by Bryan Mealer
After moving the headquarters to Big Spring, Tollett narrowed its market to Texas and bordering states, rather than the entire Midwest. The war in Europe soon led to increased fuel demand, and the refinery became the first in the nation to establish a “pipeline on wheels,” sending whole trainloads of gasoline and crude to the East Coast for shipment overseas. A deal with the T&P to pay pipeline rates rather than rail rates ensured that many thousands of trainloads followed. By 1942, the company earned its first profit, and two years later, it paid its first dividend.
But in order to truly succeed, Tollett had to reimagine the whole enterprise. He set about expanding Cosden Petroleum Corporation into a “custom refinery.” He added a modern catalytic cracking unit that manufactured every grade of gasoline and diesel while tailoring formulas for individual companies. Soon all the majors, such as Shell and Phillips, were mixing their fuels at Cosden for their southwestern markets, rather than trucking it from refineries along the Gulf. The company then opened its own filling stations in towns across Texas and New Mexico, its billboards featuring a friendly traffic cop mascot. And once Tollett discovered that the oil under Big Spring was fabulous for distilling asphalt, he installed a new vacuum still that churned out forty-five premium grades, which soon covered a third of all Texas roads.
By the end of the 1940s, Tollett had primed the company and the town, which had weathered the ups and downs of two oil booms, for its most productive decade. But even as Big Spring and the refinery thrived, both would have to contend with his demons.
4
The skies dry up, a seven-year plague … Bob trades in oil for sand … Homer battles the Lord and Little Opal, finds deliverance in the road …
The 1950s arrived with a drumbeat of war in Korea. At the air base on the west side of town, the federal government began training pilots. Thousands of new recruits poured into Big Spring and soon the rumble of T-33 jets filled the skies. To keep the warplanes and vehicles moving overseas, the Cosden refinery dispatched an endless stream of fuel and chemicals into its pipeline and rail cars, while drillers harnessed two of the biggest oil discoveries to date. East of town was the Kelly-Snyder field, part of a colossal limestone reef called the Horseshoe Atoll that had once lined the ancient Permian sea. Geologists were saying it could hold over a billion barrels of crude. To the west, toward Midland, crews were spudding into the tongue-shaped pools of the Spraberry Trend, believed to contain ten million more.
My grandfather Bob found steady work with small, independent outfits in the Permian such as Rowan Oil and Norwood Drilling Company. No longer a lowly roustabout, he now worked as a floor hand threading the lengths of drill pipe that pushed thousands of feet into the earth. Some of Norwood’s wells tunneled more than two miles down.
Between the oil wells, refinery, and air base, tens of thousands of people were moving to Big Spring, whose population by the end of the fifties swelled to an all-time high of thirty thousand. As in many small towns in America before the arrival of interstates and shopping malls, its downtown remained a place where people could open businesses and make a living. Weekends still brought a swarm of shoppers, people watchers, and traffic so thick that drivers circled the blocks in search of a place to park. The atmosphere was often so festive it carried the feel of a circus. In fact, one afternoon while Homer was selling newspapers along Third Street, a crowd gathered outside the Hotel Settles. Looking up, he saw Benny and Betty Fox, professional acrobats, dancing the Charleston on a platform suspended from the fourteenth floor, nary a net to save them. Their act was called “The Dance of Death.”
* * *
As the town’s borders expanded, both physically and figuratively, the ones my family occupied remained stubbornly narrow. They believed in what Jesus said in John 17 about the world hating those who obey God’s word, and therefore they were not of it. To them, this earthly life was a mere vapor before the promised solidity of paradise.
As Zelda, Homer, and the cousins grew older, the laws of the church, designed to shield them from the outside world, only grew tighter around their lives. They stopped playing church. Puberty dragged them out of innocence and made them fair game in the tabernacle. The sermons condemning backsliders and painted Jezebels began to feel more personal, as if the eyes of God and the preacher were in every passing headlight. And guilt, which had once pressed only lightly on their souls, now rooted itself like a tree, rattling its branches at the slightest sign of pleasure.
In high school, the rules of the church ostracized them. Since most school functions were forbidden—dances, concerts, and football games where drunks and gamblers preyed—the cousins socialized only with one another and other members of their denomination.
Attempts to assimilate were struck down, like the time Zelda and Doris signed up for a talent show at the Municipal Auditorium. Without telling their parents, they dressed like hoboes, blacked their teeth, and sang the popular song “Side by Side” with the new preacher’s daughter, Beverly Eldrige, playing piano. They easily took first prize, which was a trip to Houston to appear on television. Opal and Agnes, although surprised by the news, saw their daughters’ talents as gifts from the Lord and gave their consent. But when Pastor Eldrige caught wind of this contest, he forced the girls to forfeit.
Not everyone felt oppressed by the church’s restrictions. Despite its many rules, it remained the center of life for so many people, including Zelda and Doris, who would grow up cherishing the memories from those years, like the out-of-town camp meetings with close friends from their congregation, or the impromptu donut-eating contests they held down at the coffee shop. Zelda was never ashamed of her faith and its demands—especially not at gym class, where she and Norma Lou had to wear frumpy culottes instead of shorts. And the girls who giggled in the hallways and whispered “Holy Rollers” never shook her convictions. “I treasured God’s love in my heart and knew I always wanted to serve Him,” she later wrote. “I have never wanted to turn from following Him.”
But Homer, like my father in later years, felt the church’s laws like a pair of hands clasped around his throat. He resented not being allowed to date outside the Assembly of God. He stewed every Friday night when school friends drove to Midland and Odessa, while he went to church for the fourth time in a week.
“Mother, can’t I stay home? I have to study,” he said one Wednesday night, but Little Opal was firm.
“You have to go.”
“But I have a test tomorrow, and I don’t know the material.”
“The Lord will show you,” she said.
Once at church, the preacher’s clothesline sermons skewering short hair and war paint seemed pedestrian and unrelated to Scripture. And the scare tactics trotted out each night seemed like canned fiction—like the story about the man who felt compelled to hit the altar but didn’t, only to die in a car wreck on his way home—“He could’ve entered heaven, friends, but he chose hell instead.” Each week, Homer vowed he’d never fall for it again.
Yet every time the preacher issued the call for salvation, Homer’s protest began to crack. Always, at that critical moment, his resistance turned to fluff and he was consumed with shame. He stood up with the rest of his cousins and made his way to the front.
But the doubt and anger always crept back in, usually by church on Wednesday.
He told his mother, “I’ve confessed my sins so many times, I imagine the Lord is sick of hearing from me.”
“Then go on to hell,” she said.
His stubbornness toward the Lord enraged her.
“I wish the Mississippi River’d rise up between me and that church house,” he shouted. “With no bridges!”
“You’ll be lucky if God don’t strike you dead.”
The battles with Little Opal over the state of his soul grew epic. By the time Homer was fifteen, he’d had enough. One Sunday morning he made a final stand and refused to go to church, and before Little Opal could grab her belt, he was out the door. He jumped into her Buick and sped down
town, where he rented a cheap room at the Duncan Hotel.
“Gimme the whole week,” he told the clerk, and plunked down seven dollars. For the next hour he sat on the bed listening to a ball game on the radio and stared out the window, until Herman, driving the cattle truck, spotted the Buick outside and persuaded him to come home.
As they pulled out of downtown, his father assured him, “You don’t have to go to church anymore. I’ll talk to your mother.”
But Homer knew better. “She won’t have it,” he said, and he was right. Little Opal let him backslide a few more weeks, then tightened the clamps again. Homer was planning a more permanent escape when, most ironically, he was saved by the Lord’s own wrath.
* * *
In 1950, the rain just quit.
A drought arrived, and like the one in 1917, it came during a time of record petroleum production, as if the Lord forbade the land to give all its bounty at once. But this drought was epic and unprecedented. It first took root in Texas, then spread west into New Mexico. Within a year it had made its way to California before gripping Oklahoma, Kansas, and the rest of the Central Plains—a swath of destruction that covered ten states and persisted for much of the decade. But Texas suffered the greatest, and the longest—seven years without rain. The drought surpassed 1886, 1916, 1917, 1919, and all the Dust Bowl years combined, described by officials as the most devastating in six hundred years. It bored its grooves into the land and left it, along with those who depended on the land, forever changed. For the families who survived its indignity, the 1950s do not bring about wistful nostalgia. “The time it never rained,” as writer Elmer Kelton so eloquently described, was a time when “many a boy would become a man before the land was green again.”
* * *
In Big Spring, cotton was the first to go. The crop of 1949 had been phenomenal, a bumper yield. The following year, despite the rains drying up, the harvest remained fair, thanks to moisture still left in the ground. But that was all.
Old men in Big Spring still talk about how it happened, how the farmers seeded their fields in May after a short planting rain—the last—and how they watched the gentle shoots break ground, only to awake in the middle of the night to the sound of their fields going airborne. They’ll explain how the farmers would chart a lone gray cloud across the sky all day as if it were filled with money. “That one smells like rain,” they’d say to their wives, only to watch it vanish like a soap bubble against the sun. Or how farmers gathered by the dozen under brush arbors, put their hands together, and prayed for some relief; how they listened to the men from up north talk about seeding the clouds, which never worked; and how most years the gentle shoots were left defenseless against the hundred-degree winds that chewed them to stumps.
And say you got a rain shower after the seedlings sprouted, as happened in 1953, which allowed the cotton to actually turn out buds. Well, that just brought the aphids and grasshoppers, the false wireworms and thrips, and especially the godforsaken weevils. Sometimes, you didn’t even know you had weevils until you walked out after breakfast and found half your field beheaded on the dirt.
The government brought in soil experts and the men listened to them. Grow cover crops to keep the soil down, they said, to keep it from “migrating” the way it had in the past. Some farmers were already planting milo for cover, because milo was feed crop and akin to gold in the drought, and with milo, you might actually break even. The experts were full of other ideas—sunflowers, black-eyed peas, hybrid sorghum, weeping love grass, and guar, just to name a few. Several men planted whole fields in guar only to go bankrupt when the the buyers didn’t show up come harvest. But most were stubborn and stuck with cotton, and they went down with it, too.
They traded their two-row tractors for four-row machines that had the power to dig deeper, to bust the hardpan and allow in some moisture—if only it would rain. But it didn’t rain, and now the fields were dug deeper and gave the winds more soil to suck up. Hadn’t they learned anything from the Dirty Thirties? Well, here were the Filthy Fifties, where at noon the streetlights were coming on again. The sand was so thick it seeped through the sealed windows of the hospital operating room and coated the instruments, even penetrated the vaults at State National Bank, despite a foot of concrete and steel.
“Does the wind always blow thisaway?” a newcomer asked when he got to town.
“No,” the answer came, “sometimes it blows thataway.”
But the farmers kept hitting their fields with their four-row tractors, “deep breaking,” they called it. By 1955, the blades were cutting nearly two feet down, but all they turned up was sand. The topsoil was gone—two feet of precious soil, now replaced by a desert. By 1957, the damage was complete. Over 70 percent of Big Spring’s farms were gone. As one man told the Herald, “I don’t know how to farm this land anymore. Seems no matter what we do, these fields blow a little more every year.”
* * *
For the cattlemen, the drought was its own nightmare. First the range grass began to die, and once the grass was gone there was nothing. The established ranches, and especially ones with oil money, leased grazing land up in Kansas and northern Colorado to preserve their herd. Others paid out the nose for hay and alfalfa, which they bought on credit from the bank, and you’d hear them moaning in the coffee shop how they’d pitched their net worth out the back of a pickup.
The ones with plentiful water got cocky and kept their animals too long, until they stripped the grass roots and left the land bare, ready to blow. It could take five years for good range grass to return, and in the meantime, mesquite crept in and sucked up the groundwater. Weeds also found a foothold and filled the empty spaces: turpentine weed and broomweed, along with locoweed, which contained a chemical called swainsonine that would poison a cow’s brain and send it thrashing in the fields. The corymbs of snakeweed, which thrived in drought, caused miscarriages and stillborn calves.
As a last measure, some ranchers poured cheap molasses on dead grass and safer weeds to stimulate the cattle’s appetite. They took butane torches to prickly pears to burn off thorns so the cows could eat. But a cow that takes to prickly pear will often become addicted, eating only cacti even when standing in grass up to its knees. Eventually the thorns ripped holes in their mouths and invited screwworms, which, as one rancher observed, would eat their heads clean off if left unchecked. Cattle that grew weak became exposed to disease and opportunists. A rancher in Tom Green County once watched a pack of javelinas descend on a heifer that had lain down, eating her alive as she bawled in the dust.
Most cattlemen sold out before things got that bad. Ranches unloaded their livestock by the hundreds of thousands, trying to salvage at least something. By 1955, you could drive fifteen miles through neighboring Bordon County, where range made up nine-tenths of the land, and not see a single cow. In Martin County, on the other side, dairy farmers teetered on bankruptcy. Sniffing blood, competitors from Minnesota sent down convoys of insulated milk trucks to steal their business, using two drivers so they wouldn’t have to stop. In three years, half the dairy outfits had vanished.
Cowhands who’d worked on ranches thirty and forty years had to be let go. Facing the reality of paying rent for the first time, many joined the legion of busted farmers working for wages in the oil patch. Each morning at dawn, a group of them gathered along the Garden City highway to lay pipe south of Midland—fifty men squeezed into a windowless doghouse, winched to the back of a truck and hauled to the gas fields. For $1.20 an hour, they coated pipe with creosote and dropped it into a trench, but the dirt was so dry that the holes filled right back up. Gang pushers paced behind them like prison guards on horseback, and whoever complained didn’t get asked back, for thirty other men were waiting for each job.
On Saturday nights, the out-of-work cowboys gathered at the Stampede out on the Syder Highway, where Hoyle Nix and His West Texas Cowboys played western swing. They danced the Paul Jones and waltzed with pretty women, drank their whiskey in
the parking lot and picked fights with the Yankee airmen, who didn’t seem to know or care that a way of life was vanishing before their eyes.
By the end of the drought, barely a third of the county’s original herd remained. Ranchers moved north to less cursed ground, or else sold out and moved to town. All told, by the end of the decade, Texas lost nearly a hundred thousand farms and ranches, and 30 percent of its rural population.
Where vast herds of cattle had once grazed on the West Texas range, the pastures now yawned empty, and where cotton had blanketed the fields like snow in autumn, the wayward soil now piled against fence rows, so high you could walk clean over the tops.
As much of a tragedy as this was for everyone, it presented great opportunity for my family.
* * *
When the soil began to blow, my grandfather Bob was wrenching pipe on a derrick floor along the lucrative Spraberry Trend. But by 1952, the Spraberry’s promised bonanza was proving elusive. The geology was tricky; the underground pressure began to taper off, and wells that had started off strong slowed to a trickle. When that happened, rigs were laid down and men lost work. By that time, the bounty from the Korean War had also run its course. Now the war needed pipe and other supplies, which slowed production even more. Oil prices froze.
Then, in April 1953, the Texas Railroad Commission, concerned over the excessive flaring of natural gas that the oil wells produced, ordered the Spraberry shut down completely. The small independents Bob worked for lost millions. In fact, one of them—Rowan Oil Company—sued the Railroad Commission, and the Texas Supreme Court sided in the company’s favor. The commission reopened the field several months later but limited production to ten days a month. The smaller outfits couldn’t survive.
