Desperadoes and Dumbasses

By Rick Phillips and Mary Helen Phillips

Desperadoes and Dumbasses is the life story of a Texas raised 40-year career oil and gas accountant, fraud examiner and consultant who lived in and worked in and traveled to Indonesia, India, Egypt, Argentina, Mexico and Italy.

The story includes management teams described as All in the Family, Asleep at the Wheel, Pyramids, Tango and Tequila. It describes the consequences of management neglect and lack of follow-up. It is also a story of the unusual reply when we asked why something was done a certain way: "That's the way we've always done it." 

The retired Texas Ranger who was hired to help with investigations said this when I asked him why he wore a .44 magnum Revolver: "Rick, they don't make anything else more powerful in a handgun." I knew that same Ranger when he was a Highway Patrolman and I was in high school in Littlefield, Texas. He once drove up on us boys while we were drinking beer on a county dirt road and told us to be sure to throw the cans into the dumpster at the edge of town and DON'T throw them in the Church of Christ or Baptist Church parking lots. He said don't throw them in the Methodist parking lot either, even though where you find four Methodists you will find a fifth.

When an operations manager asked me how our interviews with his people went, I told him he had trained them well—they lived by "Hear no Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil." The big thing on all menus we saw in West Virginia was macaroni and cheese. You could see why the women there were mostly overweight. 

I also learned that coffee breaks in the oil and gas business were often deal-making sessions—don't miss one. Most of the petroleum engineers and geologists I met were sensible people; the engineers were critical thinkers and inquisitive and the geologists were great at observation and analysis. I became life-long friends with many of them.

I always liked to think outside the box which annoyed some of the accountants and financial managers I worked with. They'd say, "Rick, you ask too many questions." When you are flying over a jungle in a helicopter, trust the pilot always. When you are riding in a car in Mumbai, India alongside elephants, trust your driver always.

I met the love of my life, Mary Helen, in Midland Texas 20 years ago—she is an angel and very active as a Master Gardener. She has two wonderful daughters with three grandchildren who all call her Lala and me Dadeaux. My daughters are very special and I have five grandchildren from them. They call Mary Helen Mimi and call me Papaw.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Phillips
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386130116

Book preview

Introduction

My name is Rick Phillips, and these are my memories of my personal and professional life. I have attempted to disguise everyone in this book who could be considered a Desperado or a Dumbass or even a White Hat (someone who is neither a desperado nor a dumbass) to the best of my ability—both the innocent and the guilty. When I told one acquaintance about writing the book, he asked which one he was. And I replied, if you have to ask you are in serious trouble… a better question would be, I must not be in the book, right?

Chapter 1 – Early Life

I was born in Pampa, Texas on March 16, 1946. My mother was Laura Mae Matthews and my father was R. A. Phillips, a World War Two Marine who was two years older than she. They, along with my Uncle Tommy and Aunt Ruth, went to high school together at Klondike High School in Dawson County, Texas. My parents divorced when I was about three years old. My father fought in World War Two in Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian carrying a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) in the Second Marine Division. They married right after the war in 1945 and I was born in 1946 in Pampa, Texas where my dad was a police officer. My dad got written permission from my mother and re-enlisted, fighting in the 5th Marine Division in Korea. My dad had two brothers, Billy and Tommy, and one sister, Mayrene. Mayrene died at an early age in Brownfield, Texas of multiple sclerosis and Uncle Billy passed away about 2004. Uncle Tommy passed in 2017. The Phillips originated in Ireland and Scotland and came to Texas from the Northeast because of the scarlet fever pandemic.

My mother came from the Matthews family clan and she was the youngest with eight brothers and two sisters. The Matthews originated in Wales and came to Texas from New Jersey and Mississippi, leaving also because of the scarlet fever pandemic in New England in 1858. Mom came from a family of cotton farmers. The men farmed and the women cooked and raised chickens and churned butter. They moved to Lamesa, Texas from Munday, Texas after my mother was born.

History is about truth and one truth of my bloodline is that my maternal grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Munday along with most men of Munday. Back then the KKK was primarily a religious group, only later after my granddad left them did they become a black hazing group due to the leadership in Indiana.

Mother told me that her school in Klondike had a holiday and was closed when it was cotton picking time. All of the Matthews girls played basketball and were quite good at it. The Matthews clan is very close and even though the 11 brothers and sisters are all deceased we still have family reunions every year. There have been over 62 reunions. A couple of years ago we had 87 in attendance, the largest Matthews reunion ever. We had the first couple of reunions in Lamesa at the city park and convention center and then embarked on several locations over the years, but early on it was mainly in Abilene. Most of my male relatives drank; a few did not, including Lois’s husband because his father had been an alcoholic and he never wanted to go down that road. His three daughters however did drink, and it was up to me, Chip and Ronnie to supply them at the reunions in Abilene which was dry but had a tiny wet town nearby called Impact. Chip, Ronnie and I knew to go to a bootlegger in Abilene because they did not ask for an ID and we usually made it back with our beer before the grown-ups got back from Impact. Once we iced the beer down in Donna and Karen’s room bathtub and were surprised to find out Lois, who loved to smoke in bathrooms, smoked in their bathroom and discovered the beer which brought about the wrath of Truman.

My cousins Ronnie and Chip Matthews and I go fishing with our wives often in Baffin Bay. When we were younger, we hung out with two other cousins, both named James and one nicknamed Butch. Butch could shoot a sparrow out of the sky with a pellet gun. Once when dragging the courthouse square in Lamesa with Chip he was pulled over by a policeman who showed Chip a check he had signed the night before with the signature TOO TOO TODDLY at a local convenience store. Chip paid the policeman with cash to replace the check and was let go. That is the way it was in West Texas towns. One reunion, Ronnie declared that if it had not been for Chip’s errant examples, Ronnie and I would have been preachers. LOL.

Tip for Desperadoes and Dumbasses – always have someone to blame your errant ways on. ☺

Chip’s mother was Nell and his dad, my mother’s brother, was Vernie. Nell had a sister named Bonnie and her husband was Delbert Rogers. When my mother and father divorced, Bonnie and Delbert offered to adopt me so my mom would not have the hard time of raising me with no daddy. Of course my mother refused. There were always parties and meetings going on at Nell and Vernie’s home in Patricia, just outside Lamesa. Those who drank went out there to have fun and camaraderie—they all loved each other. One New Year’s Eve I was there with Chip, Butch and Ronnie and their parents. We were all about 13 to 15 years old; my parents had gone back to Littlefield. Delbert kept bringing us whiskey and cokes in Chip’s room. Later I noticed a baby giant firecracker in the room and I picked it up and lit it in an ashtray. It was a huge BOOM! Suddenly the house got quiet and the adults came running because Chip had a shotgun in the room. Nell was the first in the room and she loudly announced They are all drunk!!! She then took Chip for the first and only spanking I ever witnessed him get. Uncle Delbert got into no trouble.

Two things about Lamesa: It is the origin for the chicken-fried steak, originally cooked at the Del Paso Hotel restaurant. Another thing is or was Spurlock’s super dogs; not corn dogs, these were made with a sweet pancake-style batter. I always stopped on my way home from Texas Tech University to Midland for a super dog. Once we had a family gathering at my Aunt Lois’s house and I ordered 50 super dogs over the phone and we had to wait two hours to pick them up.

The Phillips clan mostly came from Ireland and Scotland. My father’s dad was a Baptist preacher and Mother was raised in a strict Church of Christ environment. Back then the joke was that several people died and went to heaven and Saint Peter was showing them around. They came to several doors, and in front of one door he said, Be very quiet, this room has Church of Christ people in it and they think they are the only ones here. Another joke was that if you went fishing with a Baptist make sure you invite two, because if you invite two they would not drink your beer, but if you invite one he would drink all of your beer. I asked my Aunt Ruth how it went with a Baptist marrying a Church of Christ and she laughed and said not well. When Mary Helen and I spent 10 days in Scotland, we went to the 3,000-year-old Edinburgh Castle which was originally built in 900 B.C. and spent the better part of a day there. One of the attractions is the Scottish National War Memorial, an area dedicated to all Scots who lost their lives in different wars; each person’s name and information is handwritten. I saw many Phillips names.

My dad, Ralph Alfred Phillips, went by his initials R. A. Phillips. A couple of years after I was born, he re-upped and went to Korea to fight with the 5th Marine Division. He and my mother divorced shortly after that and she and I moved to Lamesa, Texas. My dad came back from Korea but I never saw him until I was 10, after he passed away during an equipment accident at Camp Pendleton in 1956. The funeral was in Clarendon, Texas. He was buried in full Marine dress uniform with a 21-gun salute. I met my half-brother and half-sister from his second wife at the funeral for the first and only time. They live somewhere in California.

In Lamesa, mother worked in the courthouse as a deputy sheriff. We lived in a small house behind my grandparents A. W. Doc Matthews and Josephine Fox Matthews. I played dominoes with my Grandpa and at least once a day he walked down to the Dawson County Courthouse and played dominoes on the outside concrete tables with his buddies. Mother met a semi-pro baseball player named Bob Falk who played shortstop for the Lamesa Lobos of the old Texas-New Mexico minor league three years later. I called him Daddy Bob. He originally played in the White Sox organization and played in many places including Cuba. He allowed me to sit in the dugout and let me hold the mascot, a young wolf cub called a lobo. He gave me a baseball bat, which I used to hit him on the head once at the Sky Vue drive-in theater. He decided he needed to marry my mom and straighten me out. They married and we moved to Chicago, Illinois where my sister Robin was born and I spent my first grade. I remember being smacked on the knuckles by the nun teachers when I got out of line. Then we moved on to Madison, Wisconsin for my second and third grades. I was introduced to snow shoveling and ice-skating in Madison. We also went fishing for walleyed pike and muskies on Lake Mendota. Walleyes are delicious. I walked about one mile in the snow and rain to school and came home for lunch which was left for me in the refrigerator. I fell in love with my green-eyed, red-haired third grade teacher Miss Emerson and would stay after school to clean her chalk boards. She married toward the end of the school year and it broke my heart.

Daddy Bob took me ice fishing one day on Lake Mendota. He got me wrapped up as well as he could and then we went out on the lake and sat down on folding chairs. It was so cold! He took a steel pole and pounded a hole in the ice and we began to fish for perch, I can remember catching perch and when I pulled them out of the water, they froze in midair! I have never been that cold. I then asked Daddy Bob what the tents were across the ice. He said that was for sissies, who had heaters in the tents. I said I wanted to be a sissy.

The one thing I cannot get my head around is why my mother would marry a semi-pro baseball player and move to Chicago, Illinois where he had no job waiting. He ended up driving a taxi and then later when we moved to Madison, Wisconsin he worked as a manual laborer at the Swift company. My mother kept getting secretarial jobs to support us. We lived on Commerce Drive in Madison, close to the University of Wisconsin and Lake Mendota where we fished and swam and where I almost drowned. I never asked my mother why she decided to move to Chicago but there must have been a good reason. My Aunt Ruth told me recently that my mother was totally in love with Bob Falk and would have gone anywhere with him. It was tough at times but worked out well in the end.

One time when I was about eight years old, Daddy Bob took me to Milwaukee County Stadium with his father to watch the Braves play the Chicago Cubs. It was a dream time. I saw Hank Aaron, Eddy Mathews, and Warren Spahn—they went on to win the World Series over the Yankees two years later.

We then moved to Littlefield, Texas where we had the snowstorm of the century and school was shut down for two weeks. I could not believe it after walking to school in Madison where there is real snow. I loved to play cowboys and Indians and I always had to be Gene Autry. In Littlefield High School, I played both offensive and defensive tackle football for the Wildcats and I played Little League, Pony League and American Legion baseball. I listened to the real great rock n’ roll music back then: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Brenda Lee, the Four Tops, the Four Seasons and the Four Aces, Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, The Temptations and then later was blown away by the Eagles, Three Dog Night, the Doobie Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and great soul by Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Ray Charles and many others,