainst each other in the labor
market, offering special inducements and benefits to
anyone who’d ever had any experience working on an oil
rig. Most old-timers resented the implication that they had
to be bribed with frills to do an honest day’s work. They
preferred to sign on with wildcatting operators who offered
no fancy extras, but who spoke their language and worked
side by side with them on the drilling sites.
I’ll never forget the time I began drilling on a property
not far from the site on which a major oil company was
drilling a well. Carrying its
employee inducement program
to ludicrous extremes, the firm had designed and built
what its press agents glowingly described as the last word
in drilling rigs. The entire rig was steam heated all the way
up to the crown block. A neatly raked gravel drive led to the
site. There were hot showers for the men and even a
laundry that washed their work clothes while they waited!
Early one afternoon, not long after I’d spudded my well,
a grizzled roughneck appeared on my site and announced
that he wanted to see the boss. When I was pointed out to
him, he came over and wasted no words asking me for a job.
“Are you working now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” came the sour reply.
“Where?”
“Over there,” the roughneck replied, nodding his head
toward the deluxe drilling rig. There were no home
comforts available for my crew, and I told the man so. And,
I added, I couldn’t understand why he would want to leave
a job that offered such luxuries for one on my relatively
primitive operation.
“I’ve been on that rig for four months,” the roughneck
growled unhappily. “And we’ve only gotten down four
thousand feet!” I laughed. Four thousand feet in four
months was a ridiculously slow rate for drilling through the
type of soil formations to be found in that particular field.
“How long do you think it’ll take me to get down that
far?” I asked.
“From the looks of you—about ten days!” the old-timer
answered with a broad grin. “That’s why I’d rather work for
you than for that cream-puff
outfit over there . . .!”
He got the job, and stayed on my payroll for many years.
As a footnote to the story, I might add that my well was
drilled in record time and proved a good producer. The “last
word” in drilling rigs brought in a dry hole and was finally
abandoned.
Another good example of what close teamwork and
mutual confidence between bo
ss and crew could accomplish
can be found in the story of how my men and I licked the
“insoluble” problem of a certain oil lease.
The lease was on a tiny piece of property in the midst of
a forest of oil wells in the rich Seal Beach, California, field.
By some fluke, the lease had been overlooked by the firms
which were operating there.
A company in which I held a
substantial interest acquired the lease, but was about to
write it off as a dead loss. Everyone agreed that nothing
could ever be done with the pr
operty. In the first place, it
was a plot barely larger than the floor area of a small
house. In the second, the only right-of-way providing access
to a road was over a strip of ground several hundred feet
long but less than four feet wide. It was impossible to get
supplies and equipment to the property by truck over this
constricted path. Even if it had been possible, the postage-
stamp-sized plot would not have accommodated a regular-
sized derrick and drilling rig. The companies holding leases
on adjacent properties refuse
d to grant any right-of-way
over their sites, for if a producing well was brought in, it
might diminish the production of their own wells, since it
would be pumping oil from the same pool.
“Forget the lease,” associates with whom I discussed the
matter advised me. “You’ll never get a well drilled there—
not in a million years.”
Stubbornly, I insisted there must be a way; I put the
problem before the men in whom I had the greatest
confidence, the members of on
e of my drilling crews. They
listened to me, and their reaction was the same as mine.
They considered the problem an irresistible challenge.
“Let’s go up and look at things, boss,” a hard-bitten
driller grunted. “We’ll find some way—don’t worry.” Several
men and I went to survey the
situation firsthand, and we
found that it did look fairly hopeless.
“I guess we could drill the well with an undersized rig,”
the driller mused after thinking things over. “If you could
get somebody to design and build it, we could set it up—
but I can’t figure how we’re going to bring everything we
need in from the road …”
The obstacle provided by the limited right-of-way
seemed insuperable, until my mind began to turn over the
driller’s suggestion about a miniature drilling rig. If we
could drill with a miniature rig, then why couldn’t we solve
our transportation problem with a miniature railway? It
was a perfect solution: A narrow-gauge track and a car or
two on which to bring the disassembled “baby” derrick and
supplies and equipment from the road to the drilling site.
Mulish obstinacy? A desire to prove that we were able to
accomplish what everyone else considered impossible? Pos-
sibly—even probably. But both the miniature rig and the
miniature railway were procured. The former was moved in
sections over the latter and assembled by hand on the
microscopic plot of ground. The well was drilled—and a fair
profit was eventually realized on the unusual operation.
I recall other memorable strikes during the 1920s.
Among them is the one I made in the so-called Athens Field
in the southern suburbs of Los Angeles. I acquired the plot
in question for something over $12,000. Because I was
operating entirely on my own account and knew that I
would be stretching my available cash resources thin before
completing the first well, I elected to act as my own drilling
superintendent. Among the men I hired for my crew were
three of the finest drillers in the oil industry: Walter
Phillips, Oscar Prowell and “Spot” McMurdo. We completed
the first well on February 16, 1925, at a depth of 4350 feet
for an initial daily yield of 1500 barrels. A short while later,
I brought in the second well on the site for an initial
production of 2000 barrels per day. In the next nine years,
the two wells on the Athens pr
operty were to show over
$400,000 excess recovery—clear profit over and above all
costs and expenses.
Even more spectacular is the story of the Cleaver Lease
in Alamitos Heights, which I bought with a personal check
for $8000 in October 1926 from a man who had purchased
it for $4000 only a few days before and who wanted to make
a quick profit.
I spudded Well Number One
on February 21, 1927, and
subsequently drilled three more wells on the property. All
proved exceptional producers, bringing up a total of more
than 17,000 barrels daily. Between 1927 and 1939, excess
recovery on the Cleaver Lease wells was nearly $800,000—
a 10,000-percent profit on my original investment. Yet,
within a few weeks after the first well came in, I was not
only close to losing a fortune, but also close to losing the
lease itself. Behind this apparent paradox lie two stories.
One illustrates what the average wildcatter faced when he
jousted with certain major oil companies. The other proves
that while some large firms had no compunctions about
strangling an independent oper
ator, others were ready and
willing to give him a break—and even a helping hand.
As soon as I d brought in Cleaver Well Number One—
which produced an impressive 5100 barrels a day—I cast
about to find a buyer for my
crude production. To my dis-
may, the firms I approached refused to deal with me. The
motives behind this evident boycott became infuriatingly
clear within a few days, when I received several calls from
brokers offering to buy the Cleaver Lease at a very low
price. The brokers refused to name the principals they
represented.
By then, I was an old hand in the petroleum industry. I
recognized all the classic signs indicating a well-organized
squeeze play. Certain interests wanted my lease. Either I
sold out at a ridiculously low price, or I would be left
without any market for the oil produced by the wells on the
property.
Unable to sell my oil, I had to find some way to store it.
The only storage facilities available in the Los Angeles area
were in a defunct refinery—two storage tanks with a total
155,000-barrel capacity, which I immediately leased. In the
meantime, even while I was vainly seeking a buyer for the
5100 barrels of crude my Well Number One was producing
every 24 hours, Well Number Two came in for a 5000-barrel
daily production. This was fo
llowed in short order by
Number Three, which produced 5100 barrels a day, then by
Number Four, the runt of the litter, which brought up 2100
barrels daily. This production rate was rapidly filling the
two storage tanks—and I was still unable to find an outlet
for the oil. I knew that when the tanks were topped off, I’d
have no choice but to shut down my operation entirely.
Obviously, I was receiving no income from the four wells.
My fluid cash resources—already strained by drilling
costs— dwindled rapidly as I paid for leasing the tanks and
for trucking my crude several miles from wells to storage.
The situation could have easily turned into financial
disaster. I decided to make a frontal attack on one of the
biggest of all the major oil companies—Shell Oil. By a
fortunate coincidence, Sir George Legh-Jones, then the
Shell Company’s president, happened to be visiting in Los
Angeles. In desperation, I aimed high, asked for an
interview with him personally, and was informed that he
would be happy to see me during his visit.
A warm, friendly man, Sir George listened attentively to
what I had to say. The deepen
ing scowl that etched across
his face as he heard me was all the proof I needed that his
firm was not a party to the boycott and that he heartily
disapproved of such tactics. When I finished talking, he
smiled his reassurance.
“Relax,” he grinned. “We’ll help you.”
As a starter, the company would buy the next 1,750,000
barrels of crude oil produced by my Cleaver Lease wells, Sir
George told me. In addition, a pipeline would be
constructed to link my wells with the Shell Oil Company’s
pipeline network—and construction work was to commence
the very next day.