THE HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTING
PART TWELVE - GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH CORPORATION

Chapter 34  -  Personal Factors, 1926-1927

Dr. Sidney Powers and his boss, Everette De Golyer, made a geological combination of infinite wisdorn and broad scope. The Harvard geologist was a cantankerous cuss with a heart of pure gold. When Powers thought one of his men deserved firing, that man would be discharged; then Sidney would spend any number of days busily engaged in finding the fired employee a better job with another company. Sidney Powers ran an informal employment agency at all times. Any employer looking for a man with certain skills could always rely on Powers to have the right man under the shelter of his wing. Any geologist, despairing of finding employment came to Sidney Powers and soon would be on some one's payroll.

To know Sidney Powers was to be rubbed the wrong way by hirn. He was a direct man who spoke the whole truth at all times and at all costs. How could you find out what he was thinking? He told you what he was thinking and often in the most unflattering observations. Or if you were out of reach he would send you an articulate postcard. Sidney kept about fifty penny postcards on his person at all times and the way other men smoke cigarettes, Powers wrote postcards. The messages were varied but they vere never dull. The sharpness of his mind, its broad vision and the degree to which his whole being was devoted to the problems of geology, would show up in the diversity of a day's output of postcards. Neither Powers nor Jacobsen ever learned to drive a car and one could learn much of their personalities while one chauffeured these non-drivers about the country. Dr. Ben Weatherby vividly remembers one trip to the field with Dr. Powers. Another driver forced Weatherby's automobile off the road and into the bottom of a 15 foot deep bar-ditch, where the car was hopelessly stuck in the mud. Sidney thought that was a whale of a good joke on Weatherby and he howled with laughter for a long period of time.

De Golyer and Powers in some of their earliest conferences, agreed that East Texas should contain a number of large oil structures if only the right geological key could be found to the location thereof. Amerada had even had a Shreveport office until it was decided that Tulsa was a better and more central location. With the advent of the GRC, the geologists again bethought themselves of the potentialities of East Texas and there was high hope that refraction shooting would turn up some oilfields. The natural result of this preoccupation with the Sabine uplift, the Powell-Mexia faultline and other favorable and advantageous areas of this region was that every GRC party chief, working for the Amerada, did one or more stretches of work in East Texas. Duncan, Salvatori, Peacock, Borman, Beese, Beers and Stewart, all shot prospects in East Texas. None of these efforts were successful. When Weatherby went into the area he was working for a Pure GRC crew and only Pure had any success; the discovery of the Van Oilfield.

After a temporary assignment of a month to McDermott's GRC Party #2, with headquarters in New Orleans, and two more months on an LLE party working out of Houma and Lake Charles, Louisiana; the GRC put me in a permanent berth as computer under Sam Stewart operating out of Athens, Texas. We thought that we were onto something hot and for awhile we made use of two field parties, each working a fourteen hour shift every other day. Then Rodger Denison arrived from the Fort Worth office to supply some expert geological advise. Denison was not at all convinced by the maps Sam Stewart showed him of the faults we had located. Off we went to Teague, Texas, and after a short stay there, we took up field headquarters in Corsicana. King Rubbert, who had been doing the surveying on this party, left us late in August and departed Corsicana to continue his graduate studies at the University of Chicago.

The word leaked out that we were going to lose easy-going Sam Stewart as party chief and acquire arch-disciplinarian, Dr. X, in his place. This bit of scuttlebutt turned out to be all too true. Dr. X was against everything. He objected to the field office we had rented in Corsicana and the only reason we did not have to move to a location of his choosing was because orders came through to move our party to New Mexico while Dr. X was looking for the ideal office.

The speed limit for the company trucks on the road to New Mexico was set at 28 miles per hour by Dr. X. Before nightfall of the first day, two drivers, including the writer, had been caught red-handed driving between 30 and 35 miles per hour. From then on, we two recalcitrant drivers, having been publically stripped of our driving privileges, were reduced to mere passengers on the convoy.

This GRC party worked for a time out of Lovington, New Mexico, which was a fairly respectable town. Then we were ordered to Hobbs and there was nothing respectable, at that time, about Hobbs, New Mexico. New Hobbs was fighting Old Hobbs for the possession of the post office; so of course, New Hobbs had to throw a dance every Saturday night to show what an up-and-coming community it had become. Old Hobbs had some twenty residents and New Hobbs would not number over 75 in population, but when the cowboys came in for the Saturday night's doings, they doubled or tripled the local population, and made enough noise for a thousand head of their best steers on a stampede. The New Hobbs Hotel, which was the only place one could rent a room within a radius of fifty miles, was so new it had not yet been painted on the outside. The entire seismograph crew lived at the New Hobbs Hotel except the new surveyor, who was a  family man and had secured a couple of rooms from a rancher five miles north. The hotel was right across the street from the dance hall and we all enjoyed the full benefits of the Saturday night fun. Porter Mason, our shooter, who is now a respected Dallas physician, got hit over the head and knocked unconscious with a beer bottle during the first Saturday night frolic. One drunken cowpoke took a particular delight in attacking the New Hobbs Hotel. He quickly made the discovery that the cardboard-like walls were no match for his oversized fist. Unfortunately, one of the rooms he chose to test his muscular prowess was occupied by Dr. and Mrs. X. When an arm and fist came flying through the wall of her room, Mrs. X was nearly frightened out of her wits. From then on, X and Mrs. X locked their door and turned out the lights of their room promptly at seven o'clock every Saturday night.

When we were visited by the supervisor or an Amerada geologist, the eating routine had been standardized. First the distinguished guest was taken to the Old Hobbs Cafe, some two miles away from the hotel. When the initial meal was over, your guest would suggest trying the cafe in New Hobbs. So that night the two of you would journey to the New Hobbs Cafe and look at the menu. The menu always had the same choice of foods; beef stew, chili and soup. All three courses came from the same enormous pot on the stove. The soup was on top, chili came from the middle and the chef dug deep for the beef stew. For breakfast the next morning, it was back to the Old Robbs Cafe.

The nearest railroad station was 58 miles away at Seagraves, Texas. Our supplies came principally from three towns in Texas; Lamesa, Midland and Seagraves. Since we were in the wild west, the seismograph crew decided to grow beards. The boss had no comments to make about the field crew letting their beards grow. I was the computer, working in the field office alongside of Dr. X and the dear doctor soon informed me that he wanted me to shave off my facial adornment. When I refused, he asked Dr. Eugene Rosaire, the party supervisor, to fire me. He had found me both uncouth and a reckless driver; certainly grounds enough to warrant instant dismissal. All of us were working on a formula for layer to layer velocity analysis and depth determination in the Permian Basin refraction work and I had been lucky enough to come up with the mathematical treatment that had been adopted by the party. When Dr. Rosaire next visited the party, he was pleased with my solution of the problem. Dr. X finally got around to the suggestion that I be discharged; Dr. Rosaire said he thought the idea was ridiculous.

In later years Dr. X became a fine laboratory physicist. One cannot avoid wondering what stories he now teIls his grandchildren about the brash associates of his youth. The most thrilling misadventure of Dr. X was with an honest-to-goodness bad man. "Mr. Bad" was a local ranch owner who at the third Saturday night dance after our arrival in Hobbs, had beaten up a man so thoroughly, the victim had gone to the hospital for a long stay. Then it came out that the "tough guy" had shot and killed two men in two different gun fights, one only a year previously. "Mr. Bad" had one of his cows drop dead more than a mile from our nearest shot-point. Our permit man, who was in charge of settling claims for damages, turned down the intrepid rancher on the grounds that our geophysical activities could not conceivably have had any connection with this bovine demise. The permit man duly reported his action to the party chief. Next day "Mr. Bad" came roaring into our field office in Hobbs demanding justice. Without a word of protest, Dr. X made out a check in payment for a purebred heifer and handed it to "Mr. Bad." When the rancher had departed, Dr. X wiped the sweat from his brow, then sat down and wrote out his resignation.

To clear my conscience, I must relate the rest of the story. I was dating a Hobbs school teacher named Chandler at the time and had taken her to a couple of dances. Only after the crew had moved across the state line into Seminole, Texas, did I learn from a fellow party member that I had "beaten the time" of "Mr. Bad" for the affections of Miss Chandler. I had a date with her that night and lost no time in asking her if the bad rancher was a close friend of hers. She blinked her eyes rapidly and then aid:

"He has asked me to marry him.“

Sweet turned chicken, and like Dr. X, never more returned to New Mexico.

The nearest railroad station, as I have already related, was at Seagraves. It was in Seagraves that I purchased my first car, one of the first Model A Fords in the Permian Basin. It was a blue roadster and I loved it dearly. The jackrabbits were so thick that a trip of any length could not be consummated without running over several of them. The coyotes were almost as plentiful as the jackrabbits. The coyotes managed to stay clear of automobile collisions in the daytime, but at night it was almost impossible to miss all of the creatures who ran across the road in front of the car headlights.

While in Seminole we rented a wing on the second floor of the county courthouse as our office. For the first two weeks of our sojourn in Seminole our calculations and work maps were checked regularly by both Eugene Rosaire and E. L. De Golyer. This was only the second time I had ever seen the great man. The entire personnel of the party hung onto every word he said. He was his usual gregarious self and learned to call each man on the party by his first name.

One afternoon De Golyer was talking about an acquaintance of his named Bob Johnson. "Bob, I guess, is as worthless an individual as ever lived on this earth," mused De Golyer, talking more to himself than to any of us, "Why, I doubt if he ever had as much as $10,000 at anytime in his life.“

My new automobile had cost me $800.00 and $10,000 was a huge sum for an ordinary person in the year 1928. The story, although not really intended for our ears, spread like wildfire and became one of the classic sayings in the GRC. All of us had a goal in life. Somehow we would have to acquire $10,000. In 1928 that sum could buy ten Fords and have enough left over for a long trip to Europe. Now it would buy two Fords and pay for a somewhat shorter trip to Europe.