The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  The Pike boardwalk was a barking, strutting panorama of every kind of fun that Little Opal and the church railed against. A fat man chewing on a cigar tried to guess his weight. A freak tent advertised a bearded lady and a girl born with a monkey’s face. Sailors emerged from smoke-filled beer halls and crowded the doors of tattoo parlors, displaying fresh ink. In every direction, it seemed, were packs of tanned barefoot girls, their swimsuits covered in sand from swimming in the surf. The smell of fried onions drew him to a burger stand, where he ate lunch, then bought a plank of saltwater taffy to take back on the road.

  He’d neglected to sweep out the trailer after offloading the cattle, and once back on the city streets, the truck spewed a cloud of pulverized manure that left a wake of ill will. With an empty load he made Yuma in eight hours. He ate a chicken-fried steak at a truck stop and rented a bunk for a dollar, then slept so long the owner shook him awake, fearing he was dead.

  Outside of town, he bought from a farmer a load of prairie hay, which his father would sell at a markup. Fourteen hours later, after stopping only to use the restroom, he pulled into the company lot in Big Spring and phoned his father to pick him up. When he awoke the next morning, he found the truck parked out front with another full trailer, its cargo bawling and ready to go.

  * * *

  That summer, as Homer helped empty the West Texas range, something happened: all that anger knotted up inside him, toward his mother and the church, began to slowly unwind. The country was less crowded back then, and all that emptiness out the windshield had the power to pry open the mind. Jack Kerouac once described his book On the Road as a story of “roaming the country in search of God.” And while Homer didn’t know it at the time, that’s what he was doing, too, searching for his own vision of God, which could only be found outside of Big Spring and the church where he was raised.

  Each trip west became its own adventure, bringing new experiences to file away. Once, outside of Tuscon, a motorcycle gang harassed him for twenty miles and refused to let him pass. Homer finally backed off the truck, then put the pedal to the floor. By the time the bikers saw him coming, he’d swung the trailer straight into their pack and pushed them against a fence.

  He picked up hitchhikers to pass the time, mostly sailors headed home. And once, in the Imperial Valley, he watched a calf kick a man square in the mouth and knock out most of his teeth. As business increased, the desert crossings grew more frequent and required more pills to fuel them. Sometimes he brought a friend from church, Charles Miller, to share cigars and keep him alert, especially in the dark hours when the medicine twisted his brain. During a feverish push through Arizona, Charles made the mistake of dozing off, awaking abruptly to Homer, his eyes beaming like silver dollars, smacking his head.

  “Leon, wake up! Wake up, Leon!”

  “I’m not Leon. Leon’s your cousin. I’m Charles!”

  “Sure you are, Leon. Sure you are!”

  Out in the western wilderness, the road was a splendor of temptation and treasure. Once, after leaving Big Spring, the two decided they would stop in Juarez on the way home and get a prostitute. The plan intoxicated them across four states, as they imagined aloud every possible scenario.

  They hardly ate the entire trip in order to save their money. Coming back, they parked the truck in El Paso and walked across the international bridge. And once in Juarez, they entered the first beer hall they saw and sat down like a pair of sheep. “Two Cokes, please,” they told the waitress.

  Before the drinks even arrived, a pack of prostitutes swooped onto their laps and ordered themselves round after round of beers. When money ran low, Homer and Charles tried to flee, but a federale met them at the door and shook them down for the rest.

  On the second attempt, weeks later, it was seven in the morning when they crossed the bridge. To their dismay, the only two women still up drinking were a lesbian couple who paid them no mind.

  The third attempt was a success. The girls were around eighteen and spoke little English. The drive back to Big Spring was silent, until Charles spoke up and said, “I just don’t get it. We go in there to have sex with these girls, then you spend the rest of the time tellin’ ’em about the Lord.”

  “I just asked her why she lived that way, that’s all,” Homer said.

  “A whore in Juarez and you’re worried about her soul.”

  But it wasn’t the girl’s soul that Homer anguished over.

  There was plenty of time to get right with God, because as soon as summer ended, he was back in church four times a week, paranoid the preacher was sniffing him out like a calf that took a wrong turn.

  For another year he watched classmates couple up for homecoming and prom and listened to friends brag of conquests at the drive-in. For Homer, the car keys were off limits if his date was not a member of the Assemblies of God, and most of the girls in his church were kin. By the time Homer graduated in May 1957, he’d been allowed to attend only one football game, and that was to sell peanuts for Future Farmers of America.

  “You can go,” Little Opal said, “as long as you don’t watch the game.”

  Directly after graduation, as classmates shucked their caps and gowns and drove to the pastures to drink beer, Homer climbed into his truck and delivered a load of bulls to California. At least he had the road.

  5

  Big Spring on the global stage … a corporation for the people … Iris and Raymond …

  While the drought buried the fields and emptied the pastures, out on the east side of town, Raymond Tollett and the Cosden Petroleum Corporation rose to their zenith.

  For the refinery, the Korean War was a boon. Government contracts for jet fuel, diesel, and other products padded the bottom line even as oil prices vacillated and hurt smaller companies. It was during this time that Tollett made his greatest gamble.

  A decade earlier, during World War II, raw materials such as rubber had been in short supply and cheap alternatives were sought using the glut of American crude. Companies began deriving benzene and styrene from petroleum to make synthetic rubber and nylon. Eventually, they developed plastics, and the age of petrochemicals was born.

  By the time the Korean War began in 1950, the boom was on. Europe, still recovering from the war, had only two production plants in the entire continent. In fact, 85 percent of the world’s supply was being made along the Gulf of Mexico near Houston and Beaumont, where both petroleum and water were plentiful. Big Spring was isolated in West Texas and staring down the worst drought in centuries, but it made no difference to Tollett. Despite being an oilman at heart, he believed Cosden Petroleum could be a player in the petrochemical age, and he seized the opportunity.

  It happened almost by accident. In 1952, Cosden opened its signature BTX unit, which was the first in the world to produce benzene, toluene, and xylene—the chief ingredients in war-grade jet fuels and explosives—simultaneously in one integrated plant.

  It was during this project that engineer Dan Krausse discovered a fluke: the oil found below them in Howard County, in addition to being great for asphalt, had a unique ethyl benzene and xylene content—ideal for making plastics. That process was generally done by shipping the raw materials to a separate plant, which cost time and money. So Krausse and his team designed a facility that fed directly into Cosden’s BTX stream, thus pioneering the world’s first petrochemical assembly line. Dozens of products, ranging from gasoline to clear polystyrene pellets, could now be produced in the same location and from the same barrel of oil. The technology was later licensed around the globe and made the company a fortune.

  At the same time, Tollett was buying small oil companies and regional refineries, making Cosden one of the largest inland fuel refiners in the country. The company sank hundreds of miles of pipe, drilled on a vast patchwork of leases, and invested in burgeoning oil exploration in the Gulf.

  By 1958, despite a sluggish oil market, the plastics game had catapulted Josh Cosden’s bankrupt refinery into the lower ranks of th
e Fortune 500. Tollett, with his FBI pedigree and dapper demeanor, became a dean of the industry. He was head of the influential American Petroleum Institute, whose headquarters were in Manhattan, in addition to chairing top trade organizations around the country. He represented Big Spring in the biggest cities of the world—New York, London, Istanbul, Beijing—and whenever he returned home, the people regarded him as their king.

  For the head of a publicly traded corporation, Tollett ruled with rare egalitarian candor. He gave engineers free rein to experiment and explore, creating a culture that more resembled a modern tech startup than a mid-fifties oil company. Early in his tenure, he helped employees start a labor union so he “could have someone to negotiate with.” And he routinely awarded bonuses to any carpenter, truck driver, or janitor who submitted a persuasive suggestion on how to improve efficiency, then published their photos in the company newsletter.

  “I believe in respect for the dignity of the individual,” he wrote in a monthly column that appeared in the Cosden Copper. “I believe that a workman on the lowest paid job may be just as honorable in every respect as I could be.”

  The company plane took sick employees to doctors and specialists across the country, and to family funerals out of state. The boss made daily visits to jobbers laid up in the Big Spring Hospital, and whenever a baby was born, he sent them a monogrammed Bible. To ensure a stream of future talent, he hired teenage children of employees for summer internships. And in 1956, he began providing older workers college scholarships to study chemical engineering while keeping them on the payroll.

  For men who reached a milestone twenty-five years at the company, Tollett took them to Juarez for steaks, drinks, and girls (if they wanted), then handed them a gold ring and a month’s paid vacation. And whereas Josh Cosden had given his workers a glazed ham for Christmas, Tollett cut them a bonus check instead, which he signed himself—hundreds of them—along with a personal note of gratitude, a task that often took him all night.

  He sat on the Big Spring school board and fought to have its district line moved to include the refinery just so Cosden could pay taxes. He served as president of the hospital board, presided over the Boy Scouts and Chamber of Commerce, raised money to build the YMCA, and championed local charities. He urged his employees to follow his lead, to run for local office, to sit on boards, to fulfill his vision for a “citizen corporation.” On any given day, his office was a constant parade of people seeking loans, advice, or referrals, and few walked away empty-handed.

  “Ray loves the underdog,” said one of his executives. “He’d rather loan money to a skid row drunk than to an engineer.”

  My father’s cousin Granville Hahn was a shining example of this philosophy. Granville, who’d survived the New London School explosion by coming down with the mumps, and whose own father had abandoned his family, was driving a truck for the Cosden tire shop in 1950 when he grew curious about the refinery’s laboratory. He approached one of the chemists, a German named Mr. Franks, and asked to spend his lunch hour observing him. Granville’s education had ended with a GED, but within weeks he was blending high-octane fuels and no longer driving a truck. When Tollett opened the polystyrene unit, he made Granville its lab foreman and engineer. By the time Granville retired he held twenty-five patents, including the three-layer sheet of plastic used in every Solo party cup. But these kinds of success were not unique during Tollett’s rein.

  Even as the company grew, Tollett made himself available to the rank and file. He toured the units on Sunday afternoons, dressed down in khakis, and called each man by his name. He asked about their families, about recent fishing trips or vacations, then asked if they were happy. And for all of those things, the people gave him their energy, creativity, and the very best years of their lives. In this way, everybody won.

  And with help from the air base, Tollett and the refinery helped make Big Spring a cosmopolitan oasis. In heavily conservative West Texas, where anti-intellectualism was the norm and anti-communism was taking root, Big Spring fostered an upper middle class that was cultured and well educated. Engineers and executives vacationed in Europe and Asia, their wives hosted book clubs, and the civic groups they chaired brought in scholars, artists, and dignitaries. In 1955, Tollett paid for the Harry James Orchestra to play the Cosden Club. A decade later he brought Duke Ellington. Prince Farman-Farmaian, cousin of the Iranian shah, was a close friend and frequent guest of the refinery.

  * * *

  By this time Tollett was already divorced and remarried. In 1945, his first wife, Leta, accused him of infidelity and left him, taking their daughter Kay. A short while later, he met a stewardess on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, and they’d fallen in love. Iris Goodbrake was ten years his junior, a stunning beauty with dark curls and deep green eyes that gave off a glimmer of derring-do. She’d grown up in Effingham, Illinois, near St. Louis, where her father worked for the railroad. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago in the years before the war, she became a nurse—a requirement for being a stewardess back then—and started to fly.

  Iris and Raymond married in November 1945 at Chicago’s Stevens Hotel. After a brief honeymoon in Mexico, they returned to Big Spring and settled down in Tollett’s home on Hillside Drive. By the early fifties, Iris had given him three children: Raymond Jr., Jason Blake, and little Ann.

  With Iris running the household, one that included a full-time cook and housekeeper, the Tolletts became Big Spring’s royal family, and for the next decade, nearly every ball gown that Iris wore to fund-raisers, every European jaunt or summer camp away, would be carefully chronicled in the Herald and discussed in beauty shops across town.

  The children grew up under the ever-expanding shadow of their father’s company. The two boys joined him on his Sunday strolls through the units and came to know the workers. Weekends were spent in the ultramodern Cosden Country Club, which opened in 1955 on the lake in Pioneer Park. Enclosed in glass with views of the water, it featured a three-hundred-person ballroom and dining area, swimming pool and tennis courts, and a lounge where the walls and ceilings were deep pink. Vacations were taken aboard one of the two company planes, a de Havilland Heron or a Dove, and usually accompanied by their father’s secretary, Helen Green, always dressed immaculately in white gloves and a hat. The Beaux Arts Hotel in New York, the Ambassador in Chicago—these were places they knew well.

  Each Sunday, the children sat in the front row at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, where their father served as lay reader. At home, he changed into a silk smoking jacket and retired to his study to read or write his monthly column. His busy schedule required him to budget his reading, allowing himself six works of nonfiction each year, usually the latest business or management books, and six works of fiction and poetry. John Steinbeck and Carl Sandburg were his favorites, and his shelves contained first editions of East of Eden and Sandburg’s collected poems, both signed by the authors. Each night before bed, he spent exactly ten minutes with the Old Testament, wherein, he wrote, “lie the keys to all wisdom.”

  To his children, he was like an old lion in a fairy tale. Mornings they pressed into his bathroom to watch him dress for work. Their father was a clotheshorse. As partial owner of a men’s store downtown, each year he selected eight suits and one tuxedo out of stock. His pocket handkerchiefs were imported Indian linen, his silk smoking jackets custom-tailored in New York, where he also ordered his hats. Each week, the housekeeper pressed his underwear.

  Fresh from the shower, he dipped his fingers into a jar of white cream and rubbed it into his hair, which by then was turning thin and gray. “This is mother’s milk from an elephant,” he told them.

  “And what is that?” Jason Blake asked, pointing to a small scar on his back. “That,” his father replied, “was where I was shot by a jealous prince.”

  Once or twice a year, their father’s old FBI buddies appeared at the house. The men dressed like him, in dark suits and dark hats and shoes that reflected back the sun.
And they all seemed to drive the same large black sedans.

  “Come have a look,” one of the men said to Jason Blake, then popped open the big trunk. Inside was a tommy gun, just sitting there.

  The moments the children spent alone with their father were rare, and therefore cherished. Often he was traveling, building his company, giving his time to the community. And whenever he was in town, evenings were usually spent at the club, hosting guests and providing entertainment previously unthinkable for a small town such as Big Spring.

  * * *

  Always hosting, always with a glass of scotch in his hand. Drinking came with the job, and Raymond was famous for it. Colleagues marveled at the amount of whiskey he could put down and still function at full capacity. And when hangovers threatened to slow his pace, Tollett went to see his best friend, Dr. Marion Bennett, who administered a quick IV of fluids. On a flight home from New York one morning after a long night of partying, one of his executives watched him pull from his briefcase a syringe of B12 and spike it into his leg.

  “Didn’t even bother to lift his pants,” the man said. “Shot it straight through that thousand-dollar suit.”

  Tollett’s first wife was a teetotaler, but Iris could match her husband round for round. In photos the children still keep, the two of them are partying in Louisville for the 1953 Kentucky Derby, as guests of the Aetna Oil Company: at the Seelbach Hotel for cocktails and the Old House for champagne; Iris at the President’s Ball at the end of the evening, in a double strand of pearls, heels kicked off and dancing alone.

  Tollett possessed a driven man’s sexual appetite, only heightened by whiskey, and during the early years of marriage his wife was game to satisfy.