by Bryan Mealer
With so many men pouring into the region, bars and honky-tonks sprang up in the dingy towns like League City and Pasadena, with Gilley’s being the biggest. In fact, The Guinness Book of World Records listed Mickey Gilley’s dance club as the largest honky-tonk in the world, capable of holding six thousand people. It had pool tables, a mechanical bull, punching bags, and, of course, a giant dance floor and stage where top-billed country acts played seven nights a week. Its slogan was “We Doze but We Never Close.” They filmed the movie Urban Cowboy in Gilley’s in 1979, and when it came out a year later, around the same time as Honeysuckle Rose, starring Willie Nelson, Texas chic became the rage. People everywhere started wearing Stetsons and Tony Lamas. Bolo ties were popular, along with rhinestones, cow chip jewelry, and anything with armadillos.
Gilley’s was only twenty miles up the Dixie Farm Road from our house, yet its carnival of temptation had no power over Dad. Between the graveyard shifts and a buffer of family all around, our time in Alvin was proving to be his most stable. The friends he hung around with were from our Assembly of God church, and together with Mom, they helped keep him on the path of righteousness. What also helped was the arrival of another child—my sister Melissa—born in June 1980 in nearby Texas City. It wasn’t long after she arrived that a telephone call late one night brought Dad’s old life roaring up from behind, flashing its high beams.
Earlier that day, his old friend Mark Powell, whom Mom had cursed and kicked out of her house, chose to take revenge on his ex-wife for their recent divorce. Mark walked into the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, where his former mother-in-law worked, and shot her with a twelve-gauge while she sat at her desk. He then stole a car, kidnapped three teenagers at gunpoint, and embarked on a twenty-four-hour shooting spree across Texas.
When the news reached Big Spring that morning, Opal nearly fainted. Just the previous day, Mark had stopped by the Miss Royale dress shop and asked for Mom and Dad’s address in Alvin. “Well, it’s at home,” Opal said, lying. She could tell something was amiss.
After killing his ex-mother-in-law, the police reported that Mark was headed for Houston, and that’s when the phone started ringing. “He might be coming after y’all,” friends warned, harking back to Mom’s episode over the broken tea set.
But Mark was after his ex-father-in-law, whom he also wanted dead. He managed to find him at a trailer park and get off a few pop shots, then turned back toward Odessa, firing at random cars along the highway and injuring four people. Sheriff’s deputies finally caught up with him in a little town south of Midland. A high-speed shootout ensued and Mark was fatally wounded. His car then hit a guardrail and flipped.
“The subject was terminated one mile east of Rankin,” the sheriff’s office reported, adding that the hostages, who’d been in the trunk, had survived unharmed.
The whole ordeal, the family believed, was the Lord’s way of affirming Dad’s choice to leave his old life behind, for the wages of sin was truly death. Dad believed it too. He and his brother had even started making plans together. Preston had a dream of starting his own construction company—Mealer Homes—to take advantage of the current housing crunch. To that end, Dad started taking classes in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning at the local community college. Air-conditioning was a steady trade, he figured. In good times or bad, Texas was always hot.
At twenty-seven years old, my father finally had it together. He had the confidence and support of his church and extended family, a strong wife and three healthy kids at home, a recent promotion, and a career goal within reach. By his own description, life was grand. That is, of course, until Grady called.
“Bobby Gaylon!” he shouted. “Answer me one question: How’d you like to be a millionaire?”
Within a month, I was riding in another U-Haul on the bench seat next to Dad. We were on our way to Big Spring, headlong into the boom.
10
Grady seizes the kingdom … Dad takes a leap …
Around the time we moved to Albuquerque, Grady lost his job with the American Diabetes Association. For budgetary reasons, the ADA had decided to close its Midland office and not transfer his position as regional director. Suddenly in need of a new job, Grady turned to his wife, who asked her mother for help.
By this time, Iris’s displeasure with Grady bristled on the surface. She disapproved of his charter planes, his thousand-dollar dinners, and especially the way he threw Raymond’s name around town. And foremost, it made her sick to hear that Grady was leaving Ann alone at night so he could carouse with homosexuals, if the rumors were true. If the police ever arrested him in one of those clubs in north Odessa, how would Ann survive the shame?
So when Ann asked her mother for help finding Grady a job—at the refinery, of all places—Iris honored her daughter and made the call. But the favor came with a pleasurable twist of the knife. If the son-in-law of Raymond Tollett expected a corner office and a long-legged secretary, he had another think coming.
“You want a job at Cosden?” Iris said to him. “Then you start at the bottom. The very bottom.”
Grady’s title was yardman. On his first day of work, someone handed him a shovel and assigned him to a crew digging a ditch. Other duties entailed making coffee twice a day and chauffeuring engineers around the plant. The sight of Grady laboring in the heat, flushed and sweaty, provided endless entertainment for the other men.
“Say, ain’t you supposed to be runnin’ this place?”
“Hey, if the boss man likes your coffee, he might let you take out the trash.”
Grady gritted his teeth and forged on, determined not to crack. In order to take the job, he and Ann even gave up their apartment in Midland and moved back to Big Spring. They rented a small house that was old and drafty, and one morning Ann awoke to find a giant snake curled up on the kitchen floor.
As a reward for moving home, Iris bought them a new washer and dryer, along with a bedroom set. And evenings when Grady came home demoralized and covered in filth, he sometimes found her sitting in his living room, as if to remind him who was boss. Whatever path to easy street her son-in-law thought he’d chosen had just taken a turn straight into a wall.
* * *
But Grady was biding his time, no one’s fool. The man in charge of the machine shop, Joe Faulkner, felt sorry for him and put him inside cleaning tools. He still made coffee—once in the morning and once in the afternoon—and drove the men where they asked to go, saying nothing even while they insulted him. And he remained civil—even charming!—when he and Ann drove Iris to Midland once a week for lobster night at the Steak and Ale.
The truth was, he actually liked his mother-in-law. He recognized that despite the dragon scowl and vicious tongue, she could be generous and kind. She’d continued some of her husband’s charities, and every Christmas mailed out checks of three thousand dollars to members of her family. But even more, he wanted Iris to like him, as she was living proxy to the man whose legacy he was trying to internalize.
But Iris showed no signs of thawing, so Grady endured. About six months later, in December 1976, his wait came to an end. Iris grew very ill.
She’d been plagued with circulation problems for years, which caused her constant pain and sent her back and forth to doctors for treatment. Then, a week before Christmas, she was having trouble breathing and called Dr. Thomas, her husband’s former doctor, who admitted her to the hospital. It turned out that Iris had suffered a stroke. For two days she kept getting worse, then finally slipped into a coma. Around three in the afternoon on December 19, she opened her eyes and took her last breath. She was fifty-nine years old.
Ann phoned her husband at the refinery, sobbing, and broke the news. Grady’s brother-in-law, Roe, happened to be working in the machine shop when Grady flung open the door, screaming.
“Roe! Roe! You’ll never believe it! Mrs. Tollett is dead!”
Roe was stunned. “My god, that’s terrible,” he said.
Before he could inquire how, Gr
ady had climbed out of his coveralls and flung them into a trash can. “I quit!” he shouted and ran for the door, stopping just short of leaving.
“Don’t you know what this means, Roe? Do you know what this means?”
A look of ecstasy washed over his face. “It means I’m a millionaire!”
* * *
The transformation was rapid. In July 1977, Grady and Ann bought a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot ranch home in Ike Robb’s Highland South—“Big Spring’s Most Desirable Living Area.” The developer and theater magnate remained Grady’s idol.
After the house, the couple flung themselves into local causes. Ann became secretary of the Big Spring Garden Club and hosted events in the home, where the society page noted her décor and wardrobe as it had her mother’s. They became members of the Heritage Museum, gave generously to the Bible Fund, and were lead sponsors for a celebrity fund-raiser to benefit the Dora Roberts Rehabilitation Center, donating a trip to Las Vegas. The event featured the New Christy Minstrels and comedian Foster Brooks, famous for his role as the Lovable Drunk on The Dean Martin Show. The Herald ran a photo of Grady and Ann posing at the rehab center with little Christy Clifford, a girl with cerebral palsy. Grady stood rigid. There was talk of him running for local office.
* * *
But as Grady embarked on his long-awaited ascent, the plates beneath the town began to shift. The first jolt was cataclysmic: In 1977, after twenty-five years in Big Spring, the federal government decommissioned Webb Air Force Base and closed it down. Nearly three thousand jobs vanished in a matter of months. The overall loss of population was even greater, as families of airmen and civilian employees fled in droves, leaving nearly a thousand empty houses and a public school system in crisis. Simply maintaining the empty base cost the town forty thousand dollars per month.
More bad news arrived two years later, when Cabot Corporation, which had made carbon black in Big Spring since 1950, announced it was a victim of the fuel shortage and shuttered its plant. Gone were a hundred jobs and $2 million in payroll. But most painful was the announcement that the Cosden Oil and Chemical Company was vacating the Petroleum Building and moving its headquarters to Dallas, where it would merge with its parent company, American Petrofina.
While the refinery itself would remain, gone were the scores of executives who’d sat on school boards and directed charity drives—Tollett’s “corporate citizens” who’d put some skin in the game. The Cosden Country Club had long closed its doors on the lake. For those still around—the bankers, newspapermen, and ranchers who’d mingled with that crowd—all that remained were memories: Duke Ellington and Harry James and wild nights in the Blue Room; Prince Farman and delegations of boots-wearing Japanese; Mr. T. toasting war heroes and cops at the policeman’s ball.
When the tremors finally quieted, much of Big Spring’s educated upper class was gone. Aside from the few bankers’ and ranchers’ kids, no more students returned in the fall with tales of Vienna or Paris, or arrived with previous addresses on the other side of the globe.
The mighty T&P had ferried its last passenger more than a decade earlier. The iron rail gave way to the interstate that now shuttled tourists and traveling salesmen around the edges of the city as if it were invisible. They slept at the Holiday Inn and waited to spend their money in the shopping malls of Midland and Lubbock. Downtown stores began to close, their windows papered over.
Finally, to everyone’s disbelief, the Hotel Settles locked its doors. Competition from the interstate chains had lowered its standards, leaving it to the winos and circuit prostitutes who rented rooms by the month, then moved on to other towns. Workers pried away the mahogany paneling and marble stairs and dismantled the wrought-iron railing. Everything that could be removed—beds, stoves, telephone booths, room keys, even the plumbing pipes—was carted out and sold at auction. Built in 1929 as a monument to Big Spring’s first oil discovery and a symbol of its soaring ambition, the Settles was reduced to an empty shell.
The little town with boundless vision that had lured my grandfathers and uncles, the oasis of the plains that Tollett championed from Fifth Avenue to Tehran, was folding in on itself, threatening to collapse. Holding it afloat for the moment, and numbing some of the pain, were the champagne bubbles of another rising oil boom. And folks, as they always do, mistook them for progress.
Soon, contractors were buying up the discarded drilling rigs that were mothballed on back lots and roadsides, sanding off the rust, and adding a fresh coat of paint. The clerk’s office filled with landmen looking for leases, white service trucks stacked up at the red lights, and suddenly there were strangers in the restaurants. To Grady, this presented his biggest stage.
Because no matter how much he loved Ann, or tried to love Ann, the town would always regard him as a gold digger, the theater usher of ill repute who hoodwinked the beloved family. Already, the old man’s legacy mocked him from the grave: Tollett, the “four-career man” who dropped out of school and taught himself law, who busted gangsters for the FBI and turned a scrap heap into an empire. If Grady were to step out of that shadow, he had to build something on his own, and he had no interest in growing cotton or buying cattle. But the oil business—that was the arena of immortal men. The question was how.
* * *
The answer, remarkably, arrived in late 1979, when Grady won the lottery.
Starting in 1960, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management began holding oil and gas lotteries to award drilling privileges on public land in the American West. Most of it was located along a pay zone called the Overthrust Belt, which covered seven states in the Rocky Mountain range. Wyoming and Idaho alone were thought to hold 1.5 billion barrels of crude and over 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Each month, the BLM sent out a list of available tracts. Applications cost ten dollars each and were open to both individuals and private companies. (Wyoming’s state-run lotteries had already proved lucrative for con shops, who targeted retirees with letters that read, “Dear Potential Oil Baron” while tripling the entry fee.) Winners could lease up to 2,650 acres for an annual rate of a dollar per acre. The odds of the bureau’s computer pulling your name were around four hundred to one.
There was no limit to how many times a person could apply, so Grady had entered dozens of applications in the years after Iris’s death, devoting the same furious energy he had to his Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. And lo and behold, he finally struck pay dirt: Grady won an oil well in Wyoming.
The news arrived while Grady and Ann were driving through California on vacation. Grady telephoned from the hotel and spoke to his gardener, who described an important-looking envelope that had arrived in the mail. “Don’t move a thing,” Grady told him, then drove straight home.
He flew to Cheyenne to claim his prize, which was a small tract near Thermopolis. But a few telephone calls were enough to tell him how deep the water was. Even though he’d married into money, he didn’t have the ready capital, much less the savvy, to organize the men and tools to spud a well beneath the sagebrush. Since he didn’t know the first thing about finding oil, he’d have to hire an engineer and geologist. And say they did find some—they weren’t popping Spindletops on these plains. The taxes on royalties, after the feds took their one-eighth, probably wouldn’t justify the headache. Not with one little lease.
Luckily, one of the loopholes in the government’s rules was that no one was legally obligated to drill on the land they won. And considering all of the above, most people ended up selling their leases to oil companies—which is exactly what Grady did, unloading his acreage to a Louisiana driller for a cool sixty-five thousand dollars. It wasn’t the way he’d envisioned becoming an oilman, but it would do.
Elated, Grady called his cousin Selena, who was living in Denver, and said he was stopping in town on his way home. He wanted to celebrate.
“We’ll have dinner at Lafitte’s,” he announced, meaning the erstwhile gem of Larimer Square whose clientele had been reduce
d, according to one review, to “tourists and the tastelessly rich.”
“Grady, they’re booked for weeks,” Selena said.
“Tell them I’ll pay five hundred dollars for the reservation.”
He then told her to wear a black dress.
Selena sold real estate in Denver and knew some high rollers, one of whom offered to call Lafitte’s and got her a table. She was seated in one of the red-leather booths, dressed in all black, when Grady entered through the heavy wooden doors. He’d come straight from Perkins Shearer, the men’s store, and had shucked his shabby duds for a stunning pinstripe suit and Italian leather shoes. He brushed aside the hostess and, before reaching the wide stairway that led up to the oyster bar, stopped for a brief moment, as if to present his new persona to the room.
* * *
With the money from selling his Wyoming lease, Grady started Cunningham Oil Company and set out to make his name. He first partnered with a wildcatter named Adkins on a series of wells being drilled around Sweetwater—putting in the standard third of the operating expense for a quarter of any royalties. And with proper oil transactions under way, Grady acquired his headquarters.
There was little question of where. That fall, he announced that his company was taking over the top suite of the Cosden Petroleum Building, the very offices from which Raymond Tollett had steered the great refinery. He hired a decorator to fill the rooms with expensive carpeting and Henredon furniture. For his desk he bought an executive pen set and decorative pump jack, along with an extra-large checkbook, monogrammed and bound in leather.
