“Cussin’ Like a Tooldresser” and Serious Risk-Taking

High among the most influential experiences of my life is the summer of 1949—when I was 16—which I spent with my Dad (Marion John –Ted--LeVieux), at his invitation, in and around Ozark, Arkansas.

Dad had not been much of a factor in my life until then. Following the oil-drilling business, Dad’s work took him to newly developed oil fields in Illinois near his home at St. Francisville, Ill. and then across east/central Oklahoma during the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s before WWII.  Thus, he had been an “absent father” in my life as a child.

Dad’s drilling business both before after the war was in partnership with Charley Beal from Tulsa.  Beal’s role was to obtain the drilling contracts, and Dad’s job was to get the actual drilling done.

Each contract called for Dad to drill a well at a particular location, down to a specific depth (say 3,000 ft).  At completion—whether oil was found or not--the partnership would be paid a fixed sum (say $10/foot x 3,000 feet = $30,000), used to pay drilling expenses, with the residue split between partners per prior agreement.    Sometimes there would be partial payments--say at 1,000 and 2,000 feet.   Other than that, the entire risk of drilling the well was burdened on the drilling contractor—my Dad.   The oil company decided how deep the well needed to be.

The risks were significant. First and foremost was “losing” drilling tools down the hole, and not being able to complete the well to contracted depth.  Not only loss of income was involved, but also costs relating to manpower and equipment, regardless of well completion.  Equipment breakdowns and rig fires were a constant threat, as was serious personal injury.

Offsetting the awesome risks were compelling financial rewards that attracted so many men to spend their lives in grimy, dangerous and back-breaking work--in and around dozens of Oklahoma boomtowns like Beggs, Cromwell, Cushing, Drumright, Dustin, Glenpool, Jenks, Kickapoo, Seminole--and Okemah. The rugged oilfield environments of that time are accurately depicted in the 2007 Academy Award-nominated movie “There will be Blood.”

 

Work roles on the rig were Tool Pusher (foreman for well or group of wells), Driller (crew boss), Tool Dresser (assists driller and dresses drill bits to size with a forge and sledge hammer), and Roustabout (general helper).

In 1947, Dad formed a new business relationship with Sherrod & Apperson, another oil-promotion company based in Tulsa (then Oil Capital of the World).  Jack Sherrod, managing partner, developed a radically new opportunity--drilling in northwest Arkansas for natural gas rather than oil, as in Illinois and Oklahoma.  Arkansas-Western Gas Company, who contracted the wells, had been drilling in the White Oak field just west of Ozark since 1943.

The challenge of drilling for gas in Arkansas was much greater than for oil in Oklahoma.   First, the gas wells had to be deeper (say 3, 000-5,000 feet) compared with Oklahoma oil (say 1,000-3000 feet), and the formations were much more difficult to drill through.  There was one formation of exceptionally hard sand (Mississippian Chert) that was toughest of all.

The Arkansas Western Gas Company badly needed more gas sources, had been drilling a rotary well into the Chert for some time, and had not been able to penetrate.  One 24-hour period of very expensive rotary drilling had progressed only 20 inches.  Rotary drilling involved connecting together a string of tools, with rotating diamond-faced drill bits at the bottom.  Arkansas Western temporarily gave up on the expensive rotary drilling in such hard sands in favor of Jack Sherrod’s proposed cable-tool approach.  Cheaper but also much slower.

Sherrod apparently evaluated a wide range of potential Oklahoma drilling contractors before identifying LeVieux Drilling Company as best qualified for this particularly tough assignment.  He convinced Dad that the rewards for ultra-high-risk cable-tool drilling in deep, hard-sand formations could outweigh the greater risks.  Sherrod negotiated price-per-drilled-foot contracts that were very favorable, compared with Dad’s Oklahoma drilling experiences.

As I understood it, Dad was the only drilling contractor used by Arkansas Western over many years.  Others were apparently either lightly qualified by past performance or intimidated by the high level of risk.  Arkansas Western continued to do Company-owned gas-well drilling, but Dad did most of it.

Dad became friends with Arkansas Western engineer, Hamp Hawsell, huddling for many hours over the years discussing the geological formations they were drilling through.   Most of those conversations took place over beers at McKenzie’s Tavern, down the street from Ozark’s Haberer Hotel where Dad lived.  I did participate  occasionally in non-Tavern locations.  I found the subject so interesting that I later took a college course in geology.

Dad’s cable-tool approach involved a string of tools with an ultra-heavy, solid-steel drill bit--at the end of a 7/8” woven-wire line--successively raised and dropped onto the hard-sand formations until they were pounded into “cuttings,” mixed with water to form slush, then raised in a bailer for dumping into the slush pit.  (Abandoned slush pits devastated Oklahoma rural landscapes for decades after the Oklahoma oil booms.)

 

When the drill-bit was periodically out of the hole, it was taken to a gas-fired forge and heated white-hot.  The Driller and Tool dresser swung 16-lb sledgehammers time and again to pound the heated and slightly softened bit into desired circumference, with a cutting-edge surface.   Dad frequently worked the Driller role, pounding away with a sledgehammer while precariously balancing on his artificial left leg.  Very, very hard work for a man at the time 53 years old.  I manfully tried tool-dressing, but could handle no more than a 12-lb sledgehammer, and then only for a short time.  But I did acquire the fine art of “cussing like a tool dresser.” It really helped to relieve serious frustration.  I still occasionally practice the art-form, when “necessary.”

The following photo shows a cable-tool rig as it would have looked in the early 20^th Century, with a derrick assembled on drill site from many sections of steel.

The following photo is a side view of one of Dad’s rigs in the 1950s, mostly pre-assembled at the factory.  Engine room is to the left and drilling platform to right.

 

In left foreground are casing pipes, used to line the hole when drilled, preventing cave-ins.  Looking toward drilling platform from the forge house.

 

The deeper drilling operations in Arkansas meant that risks went up correspondingly. More stress was placed on all equipment, particularly the wire-strand cables that raised and then dropped the heavy bits--time after time after time on the formation below.  To reduce risk, Dad always used occasions for pulling tools out of the hole to assess potential damage to the wire line.  He would pull out about 10 feet of cable, then stop while he as Driller, plus the Tool dresser, a Roustabout, and myself (when present), would scan and squint at every inch of the wire line from all angles—looking for subtle signs of stress or wear.   This painfully slow, attention-taxing, and boring process could take up to an hour out of each 8-hour “tower.”  Three “towers” or shifts per 24-hour day.

If any snags or cuts in the wire line were found, the entire expensive length of cable was immediately “retired” from active service, and sold to a scrap dealer.  No risks were taken with wire line that had any flaws. That same level of preventive maintenance was followed with all drilling equipment.  The drilling engine had its premium “Pennzoil” lubricant changed daily.  As a Roustabout, my regular daily duties included wire-brush-cleaning and lubricating various tools and machinery .

Dad’s attitude toward preventive maintenance has been deeply embedded in my own daily life. Today, I follow preventive maintenance schedules as rigorously with cars and home AC as Dad did with his mid-20^th Century drilling equipment.   Preventive maintenance is a permanent part of my identity.   This attitude was reinforced by two years in the U. S. Army, where preventive maintenance is also rigorously practiced, and for the same reasons.

Employing the best people available was another big factor in Dad’s disaster-prevention program. As elsewhere, good people are always hard to find and difficult to keep.  Dad kept tabs on competent drillers and tool dressers, hiring them whenever he could.  In order to keep top performers on board and motivated, Dad paid above-average wages for that time and place.   As a result, “M. J. LeVieux Drilling Contractor” enjoyed relative employee stability in an industry noted for rapid turnover.

But Dad wanted more than stability from his people. He wanted intense dedication to avoiding the carelessness that can lead to dreaded “fishing jobs.”   Dad trained his people thoroughly on his way, and insisted that they follow instructions to the letter.

I later picked up on Dad’s serious quality-control approach to business.  Many years after, at Texas Instruments and then National Semiconductor, I posted plaques on all my staff’s desks: “The essence of professionalism is painstaking attention to detail.” That’s what I practiced personally and preached incessantly.

During the summer I worked with Dad, an inevitable serious failure happened (despite obsessive preventive maintenance).  While drilling, the wire line broke, dropping drilling tools suddenly to the bottom of the hole.  This led to a dreaded “fishing job”--getting the tools out of the hole so drilling can be resumed.   Failure would mean giving up and plugging the hole permanently, with disastrous financial consequences.

Dad did not panic or rush into solutions. Instead, he sat and thought, for some days, also phoning other contractors and drillers for insights.  I watched him, sitting in the rest-time “dog house,” sketching scores of possible deep-in-the-hole scenarios.

“What are the possibilities?”  How close to the tools was the line break?  How snarled was the line?

“What are the probabilities of one scenario versus others?”

Dad’s formal education had taken him only through the 8^th grade before he joined the Army and went to war in France in 1918.  Afterward, Dad left home to join the just-starting oil industry that had already made his father, August LeVieux, a fairly wealthy man as an oil-producing landowner.

So, using all his years of drilling experience, along with considerable native intelligence and self-taught analytical processes, Dad methodically arrived at what the available evidence led him to conclude was the most likely “fishing-job” scenario.

Next step was to locate a “fishing tool” that would precisely address his understanding of the problem.  Then he phoned drilling-supply companies in Oklahoma to learn what they had in stock and immediately on-hand.

He finally settled on a particular fishing tool stocked by Iverson Tool Company in Okmulgee, and immediately dispatched me (at 16!) in his pickup to retrieve the tool as soon as possible.  I drove to Okmulgee early the next morning, loaded the tool, and returned the same evening, proud to have been entrusted with such an important task.

The fishing tool successfully “grabbed” the shredded wire line on the first try, it held, and we pulled the lost tools to the surface.  After another several hours, we had a new spool of wire line loaded, and were back in operation!

I was awed by Dad’s analytical approach to problem-solving and his calm and productive leadership of his team—whose jobs and futures were immediately at stake (as was his own).  I tried to emulate that approach in my own business career.

Dad’s drilling for Arkansas Western was successful in every respect over a period of about 15 years, usually with two or three rigs running simultaneously.  Dad’s role shifted from Driller/Tool Pusher to fulltime Tool Pusher.

Our family’s improved prosperity enabled college educations at the University of Oklahoma for Jim and me—the proudest accomplishment of Dad’s life.  Dad sold our modest Okemah home at 201 North 9^th Street in favor of a 200-acre country home just west of Okemah, where he planned to raise Black Angus cattle in retirement.   It didn’t turn out that way because of the fierce drought of the early 1950s, but that’s another story.

My summer of 1949 with Dad provided invaluable, lifelong lessons in the necessity of taking appropriate risks (because that’s where the rewards are), and the exacting process of risk and probability management.

Thirty-five years later, in 1984, I was in Palo Alto, California, interviewing for the senior Marketing/Communications position with National Semiconductor.  My interviewer was Joe Van Poppelen, National’s Marketing VP, who had initiated the conversation.  At the conclusion of a tough interview over lunch at the Silicon Valley recruiting hotspot, Dinah’s Garden Hotel, Joe asked me one  last question:  “Larry, what would you like to have engraved on your tombstone?”

Seeing a blank look on my face, Joe followed up: “Don’t think about it, just blurt out whatever comes to the top of your mind.”

So I tried to do just that, blurting: “He was the best there was at what he did.” I had no idea where that had come from.

Strangely, I didn’t figure out that “my tombstone epitaph” obviously referred to my father’s life until much later.

I got the National job, and worked for Joe until his retirement.

There is a postscript to this story. A lifelong characteristic of Dad is that he invariably wore khaki pants and shirt—what he called a “suit of khakis.”  A notable exception was my wedding to Susan in 1956, when Dad wore a formal white dinner jacket.  Quite “spiffy,’’ as he put it.

All my life I have also worn khaki pants—even through high school and college when everyone else wore jeans.  I was ribbed about that a lot, but never knew an appropriate response.  I just “felt right” in khakis.  Today, at age 78, I still wear khaki pants every day.  I even have “dress khakis” for special occasions.  Khakis still just “feel right.”

Point: parental culture can sometimes have subtle but nevertheless powerful impacts on our lives that never go away.