Author Archives: atthetable2015

Four Men

The long polished Mahogany table as seen through the little nook off the living room, an opening on the left where the swinging door to the kitchen stood propped open with a fold of newspaper and at the end of the room a window with its Venetian blinds open looked out to the side of Mrs Lake’s home stuccoed in beige and with a little imagination you could see a long stretch of featureless desert sand. Before the glass, sat four grown men.

I could watch them at a distance and have always wondered what it was of which they spoke. Hand on fist I would sit on the little brick hearth of my grandparents home in Lakewood and try to listen.

Gathered together around the every day tablecloth that would be changed for Thanksgiving dinner later that day sat my Grandfather Bruce Hall. A man who had labored nearly four decades in the oilfields of California. He was now the superintendant of drilling for the state of California. From oilfield roustabout to the top of the heap at Signal Oil and Gas. He wore his rumpled, baggy khakis and a white long sleeve shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled halfway. Spectacles over the lower half of the nose, his bald head encircled by a fringe of hair smelling of Wildroot. He seemed to me to be perpetually tired. He’d already had the first of the heart attacks that would in a couple of years kill him. A lifetime of filterless Chesterfields, one of which, smoldering he held with three fingers, idly scraping the ash from on the edge of the ashtray, a green baize bag filled with bird shot and a shallow brass bowl. He leaned forward on his elbows a half smile on his face.

My Dad sat next to him in his ever present flannel shirt and blue Levi’s his uniform of sorts the mark of a farmer. He was forty three. He sat in his customary pose, elbows braced on the table a half smoked cigarette in his right hand pinched behind his upper knuckles, I can’t remember ever seeing him sitting any other way. At his elbow a half filled bottle of bourbon being occasionally lifted with the comment, “Another drop?” No ice either, whiskey straight no frills, or as my dad told me, “Ice dilutes and pollutes the Bourbon. Bartender puts it in to short the pour.”

There was a glass at each mans hand, no fancy fat little crystal glasses, grandma had them but they mostly sat in the sideboard gathering dust. No, these man drank from kitchen glasses and in those days it was likely a jelly jar, not the canning Mason or Kerr but the old fashioned one that came from the Jewel Tea truck, full of, and always in that household, blackberry jelly, the kind that you had to pry the lid off with a church key. Practical men they were but at the same time would never drink straight from a bottle. Class of a sort.

Uncle Ray sat at grandpa’s other hand. His dark blue shirt with the mother of pearl buttons marked him as a cowman. In his late forties he was a little on the portly side, the shirt held in with a plain leather belt and a small not so fancy buckle. His old fashioned black levi’s turned up at the cuff a good four or five inches covered most of what were hand-tooled cowboy boots for thats what he was, a dyed in the wool, genuine cowman who could fork a horse as good as any. Better than most really for he was known through the Sierra Nevada as “Powerhouse” after, on a bet, put his horse Brownie over the side of the hill at the Kings river penstocks and rode her almost straight down as if it was nothing. A feat of horsemanship that gave him the name. If you ever get up there you’ll see what I mean.

I remember him most for his laugh, a sort of lung deep basso cackle, really indescribable but still one of the greatest laughs I have ever heard. He didn’t hog it either it was as if it was just idling down in his throat ready to spring to the surface on any occasion.

Ray Long was such an original cowman, at that time already a vanishing breed that he had taken on the characteristics of the horses he rode. He was missing the molars on one side of his jaw and when he tipped his head back to laugh he looked just like a horse did. Horse laugh my dad called it.

The fourth that made up the quartet was my uncle Bob, Robert Preston Hall. At thirty five just a youngster. My mother’s youngest sibling, the only boy of that generation. He grew up with two older sisters and one younger who adored him. My aunt Patsy always said he was as caring as any parent.

He leaned back in his chair right arm hooked over the back with an elbow, his legs crossed at the knee. His white shirt collar unbuttoned had short sleeves, something I never saw the other three wear, ever. Cigerette pack in the pocket, he held one in is right hand. His jet black hair, slicked back shone in the light and sitting on his nose, old-fashioned steel rim, round spectacles. Topping it all off, he wore a thin mustache, the kind we used to call the “Boston Blackie.” He had an elegant long straight nose and a family trait inherited from grandpas’ family, Jug Handle ears. Mom said they were like airplane flaps and would slow you down when you came in for a landing.

Uncle Ray loved to tease and used the family ears as nicknames for one of his sons and me. Ears like that, guess they didn’t hurt Clark Gable none. He was an oil man too in his younger days. They had that in common.

They were different looking men really, no two looked alike but they had things in common. They could be absurdly funny and the well jest turned earned high praise in our family. The were men of the land all of them farmers and ranchers at heart with deep roots in the ground. Practical and pragmatic, they wasted no energy on frills. None of them liked to wear suits if they could avoid it and they did at all costs. The best you could get out of my dad was a sports coat and slacks.

They were all good with kids. I have friends I grew up with who still remember my dad handing out quarters at gatherings which meant something in those days. Uncle Ray made you feel like you were a grownup but wasn’t above squirting you with milk while milking either. Uncle Bob had the salesman gift and told me very first dirty joke though it barely made the grade as such.

The thing I most remember is they were grownups who stood for something. Kids were great but still kids. They shared very little about adult life. They did their best to keep all that at a distance to keep you safe. Your were a kid and they were adults, it was important that they kept it that way. They taught much more by example and were pretty content for their children to find their own way with as little guidance as possible.

Once my oldest cousin who was about fourteen and though pretty well of himself sauntered in and pulled out a chair and sat. He interjected some comment into the conversation and they all turned to look at him. No one answered. A moment or two passed as they sat silent until it occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t as old or important as he though and he soundlessly slithered out of the chair and beat a retreat.

They bookended an entire generation from one end to the other. They had seen two world wars, the greatest depression, the Korean War, the atomic bomb and each had weathered severe up and downs in the family.

That thanksgiving saw a dozen kids and five families shoehorned into that little house on Pepperwood Avenue in Long Beach, just about the last time we would all be together. Other than seeing them I really didn’t know what they talked about. I wish I had been older so I could really listen but I wasn’t.

Years have past and the questions were never asked. I had other interests and they were famously recalcitrant anyway in the way men of that generation could be. “Oh, you don’t want to know about that,” my uncle Jackie Shannon once said. I did but he just changed the subject. Every person you will ever know dies with secrets and stories you will never hear. It’s a shame.

Michael Shannon is a writer. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California.

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The Good Man

Michael Shannon.

He went to the old sideboard, stained as it was, a few wood chips missing here and there and leaning on it momentarily, he slipped into his right front pants pocket and he drew a key. Fumbling a little with the little piece of brass on the faded purple ribbon he inserted it and slipped the lock and from inside he retrieved the small brassbound wooden box graven with its vague mystical symbols and carefully set it on the cabinet top. With trembling hands, not by age but by emotion, he reverently untied the ribbon that held it shut and with care beyond care he opened it and released, the wonderful soul within that rose and floated as dainty as a butterfly above and for all to see. It shimmered in the light and was God.

For a friend.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter 14

Oct 24th 1929

In ’29 Bruce was transferred to the new field up at Elwood. Barnsdall-Rio Grande gave him a raise and he became a field supervisor. The Mesa and Ellwood fields needed men who could whipstock as the wells were being pushed out into deeper water. Bruce was good at that.

Elwood. Goleta Historical Society photo.

Bruce and Eileen moved up to a little wide spot in the road called Goleta. Sometime after the De Anza expeditions, a sailing ship (“goleta”) was wrecked at the mouth of the lagoon, and remained visible for many years, giving the area its current name. After Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821, most of the former mission ranch lands were divided up into large grants. Nicholas Den was granted this 16,500 acre rancho in 1842. The Rancho was named Dos Pueblos for the two Barbarino Chumash rancherias which were on the bluffs above the beaches. Below that was what would become one of the largest oil producing fields in California.

Barnsdall-Rio Grande added the Elwood field to Bruces territory. His skill with whipstock was doubly important because at Elwood there were no actual wells onshore. Every well was turned out into the oil sand under the Santa Barbara Channel.

Goleta wan’t much of a town in the late 20’s but they decided to move closer to the wells because exploration in Summerland was nearly done and his chief job there was to monitor production.

Bruce’s half-brother Marion who originally got him in the job in Casmalia was giving the oilfields another go. Marion and his wife Grace with their son Bill moved in with Bruce and Eileen. The kids were attending Goleta Elementary school. Mariel the oldest was just thirteen, my mother, a year younger and uncle Bob was nine. In the old photos you can see that they are better dressed surely as the result of Bruce’s promotions.

That same year Bruce and Eillen gave my mother a piano. It is, we still have it by the way an upright Gulbranson, it cost the princely sum of $300.00, and I do mean princely. The equivalent sum today would be over five grand. The original receipt calls for ten monthly payments of $30.00 each. As a Tool Pusher or Farm Boss Bruce would have been making as much as ten dollars a day. That was a very high wage for men employed in the oil fields and good pay for any man who worked with his hands.

Derrick and wells, Tecolote Canyon, 1930.

Below the horizon though a financial wave was slowly gathering and like the music played in the movie Jaws, it was building quietly but would soon turn their entire world upside down.

In November the entire house of cards came crashing down. Out of control oil companies who pumped more oil than the public could use. Banks which loaned far more money than they actually had, 650 failed in 1929 and over thirteen hundred by then end of the next year. There was no FDIC to protect your money. Millions of people lost their life savings. Wall street’s frenzy of buying and selling on margin,* the residual cancellations of industrial war equipment and the end of farm price supports put the economy in the tank where it would stay for nearly ten long years. Money that vanishes is not easily replaced. Within a year, 25% of the population was unemployed and completely adrift. Men were desperate for work and just the rumor of a job put them on the road. Children too, they were forced out of families or left on their own because feeding them was a burden to their parents.**

In 1930 Bruce reported to work at Elwood where he was abruptly fired along with his entire crew. Barnsdahll-Rio Grande had pulled in their horns, declared bankruptcy in order to escape their creditors, the banks and private investors. Then they simply walked away from California. It’s leases in Summerland and Santa Barbara were sold, it equipment simply abandoned. Oil companies, finally accepting their fate fell like dominoes. Thousands and thousands of roustabouts, worms, toolies and farm boss jobs evaporated almost over night. Your hard won skills were useless. This pull back on labor was across the board, factories, big farms, the shipping industries all pulled back.

After ten years of continuous employment Bruce’s career was simply yanked out from under him. He called in favors, got on the phone, calling everywhere, every company he had ever worked for, Associated, Standard Oil, Union and every operator from Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos and Signal Hill to the coastal companies and east to the San Joaquin valley, drillers in Oildale, Kern River and the West side and the Elk Hills; Maricopa, McKittrick, Reward and Fellows. There was nothing moving. Drilling for new oil was dead, only maintenance and pumpers had any hope of a job.

Thirty four years old, wife and three children and desperate. He was lucky to land a job with Santa Barbara Garbage Company, slinging ash cans. He rode the trucks standing on the foot plate, jumping off at every stop and hefting the loaded bins onto his shoulder and tossing them up on to the back of the truck as it idled up and down the streets of Santa Barbara and Montecito, two of the richest towns in California. A self-made man humping the garbage of the rich. It must have been galling. His brother Henry said Bruce worked like a mad man. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, sun up to sun down for $16.00 dollars a week, roughly .22 cents an hour. The cut in pay by more than three quarters put them on a collision course with poverty. It came pretty soon.

Eileen finally took the desperate measure and I mean desperate measure of going to the government office in downtown Santa Barbara and applying for relief. Under President Roosevelt’s series of assistance programs, established by the New Deal, provided federal funds to state and local governments for direct relief to the unemployed, including cash payments and food assistance. These programs aimed to provide immediate assistance to those who were unemployed, impoverished, or facing economic hardship. Like any good idea it was soon run by petty bureaucrats who wielded absolute authority over people who were guilty of nothing except being poor. They didn’t want to be poor and were shamed by the very thought of asking for help.

Just as today, those better off considered thee programs as a “Giveaway.” Relief had strict guidelines for eligibility. To meet qualifications the applicant had to fill out a questionnaire and be evaluated as to need. The Halls had the need alright. Three kids, a wife and a husband with a very low paying job which he could lose at any time. There were thousands of others who would gladly take it if they could. They stood on the steps of the company office every day, smoking, nervously, hoping for the smallest break. Mostly they would get none.

For a proud family, which we still are it was agonizing for my grandma to sit in the chair and “Beg” for help. Beg, a word that was loathed by my grandparents. Grandpa Bruce had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and was rightfully a prideful man. There is no adjective strong enough to describe how it must have felt to sit in that straight back, hard bottom chair, in front of the desk where the woman who would decide your family’s fate sat.

The conversation was short. “You qualify for food and rent assistance with just one stipulation,” she said. “Your husband will have to sell the car.” My grandmother couldn’t believe her ears. “But he needs the car to go to work,” she said. The woman looked up from her paperwork and said, “Thems the rules. He has to sell the car.”

When grandma Hall told that story it cinched a hatred for the government that still exists in our family. It’s not that it can’t help people in need but the way they do it.

My mother remembers them talking in quiet tones at the kitchen table that night. They’d sent the kids out of the room for they lived in a time when children were seen but not heard. Mom was scared because she didn’t understand what was happening. Her parents were as kind as they had always been but she said the kids knew something scary was happening. Bruce and Eileen were tense and very quiet. After ten years on the road with oil this was brand new territory. Grandpa had the assurance of a man who labors at his trade but the thought of losing all of that, though never said out loud had changed the dynamic of the family. Grandma and grandpa never had a harsh word for one another but to see her mother with tears was something she never forgot.

The only thing they thought possible was to join the family in Madera on grandpa Sam Hall’s ranch where they could at least eat and live under a dry roof.

So, they packed up what they could fit in and on the car, arranged for a friend to haul the piano and simply left the rest, furniture, dishes and all and pulled out for Madera.

The Halls on the road to Madera. From left to right, Mariel, Robert, Barbara, Eileen, and Bruce. In the rear uncle Marion. 1930 Photo Grace Williams. These old photo make people look older than they were. Bruce and Eileen are both thirty four. Grandpa has his foot on the bumper to relieve his back, a problem he had all his working life.

*In the 1920s, buying on margin meant investors could purchase stocks by paying only a small portion of the stock price with their own money, and borrowing the rest from a broker. This allowed them to control a larger investment than they could otherwise afford, potentially magnifying profits. However, it also significantly increased the risk, as losses could exceed the initial investment if the stock price declined. When the broker called the margin the buyer had to make up the difference between the money spent and the difference owed the broker. It was a dangerous investment strategy if the buyer was unable to make up the difference. In 1929 it was a financial disaster.

**Wild Boys of the Road is a 1933 pre-Code Depression-era American drama film directed by William Wellman and starring Frankie Darro, Rochelle Hudson, and Grant Mitchell. It tells the story of several teens forced into becoming hobos. The screenplay by Earl Baldwin is based on the story Desperate Youth by Daniel Ahern. In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically. Available on Apple TV.

Michael Shannon is a writer and former teacher. He writes so his children will know their history.

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Whats’s in a Name.

By William E. Lye

The Secretary of defense has ordered the renaming of United States Naval ships as follows.

  1. The USNS Medgar Evers. The Evers will be recommissioned as the USNS Theophilus Eugene Connor (1897-1973) Eugene “Bull” Connor gained infamy during the spring of 1963 as the heavy-handed Birmingham police commissioner who turned power hoses and police dogs on the black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Bull Connor and Birmingham symbolized hard-line Southern racism. Connor’s actions received national and international media coverage, which dramatized the plight of black people in segregated areas, giving the civil rights movement much-needed attention. After viewing television reports of the fire-hose and police-dogs episode, President John Kennedy said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
  2. USNS Thurgood Marshall. The Marshall will be renamed the USNS J. Robert Elliot. Elliott criticized his own party’s president, Harry S. Truman, and federal legislation to ban lynching and eliminate the poll tax, and he had opposed creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission. Elliot criticized Democrats of southern states who opposed the civil rights act. In his 1952 Georgia House campaign, he expressed dissatisfaction with attempts to end the all-white primary: “I don’t want those pinks, radicals and black voters to outvote those who are trying to preserve our own segregation laws and our sacred Southern traditions.”
  3. USNS Harriet Tubman. She will be named the USNS Thomas McCreary. McCreary, a slave catcher from Cecil County, Maryland. Proclaimed a hero, he first drew public attention in the late 1840s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War.
  4. USNS Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The proposed ship will have its name changed to the USNS Roger B. Taney. Taney, an American lawyer and politician who served as the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. In the Dred-Scott decision, Taney’s court declared that all blacks — slaves as well as free — were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all of the country’s territories. The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford
  5. Other proposed names to be deleted, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez and Lucy Stone.
  6. The Congressman John Lewis class of ships one of which was the USNS Harvey Milk. The class to be renamed for James Oliver Eastland who was a segregationist Senator and led the Southern resistance against racial integration during the civil rights movement, often speaking of African Americans as “A degraded and inferior race”. Eastland has been called the “Voice of the White South” and the “Godfather of Mississippi Politics”. His famous quote on politics in answer to a reporters question was. “I run on two things, bridges and “n*****s, ahm for one and agin t’other.”

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that Hegseth “is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s new history, and the warrior ethos.”

“Our military is the most powerful in the world – but this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos. Instead, it is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.”

Although the Navy has renamed ships for various reasons, name changes are an exceptionally rare occurrence, especially after the ships have entered service.

The Navy is made up of sailors from every state, political party, ethnicity, sex and religion. Navy men and women represent the diversity of all Americans and for the sea going contingent particularly treasure the traditions and affection for the ships they serve on.

You could have a long and serious discussion on the “Whys” of military bases and ships but politics intrudes for all kinds of nefarious reasons having to do with who votes for you the political office holder. Traitorous Confederate Generals get a name though they and their political class fostered a war that killed nearly eight hundred thousand American boys and men. The first black associate justice of the Supreme Court, a highly praised legal scholar, Thurgood Marshall is erased over what should be the motto of this country, the most diverse on earth since the Romans. DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion which perfectly describes the goals this country has pursued since it’s very beginnings. This is someones personal fever dream of hate and divisiveness. Some times we stumble as a people and fall down but the idea that the pipsqueak in the Pentagon can erase, not just a paragraph in a history book but the lives of people who changed this country for the better because he thinks that his Moral Superiority derives from the color of his skin or his belief in a vengeful God.

The writers point is to demonstrate the utter absurdity of the administrations goal of canceling all of whom they don’t like. Remember the minority, in the end, rarely prevails.

The names of the propose ships are a fiction used to prove a point.

Willian E. Lye is a writer who cherishes the title of Iconoclast given to him by Janine Plassard one of the worlds greatest educators.

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The Old Cow

Requiem for old Cancer Eye

George sent the boy out to his brothers cattle ranch because he needed help. At thirteen he could do most of a man’s work.

After morning coffee with his grandparents he climbed in the old Chevy pickup with his uncle Jack and drove down the hill from the house and over to the barnyard, the old milking barn and ice house, the big hay barn, the tractor sheds and the calf shed where the business would be done.

The big cow was in the corral next to the old squeeze, for these ancient corrals and buildings dated back more than a hundred years. The fence posts marked those decades, some railroad ties from the old narrow gauge railroad, some from the wrecked steam ship SS Elg which went aground on the sandy beach south of Oceano. To lighten the ship, the crew had thrown thousands of board feet of fresh cut lumber shipped from Vancouver, Canada, over the side. There was scarcely a ranch in the valley which didn’t have some.

The boy opened the gate and backed the truck into the corral while his uncle fitted the handmade manila halter around the cows head. A rope was led to a tie-down hook and attached with a double half hitch.

Driving at walking speed they proceeded up the rock hard and dusty adobe road. The went past the gulley where all the abandoned farm equipment lay, The old Model T which had brought the family down from Berkeley in 1918, The first of the Chevrolet milk trucks slowly rusting away, hemmed in by miles of rusty Bob wire, dented five gallon milk cans with rusted out bottoms, all of it shining with the dusty red color of death.

At the top of the hill a slow right turn east towards Pat William’s ranch and just short of the fence line, the bone yard. To the boy, his imagination active in the way that boys of no particular serious education works, it seemed as if they had stumbled on what was left of Custer’s 7th. The troopers bones lying adrift, aglow with mornings sunlight. Scattered, each one a sign of change.

Stopped at just the edge of the field, they got out of the truck and the boy turned off the hitches while Uncle Jack pulled a couple of flakes of hay out of the back, tossing them to the side. He said, “Lead her over there and let her eat.”

He went to the open door of the truck and reached behind the seat for the old J C Higgins .22 he had traded for when he was just a boy. Long since relegated to just this duty, he pulled the bolt and inserted the single Long Rifle Cartridge.

The red and white Hereford cow, her hide still beautiful the way cattle are when they are taken care of and loved. Her dusky deep red hide with its little white bib and four pure white socks all special to her breed was topped off with the curls adorning her forehead, beautiful as if she had just come from Rae Langenbeck’s beauty parlor. The one behind her husband Buzz’s barber shop, hidden behind the pink curtain where the boys mother and grandmother went for their curls.

With purpose uncle Jack walked to the cow. raised the rifle to her forehead and pulled the trigger. Without a shudder she collapsed on the ground her body giving a little sigh, faint. One of her hind legs shivered a moment but she was already gone. Uncle Jack stood a moment looking down at her and then softly gave her the only benediction he could. He turned slightly, looked at the boy and said, “She was a good cow.”

Michael Shannon writes of his family’s life. A family which lived on the ground.

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SAILING

Michael Shannon

Cool enough. Just on the edge of too cold. The spring sunlight not quite blue but the translucent curtain filtered gray of a not quite foggy day. All quiet. Just myself and Roy Brower, the dog from Labrador. Both in our outdoor chairs watching. Me the birds, the deep Blue Jays coming in looking for bread crumbs or peanuts. Deigning the bird feeder, the old dinner plate mounted on a post amongst the blood red geraniums, it’s too low for them. They never touch the ground. No, the old plate is for the perching birds. The tiny Towhees and the Crested Tits dainty in their habits. The Western sparrows with their little black and white caps if they are males, the dun colored female only coming down when they hear the “All Safe.”

In the red blossomed Trumpet Vine the married pair of Mocking birds flutter around keeping a sharp eye for the Crow, the Thief of Eggs. The Crows drift along in a stately manner like WWII B-17’s until like Focke-Wolfs, the Mocking birds swoop down to attack.

Down in the lower garden a trio of Ameruacana hens drift in convoy, scratching and rooting for bugs and assorted insects or grubs. From the rear their heads down their tails looking like the high pitched roofs of Balinese Temples I have seen.

Roy lifts his head. Swinging his nose around about, gently sniffing the breeze. Does he smell the delicate perfume of the yellow Angel’s Trumpet blossom, perhaps. The slightly sour odor of Rabbits’ Bush is also on the breeze.

By some quirk of atmosphere there isn’t a sound, not even the usual clapping sound of the big oak tree scraping its leaves.

Roy an I mused about lunch but thought better of it. I stayed in my chair for a good half hour gazing absently at the garden and its parade of birds. The gift of Reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in Hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or sit in backyard chairs. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along. To old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done, perhaps only dreamed.

(30)

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter thirteen

Elwood, his name was Elwood Cooper and he owned the large Elwood Ranch in what is now Goleta and the adjacent hills. His first name lingers in several local place names including the oil fields. There are Elwood Canyon, Elwood School, Elwood Station Road, and a Goleta neighborhood. He ran cattle. He was a horticulturist and was best known for importing millions of Ladybugs from China to California which wiped out the black fungus that was killing walnut trees and saving that industry. He also imported the first Blue Gum tree which he though might be a good source of lumber. There are still thousands of Eucalyptus planted in wind breaks all over Southern California. This turned out not to be a wise choice.

After the death of his wife in 1909 he sold out and lived the rest of his life at Santa Barbara’s Arlington hotel. The ranch was sold to the Doty family who kept the business until 1921 when it was foreclosed, auctioned off and was essentially dormant until 1927 when an exploratory oil well was drilled there by a company from Texas.

The first oil discovery in the area was in July 1928, by Barnsdall Oil and the Rio Grande Company, who drilled their Luton-Bell Well No. 1 to a depth of 3,208 feet into the Vaqueros Sandstone. After almost giving up they not only struck oil, but had a significant gusher, initially producing 1,316 barrels per day. This discovery touched off a period of oil leasing and wildcat well drilling on the Santa Barbara south coast, from Carpinteria to Gaviota. During this period, the Mesa Oil Field was discovered within the Santa Barbara city limits, about 12 miles east of the Elwood field. The Elwood Field contained approximately 106 million barrels of oil, almost all of which has now been removed. The field has been abandoned.

Elwood piers and wells. Elwood Field, Goleta, CA

Barnsdall moved Bruce up to Elwood in early 1929. Almost all the wells were being whipstocked trying to reach the oil sands covered by hundreds of feet of seawater in the Santa Barbara channel. His expertise was in high demand. The drill strings were boring diagonally down in to the field like the tentacles of a squid. The whipstocks themselves never saw the light of day, snuck in at night because no one wanted the competing oil company on the neighbor’s lease to know just what was going on.

The business was still the wild wild west. There was no government control on production. Small producers took no prisoners they just drilled and drilled. Since wells typically produced the greatest amount of oil when they were still new, the impetus was to never stop drilling. The big companies were no better. Over production was taking its toll at the gas pump but no one in the business cared. Neither did the Hoover government. The public liked the idea of .22 cent gasoline.

Times were still pretty flush during the postwar boom. Car companies were turning out automobiles as fast as they could and Ford, especially Ford with its emphasis on utility and low price was driving car production at a breakneck pace. In 1929 Henry Ford raised wages to $7.00 a day. The other auto makers promptly sued him citing unfair labor practices.

Wages in the oil fields were also high, seven to eight dollars a day. The length of a tour was now just 8 hours down from twelve. Things were better for Bruce and Eileen because he was able to spend a little more time at home though it also meant that the rigs now required two crews a day to make hole. As a tool pusher he was now required to supervise both crews not one.

It was rough work. Bruce wasn’t out of danger yet. In 1930, 67 oil workers were killed on the job. Blowouts, falling rigging, toppling derricks, explosions and fire were always a danger. There was rarely at time when there wasn’t something burning in the fields. Barnsdall, operating all over California sent them back to Oildale. a place where they lived for nearly a year. Bruce came home one day with the skin ripped from his fingertips to nearly his elbow peeled back. At the rig they had smeared some grease on the open wound, laid the skin back down and wrapped it in a dirty undershirt and sent him home. My grandmother opened it up, cleaned the dirt and stickers off, slathered it with Vaseline and wrapped in in a clean bandage which she cut from a sheet. He went back to work the same day. They were both tough people.

In 1929/30 they lived in Bakersfield in a house for the first time that was big enough for the whole family, Bruce Eileen and the three kids. It had enough bedrooms for each kid which was the first time that had happened. It was considered a luxury by the children because no one had to sleep on the couch or the screened porch. Wonder of wonder it had indoor plumbing. A faucet in the kitchen and a bathtub. No toilet though, you still had to use the “Backhouse” to do your business.

Robert Mariel and Barbara Hall, 1930. Hall Family photo

Bruce was getting a reputation for knowing what a well was doing. He could tell by smell and taste what was happening a thousand feet down. He could hear in the creaks and groans, what she was thinking. He had the drillers sense of where she was going. Kneeling on the platform you would have seen him sniffing at the casing head, taking a finger and tasting the liquid mud used to lubricate the drill string. How hot was the mud flooding up out of the well? What did it smell like, was that hint of rotten eggs? When traces of crude came up getting a little on the fingertips and touching it with the tongue to help predict its gravity, was in light and sweet or thicker, could it be chewed. There was even a difference when you wiped your hand on a rag, did it soak right in or stick to the surface. Was there gas coming up, how much pressure was pushing it? There were a thousand indicators, the well was telling you its story. It had to be read on the spot for there was little scientific measurement in the oil patch just yet.

He always said that the kind of things you see in a movie, wells blowing up or a gusher blowing vast amounts of oil skyward could and would get your fired. Crude was money and the big men in the office wouldn’t be happy if a well got out of control. If you’re senses told you what was coming next you were a valued worker and grandpa was that. He had eleven years on the job and the experience was paying off. There were just a few thousand men working the rigs and people as good as Bruce were worth their weight in gold, or oil as the case may be. Word gets around.

Everything was looking pretty rosy. All three kids doing well in school, Mariel would be in high school in a year, Barbara in seventh grade and Bobbie in fourth. The kids were old enough now that their constant moving about had taught them how to quickly make friends. How to spot the popular kids who were school leaders and elbow there way into the group. Their parents sat them down and counseled them on the best way to survive as the constant new kid. Moving two or three times a year from school to school strengthened their social skills. I remember my mother, Barbara, the second child could make a friend in about two seconds.

Something bad was lurking in the United States and the world though. On the surface was the gloss of good times shown brightly but they masked something sinister. By the end of the decade cracks would begin to show though no one seemed to understand the why or what of it just yet. Let the good times roll.

Life magazine cover. Art, John Held JR. November 1926

All during the twenties in the aftermath of the war the times were good, very good. Society had rapidly changed. The old song which opined that soldier boys who had seen gay Paree wouldn’t want to go back to the farm was true. Young people saw skirts go up, way up. Flappers wore silk stockings. They rolled them over a rubber band just below the knee slipped a flask of bootleg whiskey under their garters and shimmied like their sister Kate. Hair was bobbed. Silk undies, just a chemise and a pair of step-ins, let’s party like 1929.

Miss Bee Jackson 1925, The Charleston Girl. British Pathe photo. Youtube.

Henry Ford was turning out the Flivver by the millions, they cost just over two hundred dollars and the kids soon discovered that petting on the back seat was a delight. They wanted to go and party with Jay Gatsby on long Island. F Scott Fitzgerald helped open the door.

It Wouldn’t last.

Chapter 14, coming soon. Disaster.

Michael Shannon is a writer. These stories come from his mothers side of the family many of who spent more than sixty years in the oil patch.

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Scribes.

…or how scribblers turn a joke, a phrase, a story.

When newspapers were the only mass communication in the country they reached nearly every home. My dad drove down to Kirk’s Liquor every morning after his men went to work and bought the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. The big boys dominated and some said “Made” the news. The term Fake news is neither Fake nor new. Reading the papers at the kitchen table in our home was a part of my education. Guided by my fathers exhortation that most of what you read was suspect and how you might find a way to validate that was how I was instructed. He said, “Always remember that newspapers are always owned by an individual with an agenda.” He advised that you do your home work, read a conservative view then a liberal view and that the answer lies some where in the middle. Maybe.

About the only place you see a newsstand anymore is in the old asphalt jungle, New Yawk, New Yawk. Once the center of the news world, publishing as many as sixteen dailies and uncounted numbers of weeklies. Hearst built his temple of journalism to Saint Francis de Sales patron Saint of newspaper scribes and never looked back. He fought a circulation war in the late eighteen nineties with Joseph Pulitzer of the NY World while Alfred Ochs was busily, quietly making the NY Times the most trusted paper in the country.

Hearst and Pultitzer invented Yellow Journalism in the 1890’s, a term that is a sensationalized style of news reporting characterized by exaggeration, vivid illustrations, and a focus on sensational stories like scandal and crime, rather than factual accuracy. The term is believed to have originated from a comic strip character called the Yellow Kid written by Richard Outcault. The Kid is considered to be the seminal comic strip for those we know today. My grandfather Shannon who palled around with Outcault said he never refused a drink which was his way of saying he was a “Hale fellow well met.” Jack Shannon could spin a tale pretty well himself.

The rival newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer competed for readership by printing sensational news stories pitched at the lowest common denominator, thus inaugurating the modern conception of journalism for a mass audience and gullible one too.

There were sporting papers for the Punters, guys like Nathan Detroit* who speculated on the ponies. Their were ethnics too. Papers in Yiddish, Polish, Italian and Rooshin for the reds to read. Lest the reader thinks newsmen are just hacks who couldn’t write books consider American writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Damon Runyon. The original Rush Limbaugh, Westbrook Pegler had a Hearst column in which he preached hate and division and even Hearst eventually fired him. There were Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Bob Considine too. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill, climactic figures of the twentieth century were contributors. Karl Marx, Einstein, Susan Sontag and the critic HL Mencken as well as James Baldwin wrote the news.

The greatest of sports writers, Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Frank Deford, George Will, Roger Angell and Dick Young dispensed real insight into popular culture cloaked in sporting news. Jim Murray of the los Angeles Times and E B White of Vanity Fair didn’t write the nuts and bolts of games but looked to the humanity contained in it.

“The sports editor stuck is head out the office door, green eyeshade pulled down low, a chewed, five cent seegar clenched between his teeth. Swinging his head around he looked a human version of a snapping turtle. Hooking his index finger around the stump of rolled tobacco leaf he spotted Lardner. He sent a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of the spittoon and bellowed, “Hey Lardner, gimme five hunert on dat busher from Balmer. (Baltimore) They call ‘Im Baby or Babe, sumpin’ like that. He licked the Yankees taday. Need it for the extra edition at five .”

BABE LICKS CUBBIES

BOSTON TWIRLER BLANKS CUBS, SOX IN SIX.

Beantown takes ’17 World Series.

For the scribbler in the newsroom, the idea…set the hook with an eye catching headline. Something to catch the eye of the Rubes. Something the newsboy could screech. Something simple, catchy, suck the penny right outta their vest pockets.

Newsboys with Morning Telegraph, New York City. 1899. The original Toughnuts.

Below are actual headlines which were carefully crafted to get attention from the buyer. Believe it or not there are archives and collections of the best and most amusing ever written.

OXYGEN KEY TO STAYING ALIVE.

CONFIRMED BY TOP SCIENTISTS

Breathing Found Necessary

Princess Kate all A-Titter

Princess and the Frog

Frog Photog, No Top Pix Draws Suit.

Princess Kate of Great Britain was filmed topless on a friends yacht. She sued a French tabloid and won.

I’M A CHEETAH

WOOD’S WIFE BONKS HUBBY WITH WEDGE

Tiger Woods, serial Tomcat Bogies out of his marriage. Lock up the waitresses!

CLOAK AND SHAG HER

CIA BOSS ADMITS AFFAIR

General David Petraeus resigns over the outing of his affair with his biographer. Headline, considered tasteless at the time would barely be news today.

‘Headless body in topless bar’ was voted as one of the greatest newspaper headlines of all time by New York magazine. It was written by the Post’s larger-than-life managing editor Vincent Musetto. Murder by Wife always gets the lead..

No More Mister Wiseguy

MOB RAT BLASTS YAPPER DON

Gabby Gotti Ruined the Mob says Gambino Capo

State Population to double by 2040

Babies to Blame

OFFICIALS CONCERNED, SAY NIX TO SEX

I was thinking about papers today after reading an essay by Steve Rushkin, a writer for Sports Illustrated. In it he quotes Bobby Knight once the basketball coach at Indiana University who famously said of writers, “Everybody learns to write by the second grade, most of us move on to better things.” Most of us stop calling ourselves Bobby and quit throwing chairs by then too, but I get his point.

Don’t take yourself too seriously, have some fun. Also remember that what we know of our history we know because SOMEONE WROTE IT DOWN. There’s that Bobby.

Cover Photo: Ring Lardner at work for the Sporting News. Considered one of America greatest satirists he was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott-Fitzgerald. In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, “You Know Me Al,” an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular. Lardner is well worth the read.

Nathan Detroit: A fictional rogue and gambler from the Play “Guys and Dolls.” Guys and Dolls is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” .

Michael Shannon lives in California and writes for the heck of it.

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12 Hour Tour

Chapter Twelve

Texas Shenanigans and the Whipstock

By Michael Shannon

Texas oil sprouted big personalities. Theodore Newton Barnsdall whose daddy started in the Pennsylvania fields, drilled the second well ever and built the first refinery taught him the business the way a butcher sharpens a knife. “Tede” as he liked to be called started out working for his father as a pumper annd when his dad died he inherited the company. Ambitious, a hale fellow well met, he also had the three things an oilman must have. He was fearless, supremely lucky and had a nose for oil. Not in barrels, oh no, a nose for oil underground. He was doing ok in Pennsylvania but thought he should go west and his case that was Indian Territory. The home of the Choctaw and Osage. With his gift of gab he made a friend of Chief James Bigheart of the Osage. Bigheart was instrumental in Barnsdall buying a stake in the Osage oil company, ILIO in 1903 which covered all of the Osage reservation, some 1,470,938 acres of what is now Osage county Oklahoma.*

Barnsdall became wealthy by bringing in well after well. Immensely rich he sold his company in 1912 and took stock from the new company, Cities Service. Though Theodore Barnsdall died in 1916 his company survived.

The oil business is and always has been a labyrinth of connections, co-ownerships, subsidiaries, wholly owned or leased. Oil companies owned and were owned by railroads, refiners, conglomerates and even companies who had no connection to production at all. Production was sold to refiners, refiners to banks and then bought back by the producers. Companies were deliberately bankrupted in order to not only clear debt but sometimes to assume debt by the buyer of the defunct company. Sometimes defunct companies were not actually defunct. Names lived on.

Though “Tede” was long buried away., his company lived on but now owned by Cities Services a refiner and major lender to the business, Cities kept the name and the Barnsdall Company continued to operate. It partnered with the Philllip’s company, now Conoco-Phillips and Socony, Standard Oil of New York and in 1927 decided to move some operations to California under the name Barnsdall-Rio Grande**

How does this effect the man who laborers on the rig. No need to ask him because he likely has no idea. It’s affect on my grandparents though, easy to understand.

Grandpa Hall in the course of following the work ended up in Summerland and Santa Barbara by 1927. They rented a little house on Mission street and Bruce began working as a Farm Boss down in Summerland. Today it is a hip little town but in 1927 it was very small cluster of small houses just north of the section of beach which would become famous for the oil rigs there.

The road south from Summerland at the Rincon. SB Historical Society Collection. 1920’s

A former Treasury agent, Henry Lafayette Williams, initially intended to raise pigs there when he bought this land in 1885. But when the Southern Pacific Railroad announced it was laying tracks north from Los Angeles that would cross his pig ranch, he decided to sell off lots and build a town next to the rails.

What made this act of entrepreneurship unusual was that Williams and his wife were Spiritualists. A popular religion at the time its practitioners believed that mediums connected the living to the dead. Williams and his wife persuaded fellow Spiritualists to move to their town. Lots of 60 feet by 25 feet sold for $25 each. In 1889, the early settlers named the town Summerland which was the name of the Spiritualists’ heaven.

Town lore has it that many of the homes that the Spiritualists built had hidden rooms from which the spirit of a dead relative would enter during seances. People from neighboring towns nicknamed Summerland “Spookville” because of all the strange happenings they thought were going on.

The Williams home, The Big Yellow House.

The Williams’ own home, rumored to still have ghosts today is the Big Yellow House Restaurant, a Summerland landmark.

In 1894 the accidental discovery by a man drilling for water who struck oil instead. Oil fever and the boom was on. The bluffs along the coast came right down to the waters edge. As the field expanded piers were built into the ocean, derricks erected and Summerland had what is considered the first offshore oil field in the Western Hemisphere.

The Ortega curve, Southern Pacific RR above the Summerland field. SP Photo.

Both things played to Bruce’s skills. The wells were very shallow, some at only 400 feet which favored cable tool rigs. Shallow wells and sandstone formations were made for cable rigs. The other thing he knew was the whipstock and how to use it.

Grandpa Bruce did not whip my grandmother. He wouldn’t have dared. She was a farm girl and raised by a fierce independant woman. She would have been a handful. No, the whipstock was a tool used to direct the path of a drill bit. it seems a bit need only go straight down but there might be a reason why you wouldn’t want it too.

Here is where we might want to return to “Tede” Barnsdall and his like. You see, experimental oil drilling, as was practiced in the early days required a man who was a gambler and a risk taker like ‘Tede. “Perhaps a little “Shifty” a man who mght just bend the rules.

Oilfield history is rife with legendary fields and the Wildcatters who risked everything on an all chips in the pot hand, high card wins the gamble.***

Spindletop, Wink and Burkburnett in Texas, Sunset on the Midway in the West Kern, Old Maude in the Casmalia field, Alamitos no.1 on Signal Hill, Doheny’s first well at La Brea, each field drilled by one of those elite gamblers with which the old boys begin their tales of adventure.

When old time oilmen circle their Eldorados for the night and hunker down around the campfire at the Petro­leum Club to talk about the good old days, sooner or later one name always pops up.

Mister Glenn McCarthy. Not sure about the mister though, he never seemed like the kind of guy who needed a mister.

The loner. The poor boy who made good. The rich boy who made bad. The Wildcatter. The model for Jett Rink in the movie Giant.

Jett Rink, Wildcatter. Warner Brother, 1956.

Remember the time Glenn made a half-million from a field that all the oil companies said was dry? That’s nothing, once he was a million and a half in debt, so he built a $700,000 house just for the hell of it.

He said the banks would think he was rich. “Buy a new Cadillac and let them see you drivin’ it. Put ’em off the scent. And the time the Hous­ton Country Club wrote him a letter saying that, all in all, they’d rather not have him around the place?

Yeah, those were the days, when—at least to the outside world—he was the personification of Houston, Texas, USA. Feast and famine, gusher and duster, whenever two people got together to fight or wheel or deal or all of the above, one of them was a smiling Irishman with curly brown hair and a dark mustache—Glenn Herbert Mc­Carthy, the Wildcatter.

He came from Beaumont originally, the son of an itinerant oilfield worker, William McCarthy, who was a driller at Spindletop. Young Glenn was eight then, and carried a water bucket from the pump to the sweating workers. When he was 23, McCarthy wooed and wed Faustine Lee, the 16-year-old daughter of T. P. Lee, a rich Texas oil­man. Lee was upset, since Faustine had run away from high school to marry, but by then, Glenn could hold his own. After all, he was an oilman too and soon he proved it. It’s been up and down, cold Brut Champagne and hot Bud. Time had him on its cover, the King of the Wildcatters. One of many.

“So what if some oilmen were flam­boyant and boisterous and loud? They were the men who worked their tails off, rain or shine, winter or summer.” They risked everything and sometimes they won.

It took a man with an idea. A man like my grandfather who could solve a problem. Drilling wasn’t as straight forward as you might think. Bits did no always go straight down, they could wander all over the place. Drilling in sand or punching through rock can bend the drill string every which-a- away.

Since the business of punching holes in the ground was made up on the fly and there were very few engineers on the drill floor things had to be figured out by the dirty, sweaty roughnecks and Toolies. And by God they did.

The first slant well was successfully drilled in 1929 in Texon, Texas. Sidetracking a well can solve some unexpected problems such as bypassing damaged sections of the well or going around broken tools at the bottom that can’t be retrieved by fishing. Lateral deflection of the well bore has been achieved by placing a wedge or whipstock in the well. The whipstock is, essentially, a wedge that crowds the bit to the side of the hole, causing it to drill at an angle off the vertical. The angle of the hole was measured, in the days before high technology by the simple expedient of lowering a glass jar half filled with Sulphuric acid down the casing until it hit bottom. Left there for a time the acid would etch the inside of the jar and when pulled up a line indicating the angle would be clearly visible. The difference between this line and top of the jar indicated the angle of the bore. Very simple. Workman who solve problems rarely have any time to figure out something sophisticated like an engineer does.

When Bruce was working on the West side, as the fields around Maricopa, Reward and the Elk Hills were called, the depth of the wells was such that Rotaries were needed to make hole. A rotary rig with a Hughes Tool bit was able to drill nearly 9,000 feet**** No Cable tool rig could go much over 1200 feet. The Cable Tool method which he had nearly ten years of experience with were in the minority. Learning the rotary bit system wasn’t difficult and he soon became an excellent Tool Pusher for both types.

Tripping pipe on a rotary rig, Elk Hills. Near Taft Ca.

In Summerland it took just a few years to drill along the foreshore. The wells crowded together so close you could literally spit on your neighbor. The oil sands were shallow and the old walking beams of the cable rigs were everywhere. When they ran out of room the drillers simply built piers out into the ocean and kept on going. At about 1,200 feet the Rotary Rigs were set up on the piers and they moved farther out. When it got too deep for piers they brought in the whipstock and began slant drilling.

Summerland. 1928. Not a square foot wasted. and insanely dangerous. SB Historical

What they did was to take a large chunk of wood and shape it into a wedge, thinner at the top and thick and heavy at the bottom. Then all the pipe in the well casing was tripped out, the wedge lowered to the bottom of the hole. The drill string was then tripped back in and when the bit hit the whipstock it followed the angle of the wedge and began drilling at an angle.

Whipstocking. Baker-Hughes company illustration.

Now a driller could go around cave ins, or difficult strata reorienting the bit in the right direction. They quickly figured out that they could now drill more than one hole off the same rig. And of course, in the still wild and wooly oil business it took about two seconds for some sharp operator to figure out that he could drill under someone else’s lease and steal their oil. Bruce knew the technology and working for Seaside Oil they soon had a literal bowl of spaghetti of pipe with holes going every which-away. It was near impossible in those early days to figure out where any one’s string actually went. In a day when roustabouts still carried revolvers you had to be careful about what you said and to whom. A man had a family to feed after all and it was common custom to pay a man in shares of production once the well came in. Instead of cash, which was paid at the end of the job, a percentage of the payout on a barrel of oil was your wage. Contractors made their own rules and the big Companies looked the other way. Why they practically encouraged it by ignoring it. You couldn’t find a Toolie who knew anything about it. It was a mystery. It was highway robbery best kept quiet.

*The Osage county seat is in the small town of Pawhuska which you may be familiar with from watching Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman’s cooking show. Her husband Ladd Drummond owns the family ranch which covers 433,000 acres in Osage County. Oil rights obtained from the Osage has immensely increased the family’s wealth. The Drummonds were actively complicit in the Osage oil scandal of the 1920’s buying up “headrights” and foreclosed or bankrupt ranches from members of the Osage tribe. Not illegal exactly but certainly the result of “Sharp.” practice. Since Ladd’s cousin is the states attorney general, they are covered.

**The genealogical timeline for Barnsdall goes as such. Bigheart Oil Company-Barnsdall-Cities Services-Phillips-Rio Grande Oil-Standard Oil of New York, (Socony)-Richfield-Atlantic Richfield, (Arco)-Sinclair-Continental- Marathon oil and in 1999 British Petroleum, (BP Amoco)

***Boomtown 1940. A film starring Clark Gable, who actually worked for Barnsdall oil in Oklahoma when he still had big ears and bad teeth. Old timers will tell you its the best film ever made about boom and bust wildcatters and is largely true to life. From Kilgore Texas to the Kettleman Hills in California.

Cover Photo: The Hall Family Mariel, Bob, Barbara, my mother, Eileen and Bruce. Uncle Marion in the rear. 1928.

Michael Shannon’s mother was on the ride with his grandparents. Her memories form a great part of this story.

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Twelve Hour Tour

Chapter Eleven.

Shooters and Torpedos

Michael Shannon.

The Shooter arrived in his Studebaker truck. His Torpedos rolling back and forth as he bounced up the road from Bakersfield. The wooden boxes which held the twenty, ten quart cans of Glycerine, all packed tightly in a wads of excelsior, held securely in place by the sideboards, strapped down. Roped in tight. His was a job that allowed no mistakes. A job for a calm and very careful man. Perhaps a man who liked to blow things up. The boy who blew up coffee cans with firecracker was a natural.

The Shooter and his Torpedos.

Oil isn’t easy to find. Sometimes when you find it its impossible to get to it. When Bruce’s well got down into the oil sands he knew from the debris in the bailer. Sometimes, though the presence of oil in the samples was small and the decision was made to send a torpedo down the hole and try and fracture the formation by setting of a blast and setting the oil in the mineral free. Oil flow could be increased many times over if they were successful.

Contractors that did the “Shooting” were a highly evolved trade. Sending a hollow tube packed with a couple hundreds pounds of jellied Nitroglycerine down a well took some nerve and a great deal of skill. Men who made a career of shooting were few.

In 1867 the chemist Alfred Nobel found that by taking Nitroglycerine, an extremely unstable compound and combining it with diatomaceous earth in order to make it safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as “dynamite”. Nobel later combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose compounds, similar to, Collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a more powerful explosive than dynamite. Gelignite, or blasting Gelignite, as it was named, was patented in 1876. Gelignite was more stable, transportable and conveniently formed to fit into bored holes, like those used in oil drilling.

The Shooter, Bruce and the other rig workers knew that even after all the improvements of the previous 60 years things could still go wrong. Bruce would clear his rig of all personnel, making sure that they moved as far away as they could from the rig to be “Shot.” No one argued.

Bruce was fortunate to work for companies who took this part of rig operations seriously. You had two choices, hire experienced outfits and pay the freight or independents who were cheap but had little experience and could be hazardous to the health of everyone around them, including themselves.

If your rig was down a bad road, they would send the drivers out, tell’ em to be careful, load the soup in the back of those old trucks and send ’em off. The trucks didn’t have any shock absorbers or padding or anything to give them protection, so those guys got more money than the Toolie and earned every cent. They could be driving down an old dirt road, headed to the well and the truck would fall in a chuck hole and that would be the last of them. Every once in a while if your ear was tuned to it you could hear one take off. Nothing to do for it but to hire a new driver.

Up at the north end a Wildcat well, Arnold No 3 hit oil sands but estimated production would not reach profitable levels so the decision was made to call in a Shooter and crack the formation at the bottom of the well in order to increase flow. It was well known that Wildcatters always hung from a shoestring financially and instead of hiring out to a reputable company the looked, instead for a Cheapo outfit. They soon found one, a father and son set-up who guaranteed they could bring Arnold No 3 in. They showed up on a Sunday, hauling their dope in an old cut down Cadillac car. They packed the torpedos with two hundred pounds each of Glycerine. Now, being either too inexperienced or too stupid and lazy to do the job right they hauled all their gear up onto the drilling floor. They used the sand line to hook up the first torpedo and lifted her up ready to send her down the hole. Too lazy to pull the Key from the rotary table, figuring the torpedo would just fit they lowered her down into the Key where she just barely fit. As they lowered away, the torpedo squeaking and scraping the sides of the Key. the drilling crew seeing what was going on backed away until they were a hundred yards away for safety’s sake.

Sure as shootin’ the torpedo stuck in the key with about a foot showing and after some kicking an shoving the father took up a section of small 3/4 inch pipe and commenced to banging away, trying to get it to move. The drill rig boys saw that and turned and began to hotfoot it as fast as they could, putting some distance between themselves and the fools on the rig. The boy took another piece of pipe and started hitting the other side of the torpedo from the father, banging and banging. The slowest, youngest roughneck got behind a small pepper tree and leaned against it hoping for the best. After a minute or two the Nitroglycerin in the torpedo got tired of being abused and lit up with a roar. Father, son, rig and the Caddie vaporized. The roughneck, more than a hundred yard away was killed by the Cadillac’s door slicing right through the tree and the boys neck.


The Blast Site, Oildale, California. 1936 Note the missing passenger door.

When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of the rig or the men on it, just a huge crater nearly thirty feet deep. No part of the father and son was ever found, not a finger or foot, though they looked all around wanting to find something the poor wife and mother could bury.

The next morning, driving to work along the Valley Road, now north Chester Avenue a pusher for Standard Oil found a wheel from the Cadillac lying in the road, more than two mile from the blast site.

With a little common sense and an abundance of caution Bruce had now survived in this dangerous business for nearly a decade. The danger you can see is avoidable but the danger you can’t is not. Looming on the horizon was something that would throw the family into crisis.

The price for barrel topped $ 3.00 in nineteen and twenty and had, because of massive over production, been sliding downward. By the 1920s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands. With no industry organization or government oversight established corporations led by the ever hopeful wildcatters drilled and drilled and drilled.

Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant had geared up for the new Model A in fall 1927 and by 1928 was rolling them off the assembly line at 9,000 cars a day. Mass produced and marketed you could get a snazzy Ford Roadster for $385.00. Didn’t have to be black either, unlike the venerable old Model T which came, as Henry said, “In any color as long as its black. By comparison. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, owners of their own studio and without a doubt the best known film stars in the world really tooled around in a Duesenberg Model J which retailed for $8,700.00 dollars or about the cost of five average homes. It’s not likely they actually owned the Model A they are standing with. If they did, the cook and the maid used it to run errands.

Doug and Mary, 1928, with the Model A Ford.

Bruce and Eileen were doing well enough. By 1928 the two girls, Barbara and Mariel were twelve and eleven about to enter high school and little brother Bob, nine. High school beckoned. They had moved from the fields in the valley where Bruce had worked for Barnsdall Oil Company wells on both the east and west side.

It was a good time to get out of the valley. Oil workers were staging strikes on the Westside in Taft, Maricopa, Coalinga. The oil companies countered by trying to bring in “Scabs” from the bay area. Southern Pacific was happy to help as they had a major stake in production. Since the end of the war when wages rose the big companies decided they would put the squeeze on their labor and had gradually driven pay down. Strikebreakers, “Scabs” were protected by armed men, paid gunsels. county sheriffs and the police who knew where their butter was. The Southern Pacific RR was happy to provide trainloads of strikebreakers to the producers. There was some nasty businewss that took place at the SP depot when these trains arrived. Bruce was always concerned about things like this and after Casmalia never lived in the housing provided by the oil companies. They rented houses away from the central retail and housing districts. Oil towns were rough as they continue to be today. Gunplay, knives, drunkenness, prostitution and the company store with it’s outrageous prices were to be avoided, especially with three young children.

Taft was a “sundowner” town, which meant that if you were black or Mexican you’d better be out of town by sundown. The Ku Klux Klan was well organized and made sure that everyone knew Taft was a White Man’s town. A Kern County Supervisor, a certain Republican named Stanley Abel even had a mountain in the Los Pinos Wilderness area nearby named after him. It still is.

The Bakersfield Californian May 6, 1922

When confronted with this revelation, Stanley Abel was unapologetic to say the least. He said in a statement the day after the Bakersfield Californian published their report: “Yes, I belong to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and I am proud to be associated with many of the best citizens of Taft and vicinity in the good work they are doing….I make no apology for the Klan. It needs none.”

Many in Kern county were not impressed. They started recall campaigns for Abel and others in city and county governments. Local newspaper the Bakersfield Morning Echo was staunch support of the supervisor, stating: “Those liberal Democrats promoting the recall of Stanley Abel are the enemies of good society and of the best interests of Kern County. A vote for the recall of Stanley Abel is a vote for the return of the vicious element and the vicious conditions which existed in years gone by.” Sound familiar? History allows the name to change but the song remains the same no matter the age.

The writer is the grandson of Bruce and Eileen, He and his cousins grew up with stories from the Oil Patch.

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