Blowout!

This is the snapshot I found in Granddad’s smoking stand.

From Cold ‘Coon & Collards:

Granddad would tell me stories almost every day. They weren’t Bible stories, like the ones Grandmother favored, but tales from his life. Poking around in his black and chrome smoking stand, next to the brass knuckles and pipe cleaners, I found a black-and-white snapshot of an oil derrick. Something was wrong in the picture, however. Around the rig was a snarl of curves, like a bird’s nest of line around an over-spun fishing reel.

After supper that night, I asked Granddad about the photograph. The old farmer sat in his easy chair, packed his pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, then lit it with a wooden match. I sat on the hassock beside his feet in their slippers. Then he told me the story.

Back in the twenties he had been a foreman with a wildcat drilling company operating on the Osage Indian Reservation. The well in the picture had hit a pocket of compressed gas and blown out 2,000 feet of steel casing in a moment.

“Was anybody hurt ?” I asked.

Granddad tamped down the bowl of his pipe, struck a match, and puffed it back to life.

“It didn’t take a minute ’til the rig settled down. It happened mighty fast. A section of casing hit poor Bobby in the middle and cut him clean in half.”

_______

During the boom years, Granddad and Grandmother lived pretty well. For a few years, Howard Hughes, the teenaged owner of the Hughes Tool Company sent a barrel of Oysters as a Christmas present. Granddad bought drilling bits from the young entrepreneur.

Granddad’s career as an oilman lasted a few more years, but when The Great Depression settled over the Dust Bowl states, the Rockefellers and the Gettys bought up all the drilling leases that were auctioned by the Osage tribe, and the wildcatters were edged out.

I wonder how my life would have turned out if Granddad had hit it big like Getty or Rockefeller. I doubt that I would have grown up on a dairy farm.

There’s lots more about my grandparents in Cold ‘Coon and Collards, available now in paperback and Kindle. Click here.

Blog