The Bayou Boys: Lessons from Life in the International Oil Business

By Ken Jones

This is an American story of capitalism at its best!

Tulsa, Oklahoma, was once called the Oil Capital of the World, but today it is Houston. For a time in the 1970s, however, those who lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, or Midland, Texas, thought the oil industry revolved around them. And maybe it did. In each of those boomtowns, t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jun 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885904698

Ken Jones

Ken Jones was a Zen practitioner, writer and teacher of some forty year years standing, and alsoa widely published haiku and haibun poet.

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Late Summer, 1968

I had known Burt Keenan for several years. He was five years younger, and we didn’t have that much in common other than an interest in sailing. His job was selling diesel engines to the oil and fishing industries for a big distributor of equipment based in New Orleans, while I was District Manager for Midwest Oil, a small oil exploration company owned in part by Standard Oil of Indiana. We both lived, however, in the oil boomtown of Lafayette, Louisiana—it was the 1960s.

During a cocktail party at Randy’s house—there were lots of parties in Lafayette in those days—Burt mentioned his idea of starting a public company. He said that he would need a management team to make this work and asked if I would be interested in joining him.

Burt was a natural-born salesman. He was a nice-looking guy with a boyish grin, had a great memory for names and details, and was competitive to the core. While working for his godfather, in addition to selling diesel engines to shrimp boat operators, Burt had started a part-time boat business of his own. As a result, he had an interest in several small oil field crew boats designed to work in the marshes and coastal waters of Louisiana. However, he wanted to expand but didn’t have the management or capital to take the next step.

Unexpectedly, as luck would have it, Midwest announced the company was being sold. The buyer would either be Continental Oil Company, the same company I had worked for just out of college, or AMOCO, our parent company, formerly known as Standard Oil of Indiana. For the past eight years, I had what I considered to be my dream job; however, that dream would be coming to an end.

I was twenty-seven years old when I got the job and the youngest manager in the company with more responsibility at my age than almost anyone I knew. We had an exploration team of five geologists, three production engineers, and a land agent, plus several office secretaries, and me as the manager.

My job was to coordinate the activities with very little supervision from the home office in Fort Worth. We would drill a dozen or so wells each year and spend several million dollars as long as we kept the management advised. It was a great job. Our small office was more active and involved in drilling more wells in Louisiana each year than most of the major oil companies at that time.

As it turned out, AMOCO ended up acquiring the Midwest properties for just over four hundred million dollars, and the personnel in our office would be transferred to either Houston or New Orleans. Neither of these options was attractive to me.

At the time, I had three boys in a private school; it was the day school we had helped create as volunteers of the Ascension Episcopal Church. As a family, we didn’t want to leave Lafayette and the wonderful life we had there. I considered several job opportunities, but none had the responsibility that I had at Midwest. Plus, many of my friends were, what we called in the oil business, ‘independent operators.’ I knew most of the independents in South Louisiana, since at Midwest we reviewed almost every drilling deal to come along. I thought I could leverage these relationships and become an ‘independent’ as well.

This meant working with local geologists to identify likely areas of oil or gas accumulation, then acquiring the lease or property rights to drill what is called ‘the prospect.’ If successful, there was a good opportunity to get rich, but there was also the very real prospect of drilling dry holes and ending up in bankruptcy. This is what makes the oil business—you can be on top one day, but a series of dry holes means you are back on the street looking for a job.

When Burt mentioned his idea for a public company, I was unsure about getting involved with him, but I needed a place to hang my hat while getting adjusted to not having a regular salary. I didn’t have any real interest in being in the boat business, but I thought we could share an office and keep our costs down. I was now thirty-five and felt that I could make it for about six months on what I had saved. After that, I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to put my family in harm’s way.

We agreed to rent a small two-room office in the Lafayette Oil Center, along with some used furniture and an old typewriter. In looking back now, I wonder why the typewriter, since neither of us could type, but every office had one.

In the meantime, Burt had talked to several other guys about joining his company and the ideas were taking shape. He would be Chairman and President, I would be Executive Vice President in charge of operations, and Charlie Briley would be our salesman. Later, Burt found a young and talented naval architect, Tom Carmen, and that would round out the management team for the next few years.

I didn’t look at this as my real job, since I still wanted to be an independent oil operator. However, at least for the short term, I could lend my background to the group. After all, I was the only one who had actually worked for an oil company, and they would be the customers for ‘Burt’s boats.’

Burt had built two sixty-five-foot aluminum crew boats at LAFCO, a local shipyard, and had two more on order. The shipyard owner provided the financing for the first two, but this was as far as they wanted to go. These boats were to be used by oil companies to transfer their drilling crews to various locations in the marshes of South Louisiana and the shallow waters just offshore. This was 1968 and the offshore oil boom was underway. Lafayette was at the center of it all.

Burt and I were getting the information together to develop a business plan and the other documents that Buddy’s dad required for a public offering. In the meantime, Charlie found customers for these first two boats. Charlie lived in Morgan City, Louisiana, which was the supply center for much of the real work going on offshore. Morgan City was located near the Gulf of Mexico and was not much more than an open-air welding shop, while the oil company exploration and production management staffs were located in either Lafayette or Houston.

As it turned out, Charlie was the best boat salesman of all time. He could convince an oil company that they needed one of our boats, whether we had one or not. He would promise to have a boat at the customer’s dock on Monday morning knowing we didn’t have one; however, he knew something would turn up at the Friday night crawfish boil, the center of social activity in Morgan City. They all knew Charlie—they all liked him. It was the proverbial story of selling ice to Eskimos.

When Tom joined the team, he set out to design a fleet of larger and faster boats than those that were now available. There were many competitors in the small crew boat business, but as the boats became larger, the number of players began to be limited. Tidewater Marine Service was the largest, and I dare say best, of the boat companies in the offshore oil business in the Gulf of Mexico. They were headquartered in New Orleans and Burt knew some of their management from having been born and raised there. They were a publicly owned company on the New York Stock Exchange, so we patterned our company along the same lines. With our naval architect, however, we would design our boats to be faster than theirs with the old thought that ‘time is money.’

A local bank, Guaranty Bank and Trust, agreed to finance the next two boats if we would guarantee the loan personally. Burt and I had put into the company what limited resources we had at the time, so our thinking was that it didn’t matter, you can drown in a bathtub full of water just like you can in the deep blue ocean. Don Huter was the manager of the Oil Center branch of Guaranty. He was an old-fashioned banker who believed in ‘character lending’: Who you were was more important than what you were going to do with the money.

This is where Linda came in. Her last name was Waters and she became an important part of what would happen next. Not only could she type and do the secretarial things that would be required but Linda also got along with everyone and made it fun just to be in the same office. She was about Burt’s age—maybe thirty or so. I was the old guy at thirty-five. While Linda had ‘more miles than a Yellow Cab,’ she looked great in her white boots and short pants, so we could not have made a better choice for our first secretary.

I was still unsure about Burt, but I knew enough to know that with Charlie and Tom, we could make this work for a while. Then with Linda being part of the team, we would never have to worry about finding men to work on the boats. After much discussion, we decided to name the new company ‘Offshore Logistics, Inc.’ and the sky was our only limit. We were off and running.

CHAPTER TWO

A Little Background

Randy Freret and I had at one time both worked for Continental Oil Company and we grew up in the oil business together in the 1960s. Randy had known Burt from New Orleans, where their families were members of the ‘old-line’ Southern Yacht Club—the second oldest yacht club in America. They had grown up around sailing, and that was their primary connection.

Burt moved from New Orleans to Lafayette in the mid-1960s to sell Detroit Diesel engines and generators in Southwest Louisiana. At the time, he didn’t know very many people in our small town, so Randy and Laurie, our best friends, always included Burt and his wife, Velma, on almost every social occasion.

Randy and Laurie, along with my wife Jenny and me, plus Burt and Velma, were having dinner at LaFonda—the famous, or infamous, Tex-Mex restaurant in Lafayette. It had to be a Thursday night because ‘anybody who was somebody’ in Lafayette went to LaFonda every Thursday night. Margaritas usually flowed until the wee hours, but since it was just a short drive home—and by the grace of God—we could get home without a problem. Jenny and I had three small boys, but we also had a housekeeper who stayed with them when we went out at night, and there was no long drive to take the babysitter home. And at that time, Randy and Laurie didn’t have any children, so they just had to worry about getting home themselves. At the time we called them ‘the single couple.’ Burt and Velma also didn’t have children at the time, and these Thursday nights became a regular event.

Randy and Burt talked a lot about sailing; however, I knew very little about it at the time, even though I had been a Sea Scout growing up in Oklahoma City. On the other hand, I had been skiing every winter since high school, and this had become a big deal for me and my family. Over another round of margaritas, Randy and I made a pact that one day I would teach him to ski and he would teach me to sail. Burt just laughed at us both.

Both of these activities came to pass over the years, and I’ll share one of these stories now. Randy had a good friend in New Orleans who had just bought the latest hot production sailboat, a CAL 40, the new sloop design that was winning races all over the world. His friend, Cal Hadden, had put together his seven-member crew to race the boat from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Cozumel, Mexico. However, since most of the crew had jobs, he needed someone to bring the boat back from Mexico after the race.

Randy volunteered to get a crew together who would meet the boat in Cozumel after the race and sail back to Ma Brown’s Marina—that’s what everyone called the new marina in Biloxi, Mississippi. I jumped at the chance—this would be my first real adventure at sea and I was very excited. We would need at least four in the crew to make up the watch schedule. The distance was about six hundred miles and would take five to six days, depending on the wind and weather conditions. Bob Brillhart, a local friend of Randy’s, and Tom Ware, Jenny’s cousin from Colorado and a good friend of mine, would round out the crew.

As it turned out, Randy was the only one who knew anything about sailing, much less making an ocean passage of six hundred miles. The CAL 40 was outfitted for racing and had only a radio direction finder for navigation. The race crew had several experienced celestial navigators in their crew, so that was not an issue. We, of course, didn’t know celestial navigation or much about the radio direction finder that was on board. But that didn’t worry us very much because if we just kept sailing north, we knew that sooner or later we would run into land, and then we could ask where we were and how to get to Mississippi. Looking back, it was a pretty foolhardy thing to do, but it was a good lesson in preparation, or the lack thereof.

We had not been underway from Cozumel for more than two hours and had just passed the Contoy Lighthouse when the engine quit running. We had both the sails up, so when the engine stopped, we figured to keep sailing north into the night and could determine in the morning what was wrong. At least we had the discipline to not have anything to drink while we were under sail and were all happy to be in the open water of the Gulf of Mexico.

It was another example of a lack of preparation. During a sailboat race, the boat would perform better without the weight of excess fuel on board. We didn’t check the fuel gauge when we left Cozumel, but as it turned out, Hadden had put only a few gallons of fuel onboard for the race—just enough to get to the starting line and enough to get the boat from the finish line to the dock. Of course, with a steady breeze, this wasn’t a real problem while crossing the Gulf of Mexico, but it would become a