Chapter 1 California Here I Come 1975
My friends always told me that California was the land of “fruits and nuts”. I was excited about getting the job offer there since we had always wanted to see the place. My wife, Ellen, and our daughter, Stephanie, were also excited about the move. Billy Moore, the Dresser Atlas manager at Long Beach and his wife picked us up after dark at the Los Angeles airport in the spring of 1975 and drove us over the Grapevine Pass to Bakersfield in the San Joaquin “Big” Valley, where I would be working as a Sales Engineer. Driving over the mountains between Los Angeles and Bakersfield was my first experience with any place with high elevations. There were several places where “escape” lanes were cut out of the mountains so that 18 wheelers could get off into deep gravel pits to slow them down if their brakes failed. We were told that, in the old Model T days, the cars did not have fuel pumps. They only used gravity feed to send the gas to the engine. The gas tanks were at a slightly higher elevation than the engine. However, when going up the mountain, since the gas tank was behind the engine, the engine became elevated higher than the gas tank and so the car would stall out. What they had to do to get over the Grapevine Pass was to drive the car backwards until they reached the top so the gas would feed to the engine. Driving backwards could make for a long trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapevine,_California
Arriving in Bakersfield, we were pleased to find out that, even though it was not a particularly exciting place at first glance, you could be in almost any environment with a two hour drive. In the morning you could go surfing on the beach, but in the afternoon, you could be skiing in the mountains. In two hours, you could be at Magic Mountain, Hollywood, Disneyland (the original), Ventura, and Sequoia National Forest or in just a few more hours, Yosemite National Park.
We found an apartment, that was the center of action there, called The Meadows. Bakersfield was the home of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and the radio station there was “KERN”, named for Kern County. “KORN” was used as a takeoff name for “KERN” in the Hee Haw popular television show. Buck Owen’s Band, The Buckaroos, were the initial house band for Hee Haw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Joaquin_Valley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hee_Haw
Ellen studied real estate while we were in Bakersfield and after obtaining her Realtor’s License, went to work for John Shipman, the owner of Shipman Realtors on Stockdale Highway, who also owned The Meadows Apartments, where we lived. John’s wife, Vicki, had a sister that was a popular actress in Hollywood so they were always going back and forth from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. The Meadows had a tradition of throwing great parties, especially Halloween, which made it a fun place to live. There was always something going on around town. One of the top ARCO engineers and his wife also lived there and we would occasionally sit around the pool and chat about other things besides business.
Buck Owens drove a special automobile around town built by the Las Vegas custom car maker, Nudie Cohn, who did a lot of automobiles for Hollywood movie stars. Since Buck would come to visit one of the ladies that lived in our apartment, we would often see it parked there and also at the KERN Radio Station. The special car had a Texas Longhorn on the front, 1000 silver dollars imbedded in the upholstery, a saddle in the middle seat, and pistols and rifles attached to the sides. In those days, he left the top down, since no one would even think of stealing anything from Buck. He had a special permit to drive it on the highway, which might be hard to get these days. His license plate was BUCK 1 when we were there. The car is currently in his Bakersfield Crystal Palace Museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Owens
Bakersfield was also noted as a refugee town as a result of the dust storms that struck the Midwest Dust Bowl during the depression in the 1930s. There was a saying in town: What are the first three words spoken by a person from Oklahoma? The answer was Mommy, Daddy and Bakersfield, since families moved from Oklahoma to California as soon as they could to find work. The saying was an inspiration from John Steinbeck’s great novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
There were some excellent restaurants in Bakersfield, despite the town’s small size. One of the finest French restaurants was Maison Jaussaud’s, but there were also special Basque restaurants where one could try the unique taste of rabbit along with several other specialties. Of course, most of the oil field workers preferred chicken fried steak, which contained no chicken, as the name implied, having only beef for meat. They said that, if chicken fried steak had not been invented, then there would have never been any oil wells drilled. In fact, the last meal for Buck Owens was chicken fried steak. He remarked it was his favorite, a few hours before having a heart attack. He had planned on cancelling his show that night at his local restaurant since he was not feeling well. However, some couple complained they had driven all the way from Oregon to see him, so, he changed his mind and performed one last time, passing away right after the show.
One of my favorite songs was Streets of Bakersfield, written by Homer Joy and originally recorded by Buck Owens and later made more popular with his duet with Dwight Yoakam. Note the interesting car near the end of the music video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Bakersfield
Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens Streets of Bakersfield - YouTube
Back to the subject of work, Dresser Atlas was owned by the parent company, Dresser Industries (who merged with Halliburton, later in 1998, but other divisions such as Kellogg separated and the oil field equipment group was purchased by GE in 2011). At that time, Dresser Industries also included other service products such as valves, heaters, pumps, engines, compressors, oil derricks, blowers, drill bits, refractories, and drilling mud, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresser_Industries
Shortly after being transferred to Bakersfield, Dresser Industries decided to try an experiment and send some of their promising employees to a twelve week "Super Sales" School in Houston. Four people were selected from Dresser Atlas - Bob Carr, Ted Turner, John Kowalski and I. Having barely unpacked from our move from Houston to California, we were headed back to live in a hotel room for 3 months. Fortunately, our daughter, Stephanie was only five years old so she went with her mom and me for the duration. Twelve weeks is a long time in a hotel, but we made the best of it with frequent trips to Astroworld, Galveston, NASA, etc. along with a trip back to Alabama to visit both families. Dresser Industries had a private Skybox at the Houston Astrodome so a couple of times I was able to watch the Houston Oilers in style when we entertained clients there.
The "Super School” actually did help me to gain confidence in public speaking, doing sales presentations, learning marketing techniques, etc., so when we went back to California, I was ready to hit the ground running and sell some logging services. Shortly thereafter, I co-authored my first technical paper there, "The Use of Photon Logs to Evaluate Gravel Packing" (SPE, Bakersfield, California, 1977), working with fellow authors Billy Neill, Dennis Lynch and Johnny Haire out of Ventura.
https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-6532-MS
"The Use of Photon Logs to Evaluate Gravel Packing" (SPE, Bakersfield, California, 1977)
Jerald Heflin, the guy that originally convinced me to join Dresser Atlas, worked out of the Ventura office and I worked in Bakersfield, but we often did joint “dog and pony show” type presentations to the clients. When we were working together on the Continuous Carbon/Oxygen Log (which was a solid state update to the old Van De Graaff generator Neutron Lifetime Log, described in Book 1), we spent a lot of time together at the rigs and in customer’s offices. The new Carbon/Oxygen log was an improvement since its measurement of the relative amounts of carbon vs. oxygen could tell the difference between oil and water behind steel casing and it worked in fresh waters which existed in many California reservoirs. Oil is a hydrocarbon while water is hydrogen and oxygen so the ratio of carbon to oxygen is a good indicator of oil.
Jerald came up with a novel idea of overlaying the Carbon/Oxygen ratio curve with a reversed Silicon/Calcium ratio curve to find oil. Limestone, which is calcium carbonate, looked like oil on the carbon/oxygen ratio even in water zones, since it had also had a lot of carbon. By using a reversed Silicon/Calcium ratio curve, the amount of carbon in the rock could be subtracted out, leaving only the carbon in the oil fluid.
I first put the Heflin Continuous Carbon/Oxygen film overlay method to test in the real world with Jerald’s help in the back seat of a car around midnight at a remote land rig location up in the hills near Ventura. We traced the curves onto film using a grease pencil. That method soon proved to be reliable and has been used ever since. Jerald and I, along with Dr. Don Oliver (Research) and Larry Koenn (Engineer), put together a publication on the new Continuous Carbon/Oxygen Log and presented it at the American Petroleum Institute conference in Bakersfield in 1977.
Heflin, J.D., Lawrence, T., Oliver, D., and Koenn, L., "California Applications of the Continuous Carbon/Oxygen Log", API Joint Chapter Meeting, Bakersfield, California, October, 1977.
The tool was very advanced at that time, generating around 100 million high energy (14.2 million electron volt) neutrons at 20,000 times per second. There was one small drawback to the C/O tool compared to other logging tools. It had to be logged at a very slow speed, around two feet per minute, while most simpler instruments traveled around 30-100 feet/minute. It was so slow that birds would land on the line and not realize it was moving. In order to generate some humor out of that and to entertain our customers, Jerald came up with an idea. We took a break from the rig and went into town to the Goodwill store to see if we could buy some sales props. We bought several old garments, including underwear and a couple of bras. When we went through the checkout lane the lady looked at us strangely and asked, “Will there be anything else?” Jerald replied, “I guess not, unless you have a Number 2 washtub?” The lady said, “Wait right here” and went into the back and brought one out. She was still shaking her head as we left the store wondering what we were going to do with all that stuff, especially, the ladies apparel.
We took everything back to the rig and Jerald cut up the two bras and made a three cup one and hung it on the line. We made photos of the laundry and washtub and the slides always broke the monotony when we did our presentations on the Carbon/Oxygen log. With the presentation slides, we also pretended to hang our other laundry on the logging cable while running the survey. We kidded that one advantage of running the tool would be that by using the Number 2 washtub, the roughnecks could also do their laundry at the same time and hang the clothes out to dry on the slow moving wireline. Jerald took an image from the popular movie, “Rocky”, where Sylvester Stallone has the swollen eyes and altered it for him to have three eyes which matched the three-cupped bra very well in our slide presentations. Staring at the camera for a long time while running a C/O log would do funny things to your eyes.
It turns out that the ceramics inside the C/O log were very good insulators, which were essential for the extremely high voltage. These ceramics were made by the same company out of Colorado, who made the ceramics for the nose cones of ballistic missiles so they can survive the heat of re-entry, Coors Brewery. That’s right, these ceramics were great filters and sterile filtration is one of the secrets in brewing fantastically pure Coors® beer. Naturally, we updated our Number 2 washtub slides to add a couple of Coors® beer cans to add flair to the technical presentations, which went over especially well for our clients in Colorado.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coors_Brewing_Company
While Jerald and I were making more and more presentations separately, I thought I would spice up mine by bringing in an assistant. When the family and I went to the original Disneyland in Anaheim, I picked up one of those souvenir Charley McCarthy ventriloquist dummies, similar to the one used by Edgar Bergen, complete with a top hat, to be my assistant. At least, it seemed to keep the audiences from going to sleep during my presentations. I used the line that "interpreting the Continuous Carbon / Oxygen log was so simple, even a dummy could do it". "Throwing my voice", however, was difficult for me, although there were a few moments of believability and great entertainment, in any case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bergen
While in Bakersfield, I began work on a mathematical model that would solve the Heflin Carbon / Oxygen overlay method on a computer so we would not have to manually flip the log film and trace the curves on top of each other, especially in the back seat of a car. Basically, it came down to solving a simple linear equation using a slope and intercept. After showing ARCO what I was trying to accomplish, Kim Howell, one of their sharp young engineers in Bakersfield, gave me a suggestion on nomenclature for the intercept and I adopted that. ARCO had several other young talented employees in Bakersfield such as John Weisgram and Van Smith. Most of them, including Steve Suellentrop and later, his brother, Gerry, would go on to higher management positions including some up to the corporate executive levels of ARCO and other companies.
During this time, oil prices began to rise, primarily due to the continued conflicts in the Middle East. Someone jokingly changed a gas price sign on one of the abandoned service stations to read 99 cents per gallon. I thought prices would never go that high, since it had only been only 35 cents, right before. Of course, the price hikes were just getting started.
Around this time, Gulf Oil Company drilled a wildcat well up in the mountains near Ojai, California. Ojai was the home of the fictional “Six Million Dollar Man” and “Bionic Woman” characters in the popular TV series starring Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagoner. In the films they had both been childhood sweethearts growing up in Ojai and several episodes were filmed there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bionic_Woman
The Gulf geologist was Bob Evans out of Bakersfield who had lost some of his voice following a stressful evacuation from Nigeria several years before when they had to flee by boats down a river with people shooting at them. California is noted for its strict environmental rules and Ojai just so happened to also be one of the main breeding areas for the endangered California Condor vultures whose wingspan could approach10 feet.
The California Condor is the largest bird in North America. The State of California was concerned that the noise of the drilling rig might interfere with the mating of the Condors. Therefore, they imposed a rule on Gulf Oil. They could only drill during the day time and would have to shut down at night when the condors were supposedly mating. Of course, this is not conducive for drilling operations. It takes hours to get the drilling mud mixed to the proper density and viscosity and if you have to stop in the middle of drilling, the mud will harden and the pipe could become stuck in the hole. Nevertheless, Gulf complied and finally drilled the well and I was asked to go onsite and do the evaluation. Soon afterwards, having spent so much extra money and taking almost twice as long to drill, Gulf finally gave up that area.
Apparently, that did not save the condors, sadly. The last free-flying ones were rounded up in 1987 and put in cages, since they found out that Condors actually breed better in captivity. They only lay one egg each season, so the odds are against them. Recently, they were slowly being introduced into the wild. Staying away from power lines, windmill farms and DDT also helps, of course.
http://www.defenders.org/california-condor/basic-facts
Tenneco was one of the major operators in Kern County. Apparently, in the old days, the County gave the Kern County railroad every other square mile of land in a checkerboard fashion to entice them to build the railroads. Tenneco, who owned Kern County Land Company, had the license to drill on the all the other properties, which gave them a larger share than most of the major oil companies. If I recall, they had so much land in the area that they were also affiliated with California food products such as with the SUN-MAID brand at the time. According to the link below:
Tenneco's most significant acquisition under Symonds came in August 1967, when it purchased the Kern County Land Company for approximately $430 million. Kern was established in California around 1850 by two lawyers from Kentucky, Lloyd Tevis and James Ben Ali Haggin, who intended to purchase land for resale to prospectors drawn to California in search of gold. Although the scheme failed, the subsequent development of irrigation systems transformed the 2.5 million acres of arid wasteland into arable cropland. Moreover, some of the land was later found to contain oil deposits. While the Kern Company lacked the expertise to develop these oil deposits, Tenneco was perfectly suited to develop the sites. At the same time, Tenneco had no immediate interest in Kern's agricultural businesses, but, as those businesses were profitable, they could easily be assimilated into Tenneco's existing land management group. The acquisition also included Kern's 53 percent interest in J.I. Case, a manufacturer of farm and construction machinery located in Wisconsin, and Walker Manufacturing, which produced automotive exhaust systems.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/tenneco-inc-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenneco
One of Tenneco’s largest oil discoveries while I was there was the Youlumne field, southwest of Bakersfield, near the edge of the mountains. It was my job to go to the rig when Dresser Atlas was performing a logging job there and quality control the surveys. This included entertaining the Tenneco representative geologist and engineers by taking them to lunch in the nearby small towns of Taft or McKittrick (populations 8,978 and 115, respectively), whenever there was a break in the logging activity.
The Tenneco geologist, Dave Pearcy, was also strict about quality control. One of the surveys we usually ran was an acoustic sonic device where we would measure the speed of sound in the rock formations below the earth. Instead of velocity (feet per second), we recorded the inverse, sonic travel time, in microseconds per foot. Dave had developed a QC system where a certain rock formation called the Brown Shale around 7000 feet deep should always have a consistent travel time of 88 microseconds per foot (11,364 ft/sec). After recording the sonic log, Dave would make us look at the reading in the Brown Shale to make sure it read 88 microseconds per foot and it almost always did.
There was one day, however, when the sonic log read 98 microseconds per foot, instead of 88 microseconds per foot in the Brown Shale. At first, I thought the logging engineer had shifted the scale by 10 microseconds, accidentally. After confirming the value the tool recorded up the hole in the steel pipe was 57 microseconds per foot. This corresponded exactly to the inverse speed of sound in steel, so we knew the scale was correct. Suspecting the tool had been unstable after going down to the bottom of the hot hole to over 10,000 feet and over 200 degrees Fahrenheit, we decided to rerun the sonic log using our backup tool that we always carried.
While the crew ran the backup sonic tool in the hole, the Dave and I went to lunch in the small town of Taft. Later when we came back to the rig, the crew was pulling out of the hole with the second sonic tool. When we checked the reading of the Brown Shale it still read 98 microseconds per foot instead of 88. Dave was furious and ordered us to run another tool in the hole. Since we only had one backup tool and had already used it, we had to call Bakersfield to have them “hot shot” another tool on a special pickup truck. Since that was going to take a couple of hours, the driller was worried about the condition of the open hole and decided to make a bit trip in and out to condition the hole. That would take around 12 hours so I went home for a break.
I was getting ready to go back to the rig several hours later when I got a phone call that the logging job had been cancelled. Apparently there had been a 6.0 earthquake near Youlumne, which caused the earth to move enough to twist off the drill pipe and Tenneco would have to re-drill the well from scratch.
For the subsequent logging jobs at Youlumne, the Brown Shale always read 88 microseconds per foot. I have often wondered if the increase in travel time from 88 to 98 was due to a decrease in velocity due to pressure building up underground. In other wells, there are many technical papers written to show an increase in travel time for zones that are over-pressured relative to the surrounding zones, but this was a one-time event. We had a sharp Dresser Atlas electronics guy, Dave Elliott, making sure the logging tools were always in good shape, so I felt confident the velocity readings had been correct.
There are lots of earthquakes in California, of course, and Bakersfield has had its share. The 1952 Kern County earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.3, was very devastating to the town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Kern_County_earthquake
Another Tenneco client of mine was Wes Franklin, a geologist in Bakersfield, who was a relative of the owner of the famous racehorse, Seattle Slew. Wes and his wife went to the Kentucky Derby and Seattle Slew ended up winning there and at the Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes, and thus the Triple Crown in 1977. It was an exciting time for all their friends and a lot of celebrating afterwards. Seattle Slew is the only horse to have been undefeated in all previous races to have won the Triple Crown and is ranked 9th out of the top 100 horses in the 20th Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Slew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwOImSrzmCg
Tenneco had been the first company to run the new Continuous Carbon/Oxygen Log in California. When I finally convinced Ridge Dorsey, one of their top geologists in Bakersfield to run it, he said to have the guys out at the rig tomorrow. I reminded him that the C/O logging truck was in Houston and it would take three days to drive to California. He said, “Don’t you have any other way?” I replied jokingly, “Not unless you have a C-130 transport plane we can put it on.” He said, “Hang on a minute. Let me check. I think we have one at Hobby Airport in Houston.” Sure enough, Tenneco had their own C-130 they used to transport equipment back and forth to South America. The next problem was how to make the large logging truck fit. We ended up having to take the wheels off to load it on the plane, but we got it done and flew it to Bakersfield.
One of our Carbon/Oxygen logging engineers, John Fuson, worked for the California fitness guru, Jack LaLanne and had muscles much like the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, so whenever we would go into town to eat, people would stare. The nearby Midway-Sunset field southwest of Bakersfield was mostly operated by Chevron and is the largest oil field in California and the third largest in the U.S. having produced over 3 billion barrels of crude since 1894.
The Elk Hills field was also called the Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 1 field, discovered in 1911, and confirmed by Standard Oil Company in 1912. President William Howard Taft designated the region as the nation's first Naval Petroleum Reserve in 1912 out of concern for the long term availability of petroleum for the U.S. Navy. (This explains how the nearby town, Taft, got its name).
The dusty Elk Hills have a prominent role in U.S. political history, for it was the lease of this land by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, to Pan American Petroleum in 1922 in return for personal loans at no interest, that brought on the Teapot Dome scandal which ruined the reputation of the administration of Warren G. Harding, now commonly considered to be one of the most corrupt in U.S. history. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the lease, and returned the Elk Hills to the U.S. government.
(Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Hills_Oil_Field)
There really were elk around Elk Hills and occasionally you could see a herd of Tule Elk off in the distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_elk
The ground near Elk Hills and Midway Sunset was covered with this stuff that looked like “moon dust”. I soon learned that it was diatomaceous earth, the same material that people put in their swimming pool filters. When you walked around the rig, your shoes would sink a couple of inches into the ground and a cloud of dust would follow you. Diatomaceous earth is composed of the silica shells of dead sea creatures called diatoms that lived in the Miocene Age from approximately 5 to 30 million years ago. There are numerous pore spaces in the shells so that rocks composed of them may contain up to 70 percent porosity, whereas most sandstones top out at around 39 percent. They are quite spectacular using images from a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Deep underneath the earth, these diatomaceous “shales” may be filled with hydrocarbon, but, since the pores are mostly unconnected, the permeability is usually low. In the Monterrey Shale, techniques were developed to produce the oil from those type formations and that was one of the geological objectives most people were exploring at the time. The rock itself was called diatomite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Formation
There have been a lot of media publicity and movies made about oil spills and oil rig disasters in the last few years. The greatest oil spill of them all occurred in California in 1910. The Lakeview Gusher, at its peak, gushed at the previously unheard of rate of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, creating a river of oil that had to be contained by dikes. The column of oil was over 20 feet in diameter and over 200 feet tall. I would often drive by the place and occasionally stop and reflect on the enormity of the event and the oil stained sand hills. They are still darkened today, according to my friend, Dave Rippy, who currently lives in California and who generously provided the modern day photo below.
The site for the Lakeview well was picked by a grocer, Julius Fried, because he thought a clump of red grass indicated good oil land. Fried went broke before drilling very far and the well was taken over by Union Oil. A driller with a string of "dusters" to his name, "Dry Hole Charlie" Woods, was assigned to the well.
According to Wikipedia:
Lakeview Gusher Number One was an eruption of hydrocarbons from a pressurized oil well in the Midway-Sunset Oil Field in Kern County, California, in 1910. It created the largest accidental oil spill in history, lasting 18 months and releasing 9 million barrels (1.4×106 m3) of crude oil.
Midway-Sunset was one of the largest oil reserves in America. When drilling commenced, the Lakeview Oil Company expected natural gas and a small amount of oil. Instead, there was a large blowout which overloaded storage tanks.
The 9-million-barrels (1.4×106 m3) geyser released more than 1.2 million US tons of crude, far more than any other single leak on land or water. Its site is located about a half-mile (800 m) east of the Taft–Maricopa Highway, California Route 33, marked by a Caltrans guide sign and a bronze plaque designated as California Historical Landmark number 485.
The Lakeview Oil Company started drilling at their Number One well on 1 January 1909. Initially only natural gas was found. As work continued the company partnered with Union Oil, which wanted to build storage tanks there.
Early twentieth-century drilling technology lacked such modern safety features as blowout preventers. When drilling reached 2,440 ft (740 m) on 14 March 1910 pressurized oil blew through well casing above the bit. An estimated 9 million barrels (1.4×106 m3) escaped before the gusher was brought under control in September 1911.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview_Gusher
https://web.archive.org/web/20061019100520/http://www.sjgs.com/lakeview.html
Chevron also had a large oil field in Kern River. They were doing enhanced oil recovery using steam flood since the oil was heavy and viscous. Kern River, all the way up to Lake Isabella, was a great place to go rafting or tubing over some very nice rapids and large boulders. If you were a little bolder (no pun intended), skinny dipping was common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kern_River
Two of my favorite places near Bakersfield were Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park. You cannot imagine the size of those Sequoia trees, until you see them up close. The General Sherman tree is the largest living tree in the world and some of the trees are over 3,000 years old. Their bark is somewhat fire resistant which helps them survive so long. A few of the trees were so large that tunnels were carved through them in the late 1800's. The tunnels were wide enough for horses, carriages, and later cars, to pass through.
https://www.nps.gov/SEKI/index.htm
Dresser Atlas hired a young, handsome and physically built geologist, to do sales in Bakersfield, straight out of college and who had just gotten married. I am not sure if it was true, but there was a story going around about an episode that apparently spread to Hollywood and was later possibly put in a movie. Right after this young kid got married, his wife asked him to go to the supermarket to buy some Tampax® tampons. Being a newlywed and not used to shopping for such things, he was very shy and made sure no one saw him take the box off the shelf and stealthily made his way to the cashier. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, there was no price on the box. The store cashier got on the intercom and announced where everyone in the store could hear. “Need a price check on a large box of Tampax®.” He slumped down and covered his face so no one could see. There was a little guy running around in the back that always checked prices, but he misunderstood and thought the cashier had said “thumb tacks” instead of Tampax®. The guy in the back got on the loud intercom and asked, “Are those the kind you hammer in, or the ones you push in with your finger?” He reportedly looked at the cashier and said, “Never mind, I don’t really need them today.” and rushed out the door. Snopes even covered a version of this story later, but they used a lady as the main character and the earlier story I heard around 1976 is more believable to me.
http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/feminine/tampax.asp
Speaking of “hammers”, another rumor was that the famous Dr. Armand Hammer, who owned Occidental Petroleum and has close ties to the Soviet Union, had a penthouse in Bakersfield at that time, maintained by a lady custodian. It was alleged that he kept a pet tiger inside the place for security. I never bothered to check that rumor out, naturally. According to Wikipedia:
“Hammer was named after the "arm and hammer" graphic symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), in which his father had a leadership role.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occidental_Petroleum
In Bakersfield, we had Melvin, a new young, black logging engineer from Alabama, who was fresh out of college, and straight from the training school. One Saturday afternoon, I was asked to go out to the rig for quality control and check on Melvin since he was so new. When I got to the rig, his operators were rigging down the logging equipment and Melvin was putting the sidewall core samples in bottles, while at the same time running ammonia blue line prints and filling out the customer service invoice. I asked him, “What happened, Melvin. How did you guys finish up so fast?” He looked up at me from his engineer seat behind the logging camera and said, “I’ve got a hot date back in Bakersfield tonight”! Melvin was one of our faster logging engineers, pushing the wireline tool speed limits going in the holes and coming out. It was not long before we gave him the nickname, “Flash.” That name stuck with him for years, even after he was transferred to Laurel Mississippi and presumably later in management positions at Baker Atlas, Baker Hughes and Fronterra.
On December 22, 1976 around 10:30 pm, California time, I received probably the worst phone call of my life. My oldest brother, Harry, had passed away, unexpectedly. It was devastating and knocked me to my knees. We had Christmas presents under the tree but had to hurry to the airport in order to make the funeral. My other brother, James Donald, who was in the U.S. Air force, stationed in Japan, was struggling to get a flight to make it back home in time. It was a terrible time for all our family, especially during the Christmas holidays. What is really strange, however, is that when we made it back home to Bakersfield, Santa Claus had delivered some extra presents to our six year old daughter, Stephanie, while we were gone. It is still a mystery, but perhaps Santa had a little help from our neighbors since we left them a key to the house?
Ellen continued to be successful in her real estate career and received a large annual bonus from her boss, John Shipman. We promptly took the money and flew to Hawaii for a vacation since that had always been a dream for both of us. We chose the “Garden Island”, Kauai as the primary getaway location. We rented a car and drove around the island. The natives in the villages were very friendly. In one case, a young girl flagged us down on the road and asked if we wanted a Hawaiian Lei. Of course, we accepted and she invited us to her house with her parents, where she promptly picked fresh flowers and made it by hand for us as we watched. I was impressed with the hospitality of the natives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kauai
Returning from Hawaii back to Bakersfield, it was not long before another song, (this time by the group, America), told us we had to pick up and move again, headed down the "Ventura Highway".
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