It Was Fun While it Lasted

By M. H. Major

M. H. Major's memoir and personal letters offer an insightful account of an ordinary man's resilience, fear, hope, and mortality as he struggled to succeed as a wildcatter to find oil in South Texas.  One of four brothers ordered by their Depression-era father to become doctors, Millard was the only son to strike out as a geologist in a business he'd been taught to distrust.

 

As World War II raged, finding new production was easy enough. But an oilman must discover new drilling prospects year after year.

A long-time consultant geologist for the King Ranch, Major details his challenges to stay in the game long after production in South Texas began to play out and other geologists had left the field.

 

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Major Press LLC
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781942473343

Book preview

Book Description

M. H. Major’s memoir and personal letters offer an insightful account of an ordinary man’s resilience, fear, hope, and mortality as he struggled to succeed as a wildcatter to find oil in South Texas. One of four brothers ordered by their Depression-era father to become doctors, Millard was the only son to strike out as a geologist in a business he’d been taught to distrust.

As World War II raged, finding new production was easy enough. But an oilman must discover new drilling prospects year after year.

A long-time consultant geologist for the King Ranch, Major details his challenges to stay in the game long after production in South Texas began to play out and other geologists had left the field.

Photographs

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THE PICTURES ARE OF M. H. Major and Ann Campbell circa 1945. The next photo is of them on their honeymoon in 1945. The fourth picture is of David Major/Peggy Major, their children circa 1970.

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The first photo is of his brothers John, Robert, David, and Millard. In the second Millard is in his Piper with his wife in the 1970’s. In the last, Millard is cruising on his sailboat in South Texas with his wife and friends.

The first picture was taken in the Dominican Republic at a well site. The second photograph was taken of David Major and Millard Major at a well in South Texas in the 1950’s.

Foreword

Margaret Ann Major (Peggy)

MY FATHER WROTE THIS memoir more than thirty years ago in1992. I decided to publish it because although I’ve never taken much of an interest in genealogy, I would have given anything to know a little more about the life and thoughts of my grandmother, Maggie O’Skelly Campbell, who died of cancer at the tender age of thirty-four and caused my dear, sweet mother immense grief.

I am putting my father’s book out there for any future descendants who have an interest in the lives of relatives who preceded them.

M.H. Major, my father, was nicknamed Bulger. The origins of his nickname are lost in time. He had a keen, intelligent mind and a witty, if dry, sense of humor. He was one of four brothers and always got on well with other men although he preferred the company of my mother, who pampered him. He was tough and masculine but stern and fair. That said, he was harder on my younger brother than he was on me. After all, my brother was a male. Back then, a girl’s prospects were more limited. Thus, less was expected of a daughter and more of a son.

This volume contains his memoir, It was Fun While it Lasted, letters he wrote from Bahrain where he briefly worked when he suffered a mid-life crisis in his late thirties, love letters he wrote my mother before they were married, and letters he wrote his brother, Bob, when he was older and in declining health.

I added these letters at the back of this volume, because they show his inner struggles with his midlife crisis, old age and infirmity, and his deep love for my mother.

I want to thank Dr. Kimberly Huett for her many

hours of work copy-editing this manuscript. 

Editor’s Note

Editorially, I have made the decision to include the content of my father's autobiography and enclosed letters largely intact while lightly editing for clarity (e.g., spelling, mechanics).

Where identifiable living people are noted in my father's account, I have taken the following approach: a) leave the references as they are (e.g., when they speak to the routine motions of life); b) anonymize the references (e.g., when my father is editorializing); or c) remove the references entirely (e.g., where anonymization is insufficient to protect the referenced people).

Doubtless, there are points in this book that some may find offensive. However, as editor, I have left this narrative largely unchanged to allow you a more complete picture of this Texas oilman, husband, father, and imperfect soul in his own words–in his own time.

Prologue

I

I DON’T KNOW much about my ancestry. My paternal grandparents came to Texas from South Carolina. My father was born in Rosebud, Texas, around 1892. My maternal grandparents were among the first settlers of Bowie, Texas, which is in Montague County in North Texas.

Grandpa Allen, whose goal was to get off the farm and have a successful business in town, built the first permanent brick building in Bowie to house his grocery store. From that store, and later banking, he built one of the more substantial estates in the county and retired when he was 40 years old.

My mother, Leta Allen, was born in Bowie and died there. I had one older brother, David, and two younger brothers, Bob and John. My father wanted all his sons to become doctors, and I was the only one who went his own way. We were a close family, held together by the iron discipline of my father and the constant love, wisdom, and sacrifice of my mother.

They did something right. Among their second and third generation descendants are doctors, lawyers, authors, teachers, veterinarians, and successful businesspersons. Many of them are, or were, millionaires. I can't think of a failure among them. As I write this, Anne Telle, my great niece, is one of forty students being honored at the University of Texas for a 4.0 grade point average, and my grandson, David Cleaves, isn't far behind with his 3.825.

This isn't the history of my family, though. It's my response to a request from my son-in-law, Ted Cleaves, to write down a few of his favorite anecdotes from my childhood and working life.

Chapter 1

I WAS BORN born in Abilene April 25, 1919, right before The Treaty of Versailles was signed that ended World War I, and right before we moved to Hearne the following summer. When I was two years old, I managed to walk or crawl out a second story window. When my mother saw me fall, she dashed out to find me in a freshly cultivated flower bed with my long blond curls lying across the crisscrossed bricks edging the bed.

My father was principal of the high school. I have a vague memory of looking out the window of our two-story house and watching him walk across a yard. We moved from Hearne to Fort Worth for the summer of 1923 and lived in a house my father built adjacent to Grandmother Major's home.

My grandmother’s address was 3101 Avenue B, across the street north of TWC which was Texas Women's College then and before that, Polytechnic University. Later it became Texas Wesleyan College. My grandfather, a Methodist preacher with a fervent belief in the value of an education, a belief he instilled in generations of his descendants, had moved next to the school to facilitate the education of his children.

We moved to Groesbeck in the fall of 1923, where my father was to be school superintendent and lived there seven years, at 814 West State Street. In the summer of 1991, my wife, Ann, and my daughter, Peggy, visited Groesbeck and saw our old house, much improved, from the time we lived in it. The present occupant and owner was in the first grade the last year we lived in Groesbeck. He remembered Mr. Major being superintendent.

Daddy loved to fish and did it relentlessly, which is the basis for my intense dislike of this sport. One of his tenets was that fish had to eat at least once in 24 hours, so that if you waited long enough, they were bound to bite. The only place near Groesbeck to fish was in the muddy, dank bottoms of the Navasota River. The other habitués of these bottom lands were the surviving descendants of former slaves, whose understandable motive for fishing was poverty and hunger.

Once we left a favorite spot at dusk, trudged single file down a winding pathway toward our car that Daddy had parked on the road a half mile away. Each angler had his own part of the load, a minnow bucket, a cane pole, and a pitiful string of small catfish and perch. Suddenly trees and vines ahead of our column thrashed wildly. Daddy let out a cry of exultation.

He had seen a giant copperhead slithering across the path and had tried to add it to our bag, but the snake fought his way out of the bag. Daddy was upset to lose the snake in the darkness, but we went on.

Did I tell you that I was barefooted? I took only a few more steps when something slithered under my foot. It felt like a muscled coil about the diameter of a fruit jar as it moved rapidly off to my left. We'll never know which was more frightened, because both the snake and I left the area at high speed.

Twenty years later Daddy and I had an encounter with another snake while Ann and I were visiting in Bowie. We were on a half-day fishing trip to the Red River, and on the way stopped to seine for minnows. We could have bought all we needed from bait stands enroute for a couple of dollars, but that would have been too easy. Instead, Daddy knew where we could get free minnows from any one of several tanks.

We tried our luck at one of these tanks. He held one end of the net at the edge of the water while I waded out in waist deep, red, liquid mud and started a semicircle pass with the seine. As I came around into shallower water, I first thought I had picked up a rock, but suddenly a heavy thrashing almost tore the net out of my hand, and we saw an ugly, short, stump tail water moccasin six inches or more in diameter at his largest point, desperately trying to get away. These snakes are all muscle and unbelievably strong. In a couple of seconds, he tore a big hole in the net and was gone. That was the last time I went fishing with my father.

The river bottoms were also hunting grounds. Daddy had a 38-caliber revolver, bought in Wisconsin as protection against a rapist who had terrorized the neighborhood when he was in school there. He was a poor shot, because he wouldn't spend money buying ammunition, but he always carefully cleaned this gun in preparation for a coon hunt. One evening, right after one of these ritual cleanings, he was walking down the hall, thoughtlessly pulling the trigger, when the hall suddenly exploded around him. He had shot a hole in the floor.

Boys, he said, let that be a lesson to you. There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun.

WHEN WE HUNTED, OUR hunting party would gather around gasoline lanterns at a favorite slough and release the hounds. The dogs would dash away enthusiastically, bounding through the darkness, their barking and howling receding in the distance, until they flushed their game. When their noise became excited and anxious and finally stopped moving away and changed to a deep throated baying, we hunters knew they had treed their quarry. We took off through the underbrush, with the blackness relieved only slightly by flashlights and gasoline lanterns, and eerie shadows thrown on the tangled foliage. When we caught up with the hounds and pointed our flashlights up in the tree, the light reflected a pair of frightened eyes and the ringed tail of a coon.

Since a coon had no value, the hunters shook it out of the tree to give the dogs another run. Usually, the coon was unable to elude the dogs and was torn to pieces.

MY MOTHER DROPPED OUT of college after her third year when she married my father. She had a teaching certificate, so she organized a first-grade class of six-year-olds which she taught in our house. She received $15 or $20 per month per child and had about 15 carefully selected children.

At that time, the State wouldn't accept pupils under seven in the public schools, and she wanted her children to begin first grade before that. I'm sure she was a good teacher. I'll never forget the 45 combinations or the Palmer method of writing, and she certainly got the pick of the town's kids. Their parents must have been interested in them, because that was a lot of tuition in those days. And the $1500 or so per year she made was a welcome addition to our income. I was in the first class she taught, and so was Bob, who was a year younger, although he was merely auditing the class. The next year he repeated it for credit.

We lived only two or three blocks from town, and on Saturdays went to see the latest Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson movies. Those were real cowboys, not like the singing cowboys of the thirties, Roy Rogers and his ilk. Of course, the movies were silent. The screen was, strangely, at the front of the house, so you walked in with the flickering picture over your shoulder and passed the player piano mechanically beating out an accompaniment.

Sometimes it was dark when the movie ended, and we had to walk home. After these movies, the alleys were filled with all sorts of imagined dangers, but whatever was out there never caught us because we ran home at top speed.

The discovery of the Mexia Oil Field near Groesbeck brought oil fever to the area while we lived there. Occasionally lightning struck a tank of oil or a well blew out and caught fire. When that happened, a shimmering glow lit the northern sky, filling our nights with a sense of excitement and danger. We visited this field several times and saw the horses and mules floundering in the mud as they built roads and dikes, set tank batteries, and buried pipelines.

One Sunday afternoon we drove to Kosse and saw the strangest oil boom that ever was. The town looked like a giant army camp with tents covering every available space. Men were selling water from tanks on wagons. Behind each tent stood a foul-smelling pit used as a latrine.

A wildcatter had struck oil at the edge of town. The well blew in with a roar and flowed thousands of barrels of oil daily for several days, then started producing salt water and died, but not before it had converted creeks into torrents of oil, and the population into speculators and instant oil experts.

It was impossible to tell where the streets were. Overnight Kosse went from a sleepy town of a thousand, mostly sharecroppers, to a seething mob of more than 15,000.

Cotton farming was a big gamble, but it was nothing like the fun of the oil business. Many people claimed Kosse would be bigger than Mexia, already producing more oil than any other field in the state. Since every lot in town was available, a frenzy of activity was unleashed. Everyone tried to promote a well deal, even if they only had one town lot under lease, especially if they only had one lot. They knew they had to be fast to get the oil from under their neighbor’s lot before he could do the same to them.

I don't know where the money came from, but before it ran out, more than a hundred wells were drilled, all of them dry. The Texas Bureau of Economic Geology credits this field with a five-acre extent, a crevice in a limestone reservoir. Kosse's population jumped from 1,000 to 15,000 and then fell back to 1,000 in a matter of weeks which deepened Daddy's distrust of the oil business.

In the mid-twenties the Groesbeck drug store got a radio, put a speaker out by the sidewalk, and we would park our model T Ford out front and listen to the news which consisted of baseball games or whatever shows were being broadcast. Soon we had our own Crosley radio, in a metal cabinet with a brown crinkled paint finish, separate speaker standing on top of the cabinet and a long antenna strung high up over the back yard.

The model T was our first car. Soon after we moved to Groesbeck, Grandpa Allen began the custom he continued until his death of giving us his two-year-old Nash, taking our old car, and trading it in on a new one. He didn't take the Model T though, perhaps because he couldn't get a good trade on it. Instead, Daddy sold it for $700 - $100 down and $30 a month. In fact, he liked to say he sold it and got it back three times before it stayed sold.

Grandpa wanted us to have a good car so we could visit them often. They had moved to Fort Worth after their daughter's marriage, to be close to her, and then Mamma and Daddy moved away from Fort Worth to Wisconsin and then Abilene, and my mother’s grandparents remained in Fort Worth, with no real reason for being there.

We visited them often, driving the forty miles over dirt roads to Waco, then on a paved highway a hundred more to Fort Worth. The Grimes Garage in Hillsboro advertised heavily that if they didn't serve you in one minute you could have a free fill-up. This might amount to $2.00, so we always stopped, hoping to get this windfall.

An impressive row of giant metal towers carrying electric power to the Dallas-Fort Worth area lined the road north of Waco. I don't know where the generating plant was located. On such trips we would stop somewhere along the way, often by a windmill where we could get fresh water and enjoy our picnic lunch.

Since schoolteachers had the summer off, we would usually go on longer trips during my father’s summer vacation. We might go to our grandparents’ house in Fort Worth and later to Bowie after they moved back there. If they had already gone to spend the summer in Colorado Springs, we stayed at their house in Fort Worth two or three weeks, or until we had used up their milk and ice coupons.

We visited Grandma Major, Aunt Frances, Uncle Mort if he wasn't at sea, and Aunt Ludie and Uncle Towns, who lived in Dallas. Frances, Mort and Towns were my father’s siblings. After that we often followed Grandpa and Grandma Allen to Colorado to spend a few weeks in cooler weather. The road was difficult, except for a short stretch of pavement south of Amarillo.

Most cars were open touring cars, and rainy weather called for an exercise in putting on side curtains and mud chains. With chains we could negotiate almost any obstacle. Once we had to stop and spend three or four days at Capulin, New Mexico for mechanical repairs. There wasn't a tourist court in town, but we carried a tent and camping gear. Breakdowns and camping were all part of the trip.

Our most ambitious vacation came in 1927 when summer found us with a car full of camping gear and supplies. With our running boards packed solid, we attached a big sign on the side of the car that said, BOSTON OR BUST.

Most nights we stopped by the roadside, set up a camp, fixed dinner and slept in our tents. If possible, we asked permission from the farmer whose property we were on. He invariably granted permission, and as often as not gave us bread, milk, and other goodies.

With four boys in the car, sometimes our small misunderstandings flared into bloody fights to the death, as John, my younger brother, nicknamed Mr. Bang because of his quick temper, sometimes put it.

Daddy solved these problems by putting one or two of us that he decided was most guilty, or whose turn he thought it was, out in front of the car to run off excess energy. Since we might not see another car for fifteen minutes at a time and we weren't due in Boston for two weeks, we had the luxury of being able to creep along at a snail's pace, or an eight-year old's pace, until the pleadings of Mamma got us back in the car.

Somewhere in Louisiana, the great 1927 flood of the Mississippi which had overflowed in seven states, stopped us. In places the river had grown to a width of 40 or 50 miles. Whole towns were flooded. Sometimes cars had to wait their turn for a day or two to be ferried across this vast expanse of water. There was no noticeable current and our ferry navigated around the tops of houses, trees, signs, and other indications of the drowned civilization below us.

Chapter 2

IN WASHINGTON we pitched camp in Potomac Park in the heart of the city. In 1959 my wife, Ann, and I, along with our children, Peggy and David, stayed there in our Airstream trailer, shortly before this historic campground was abandoned. From this delightful vantage point, we spent several days touring the sights of the capital. In 1959 we climbed the steps to the top of the Washington monument, visited Mount Vernon, and wandered through the Smithsonian. Then we went to New York, where 27 years earlier I sat in the car and waited for my father to go to the top of the Woolworth building, then the world's highest.

In Boston on my family’s 1927 trip, we made camp for our six weeks stay at the Boston Auto Camp. We had three tents. Two were for sleeping, one for the