Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Joiner, pale and shaking, was engulfed by a mob of men and women all trying to hug him and pat his stooped back at once. D. H. “Dry Hole” Byrd, Joiner’s friend and helper, gauged the flow of the gusher—6,800 barrels a day.8 Joiner, who had drilled only dry holes for seventeen years, was stunned. “I always dreamed it, but I never believed it,” he said.9

  Nobody who witnessed the Daisy Bradford No. 3 explode with riches that day fathomed the scope of the power that had been unleashed. By early 1931 the first wave of the boom crashed across a five-county region of East Texas.

  “The daring, the resourceful and the unscrupulous had caught the scent of oil and money in the spring air, and then swooped down on the five oil counties like the cavalry of Genghis Khan,” James Clark and Michael Halbouty wrote. “Behind the oilmen came the opportunity seekers; unemployed workers from virtually every state; thieves and gunmen, con men, gamblers, pimps and brigades of pajama-clad prostitutes.”10

  Work-hungry families pouring into the region made do with all the resources they had or could scavenge to claim a stake, even a small one, in the boom. Many tent houses consisted of wooden floors and frames, wrapped and covered with tarpaulins that could be rolled up to let breezes blow through or lowered on stormy nights. Most had screens to keep flies and mosquitoes out.

  William T. Jack grew up in Joinerville when the boom was in full swing. The house his family lived in “was hardly fit for human habitation,” Jack recalled in his memoir, Gaston High School, Joinerville, Texas, and a Boy Named Billy Jack.11 “But within the perimeter of the field,” he added, “we were not as bad off as you might suppose. During the Depression the difference between respectability and trashiness was cleanliness.”

  “Joinerville became like every other place,” he recalled, “except that an oil field can never be quite like any place else, at least not to the eye and nose. The derricks, jacks, tank farms, slush pits, rod lines and blazing torches made it distinctive. An oil field by its nature is dirty and smelly.”

  Honky-tonks vibrating with banjo and guitar music sprang up throughout the regions. Prohibition did little to discourage drinking in the oil fields. The influx from around the country brought all manner of bootleggers and bathtub distillers, the mad scientists of the working man. One brew, called Choc beer, was made with malt and various ingredients by the Choctaws. Roughnecks said a gulp of it could “raise your feet off the ground.” White lightning—the classic bootlegged spirit—was always available, although there were no warnings on the jug that the contents sometimes killed the imbibers because of lethal additives or risky distilling operations at backwoods stills. Some roughnecks created a bizarre concoction by taking gelled heating fuel and squeezing it through their socks, a Texas Ranger said. The result, presumably, could either be drunk as a cocktail or used to roast marshmallows. Another oil patch drink, the Ginger Jake, caused a nervous disorder that resulted in a loss of equilibrium and a permanent inability to walk straight, a condition known as jake leg.

  Such behavior and attitudes shocked the sensibilities of those whose lives were anchored in an agricultural society and deeply held biblical teachings, such as Lou Della Crim. She held tight to her priorities even as the boom spilled closer to her home and little white church.

  On the last Sunday in 1930, Mrs. Crim was walking slowly toward the Presbyterian church where she had worshipped for decades when she was hailed “by a wildly excited messenger” shouting that oil was discovered on her farm near Kilgore. Nodding politely, she paused for a moment. It certainly meant she would become rich beyond anything she had ever imagined. It also would change the region she held dear. “I think the oil well will keep until churches services are over,” she said, walking on.12

  Many of the oil-field families that were religious—and many were—typically attended services conducted by itinerant preachers, including roughnecks who worked on the rigs during the day and preached at night and on Sunday.

  Previously poor farmers, such as Claude Ashby, who had worked his fingers to the bone raising corn and cotton on a 170-acre tract outside of Henderson, suddenly became wealthy beyond their dreams. After nine wells struck oil on his property, a swarm of salesmen camped in Ashby’s yard trying to finagle a piece of the action. “They have tried to sell me everything from needles to steamships,” he said.13 Instead, Ashby bought a diamond stickpin for the only tie he owned.

  Within a month of Joiner’s discovery, a rural parcel near London had become the town of New London, with two dozen businesses and more than six hundred residents. Kilgore, the center of oil-field activity, went from being a hamlet with about seven hundred residents in 1930 to a bustling town with more than four hundred businesses by the end of 1931.14

  “Drilling in the mammoth field was frenzied,” Knowles wrote. “During one week a new well was completed oftener than once an hour.... Not an oil mind in the country was prepared for the magnitude of the field. The Oklahoma City field had been among the nation’s largest, covering 20 square miles. The East Texas field was soon producing over an area of 211 square miles. A forest of derricks stretched 43 miles long and 3 to 12 miles wide.” By June 1931 a thousand wells were producing 360,000 barrels of oil a day. Two months later production had soared to 848,000 barrels a day.15 The Black Giant was on its way to producing 1.5 billion barrels within a decade.16

  A vast cast of characters that represented the multifaceted work entailed by every boom arrived in East Texas. The veterans had experience that recommended them as ready hands in various roles: drillers, derrick men, pipe pullers, pipeline “cats,” tank builders, tank cleaners, machinists, boilermakers, carpenters, equipment operators, mechanics, welders, and cutters. The inexperienced found abundant work as laborers called roustabouts, until they had the chance to work on the rigs. Some of the toughest, strongest, and most reliable men were put to work as roughnecks, a name tailored for a specific role, though often applied generically to anyone who worked in an oil field. The roughnecks were the men on drilling rigs working directly for the driller. One of their tasks was hauling the drill pipe up from the hole to change bits, which became dull about every two hundred feet. The process could take more than two hours as roughnecks wrestled up from the ground three joints of pipe at a time, unscrewed—or “broke”—the sections, and put them on a rack on the derrick floor. As each section arose, mud would spout from the wellhead, covering the workers.

  The music of their work was the clank of heavy metal, the grind of motor-driven winches, the swoosh of steam from hissing boilers, the clatter of boots on wooden drilling platforms, and the call of commands in a lingo as idiosyncratic as a foreign tongue to men unfamiliar with it, such as those who worked at desks in starched white collars.

  “Take off your tails, cats, and put on the hooks. Deuce and four. Ace and three. Now all together. Hit her like you live—hard,” bellowed the foreman of a crew laying a pipeline, as described in Voices from the Oil Fields.17 “Load up on them hooks, you snappers [workers always looking for light duty]. That’s high. Ring her off, collar-pecker [the man who keeps time for the men who are screwing the line together, by beating on the pipe]. Up on the mops. Out, growler-board [the foundation used to support boards holding up the pipe]. Next joint. High like a tree and down to the velvet. Bounce, you cats, bounce.”

  By March 1937 Columbus Joiner, the man who started it all and was hoisted on men’s shoulders and paraded through the streets of a village named Joinerville in his honor, was long gone from the great oil field he had lucked upon less than seven years before. He was rumored to be in a borrowed hotel room somewhere, maybe Dallas or Oklahoma City, hiding once again from creditors and dodging men who once called him a friend. Joiner always seemed either loaded with riches or down to counting pennies. Nowadays, although his worth on paper was nearly $3 million, he was out of cash and watching his riches disappear like a mirage on the Texas plains.

  He had lost his fortune for the last time and was biding his time as old age transformed him, day by da
y, into a ghost of his former self. But his legacy was solid. He would always be Dad Joiner—a title conferred not as a tender expression a son uses for his father (Joiner’s own son was a plaintiff in one of several hundred lawsuits filed against the old man claiming breach of contracts) but in a broader sense: he fathered the Black Giant. The glory of that day belonged to him as long as he lived.

  10

  Lunchtime

  A stream of students began to flow from the New London High School toward the cafeteria located a short walk from the main building. As the noon hour neared, the procession of children was flowing both ways, to and from the cafeteria, along the concrete walk between the buildings. Many students shed the sweaters and jackets they had worn to school that morning. Dozens drifted away from the cafeteria line toward the hamburger stand, which sold ice cream and other treats also, located on the campus and operated by Alf Shaw, Superintendent Shaw’s nephew.

  Carolyn Jones went to the cafeteria with several of her classmates. She rarely saw her older sister, Helen, although they attended class in the same building. When they did meet by chance, Helen quickly disappeared. They hadn’t been close recently, but it still irritated Carolyn when Helen dodged her in the halls, as though she didn’t want to be seen talking with somebody who was just nine years old. Carolyn and Helen hadn’t gotten along in the years since their mother and father had divorced. Their mother, angry at their father for being too choosey about the jobs he was willing to take, took the girls from Wichita Falls, Texas, to her parents’ home in Oklahoma in 1931. Carolyn and Helen’s grandfather was dying of sarcoma, and their grandmother was struggling to keep their general store open. In the tumult, Helen sided with their father, Walter Jones. She and her mother, Eula, constantly clashed. Carolyn was canny enough to stay out of their fights. After their mother married Ervin Lowe, an oil-field roughneck, and the family began moving from one boomtown to the next across Oklahoma and Texas, the strained relationship between the girls did not improve. Helen left to live for a time at their grandparents’ home in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Carolyn missed her sister, but Helen’s absence spared Carolyn the upset and tension of witnessing arguments between Helen and her mother.

  The separation wore on Carolyn, though, and she was comforted when Helen returned to live with them in New London. Later, Carolyn was happy when her seventeen-year-old uncle, Paul Greer, moved to New London from Woodford, a hamlet near Ardmore, where he attended a two-teacher rural high school with about twenty students. A senior at New London, he was the baby brother of the girls’ mother. He was closer in age to Helen, fourteen, an eighth-grader, than to her little sister, Carolyn, but it was nine-year-old Carolyn who adored Paul as if he were an older brother. Paul wanted to be a doctor, like one of his older brothers, and chased his education with a rare single-mindedness. Few places in the country offered New London’s educational opportunities.

  Bill Thompson lunched with a couple of his fifth-grade buddies and commiserated with Perry Lee Cox over Perry’s unfortunate morning. He’d tried unsuccessfully to skip school, and it backfired on his backside.

  After his father left home to go open his store, Perry Lee convinced his sister, Bobbie Kate, that it would be okay for them to miss classes because nothing new was happening at school anyway. The school bus came and went, and Perry Lee and his sister were outside playing when Marshall Cox arrived back at the house for something he’d forgotten. He gave Perry Lee a hard spanking for hatching the plot, then drove his children to the New London school.

  Perry Lee, red-eyed, had darted away from the car and into the high school.

  Mattie Queen Price sat at a table in the cafeteria among the students and other teachers. While she ate, she looked through lesson material she had brought from her room—a scrapbook stuffed with sheet music, poems, sketches, newspaper clippings and written anecdotes she’d been saving since she was a young girl.1 She dipped into the scrapbook almost every day for her lessons in piano, voice, dance techniques, and theater, and as a private music and poise instructor. Her homespun jokes and movie-star looks endeared her to the students.

  She nearly always wore a flower pinned to her blouse, something she’d picked that morning from her garden. Queen loved flowers almost as much as she loved children. She never missed a meeting of the Overton Garden Club, where she was a founding member.

  This day, she saw the father of one of her students sauntering across the cafeteria, sidestepping tables filled with students, until he reached her seat. The man handed her money for his daughter’s last piano lesson, cash that he didn’t have at the time Queen performed the lesson. He apologized for not getting it to her sooner. She laughed and told him she was quite confident he would pay the bill. She was not on the school’s payroll, but since school officials considered her work important, she was given office space with a piano and room enough for dance lessons. Although many of her clients lived paycheck to paycheck, nearly all of them found some way to pay her before the month was out.

  “You take good care of my little girl,” the man said, tipping his scruffy work hat.

  “I always do,” Queen said.2

  When Alvin Thompson didn’t bring a lunch from home for his midday meal, he had a choice of more than two dozen restaurants and cafés in bustling Henderson. Ten were within a short walk from the downtown car dealership where Thompson worked—Quick Lunch, the Court House Café, Dan’s Lunch, Cut Rate Café, Ye Lion’s Den, the Randolph Hotel Coffee Shop, Wyatt’s Café, and the lunch counters at the movie houses.3

  Near the dealership, workers were setting up a traveling carnival for the weekend. It featured an arcade padded with straw dust for games like tossing darts at balloons, ringing horseshoes, and flipping coins into saucers for a chance at winning stuffed animals, trinkets, and baubles. This weekend food smells would waft through the crowded midway: popcorn, cotton candy, saltwater taffy, candied apples, corn dogs, hamburgers, and fried potatoes. Even the small carnivals at least featured a merry-go-round, bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, and a pony ride. A half-dozen tent shows with jugglers, fire-eaters, tiny people and giants, magicians, and knife throwers rounded out the show.4

  Thompson tried to take his children to town any time a fair or circus stopped in Henderson. When he farmed, they often didn’t have enough money. When he worked for the state as a cattle tick inspector, he could get the family into circuses for free because any venue with animals fell under his authority. Now that he sold cars, Thompson earned enough to splurge once in a while. He and Bonnie enjoyed it as much as the kids.

  Roustabouts tacked up posters on telephone poles all around Rusk County to spread word of the carnival. One of the hired hands tested the carousel, its music spilling into the streets of Henderson.

  11

  Fateful Afternoon

  Superintendent Chesley Shaw made two unusual changes regarding the school day. First, he decided to keep students in the high school until their normal dismissal time at three thirty, instead of letting them out thirty minutes to an hour early, as he normally did when the PTA held its monthly meeting at the school. Second, he agreed to move the PTA meeting from the high school auditorium, where it had always met, to the gymnasium located behind the school.

  Louise Taylor, the grammar school principal, visited Shaw after lunch and told the superintendant more elementary students would take part in a show at the start of the PTA meeting than expected. The program, called Dances of the World, needed room for the dancers. The auditorium stage would be overcrowded. Somebody suggested using the basketball court in the gym. Parents could sit in the bleachers. The PTA meeting would not interfere with activities in the gym because physical education students in the last period would be outside playing ball.

  Shaw approved the move and gave instructions to post signs at each of the high school’s entrance doors informing parents of the change.

  Hundreds of students throughout the high school picked up copies of the latest edition of the London Times, the student newspaper. It normall
y came out each Friday. A front-page story announced why the paper was a day early: “There Will Be No School Friday.”1 But broadcast news had scooped them. Days earlier the holiday had been announced over the public address (PA) system, rousing cheers and smiles throughout the school.

  The mimeographed newspaper urged all students to get behind the school’s finalists in the Interscholastic League playoff competition being held in Henderson. “If Mr. Shaw thinks this event is important enough to turn out school, we should certainly lend our moral support by attending as many of these events as possible,” the story read.

  Today, though, came an unwelcomed announcement shortly before 2:30 p.m. The students thought they’d be dismissed early until the word came through the PA system just before the bell sounded for the day’s last period: dismissal would be at the regular time. Grumbling ensued.

  New London head football coach Red Moore was expecting a large turnout of boys, including several lettermen from this year’s team, for the start of spring training on Monday, the London Times reported. Moore planned to divide the squad to compete against itself in a spring scrimmage under the lights of the football field. The London Wildcats’ band would be taking part in a five-day clinic, also starting Monday, directed by Hale A. VanderCook, founder and head of the VanderCook College of Music in Chicago, the school newspaper reported. “The band is indeed fortunate to have Mr. VanderCook,” said a front-page article that likely was written by New London band director C. R. Sory.

  In sports news, both New London’s high school and grammar school girls’ softball teams took first place in the “playground division” of the county meet that had just finished, reported sports editor Elmer Rainwater, a senior and football letterman. The high school volleyball team had defeated Gaston in an early match and was favored to win the county title on Friday, another story said. But the high school track team had a miserable showing in an event the previous week.