Oilman

By Walter Dechant and Aaron Dechant

Through stories of gathering water from a hand-dug well, using bones found in the fields for toys, and running a farm powered by horses, it would be easy to categorize Oilman as a story about farm life in the early 1900s. But it is more than that. The storie

• Language: English
• Publisher: DAS Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987398135

Book preview

1

BLIND DATE

Marie, age 17

The crowded car’s tailpipe was inches from the pavement. My friends and I were headed to a barn dance, something we did most Sundays, and even sometimes in the middle of the week. I would call us wild, even today, but it was maybe a different kind of wild—the kind of madness to live that only comes from growing up in farm country. I got out and looked back at my friends. I don’t know why, but something about the sagging car struck me as I walked up to knock on the door for the first time. The Feltis house. Marie’s house.

I didn't know her personally, but somebody in our group knew her. I knew the guy she was going with. Except, as it turned out, she’d broken up with him.

So here we were: a blind date.

I was nineteen years old when I met the woman I would spend the next sixty-five years of my life with.

The area around Hays was a tight community made up of mostly farmers and a cluster of small towns, with Hays being the largest. In those times, it wasn’t as if you knew everyone, but you knew families, and paths would cross sooner or later. Marie was working for a local doctor, Dr. Haigler, in his Eleventh Street office. He had built a new building on Ash Street and she worked there for a couple of years. Of course, I was living with my folks and working my dad’s land.

The friend that had told me about the breakup was with me as I went up to the door. It’s funny, because I remember groups coming to visit my own children years later, looking for a game of baseball, and when they were teenagers, dates of their own.

We went up to the door and told Marie that there was a group of us in the car, and that was all of it. For whatever reason, she went along. That's how we started out. She hung out with us, but I would say that Marie never really fit in too well with the group. We were a wild group, remember, barn dancing all the time, and she didn't like those barn dances as much. Some of my friends played in a band at those dances, and one of them, Elmer, would later play at our wedding.

Elmer owned the '36 Ford we were in, and boy did we have that car loaded down. A lot of times it didn’t just sag—we would have it dragging on the back end from all the weight. At one of the dances, there was a guy who’d gotten hurt—well, he more or less got stabbed. Dr. Haigler took care of him through the whole ordeal. He was fine, but that was the end of the barn dances.

Before I met Marie, the group I was with knew the owner of the barn. In fact, the dances were held on land that a brother-in-law of mine owned, and we danced out there maybe once or twice a week. One guy in our group, Andy, was an accordion player so we had our entertainment. He was going with my sister Stella. Down the line, they got married. That was kind of how it went; there was a guy named Johnny who was in our group, and he got married. Then Elmer got married and left us. Then we had a small guy named Danny. He was our mascot, on account of being so small. He always had a little too much to drink and a whole lot to prove. Most nights, he turned ornery. But even he got married, eventually.

The band all got married. The barn dancers all got married. Then, I suppose, we got married, too.

It was 1947 in Western Kansas—when you reached a certain age, and after you had been going along with someone for a while, you got married. It’s what everyone did, so it’s what we did, too. There weren’t a lot of options at the time. You could go to the military, I suppose. There was school. But mostly it was farming.

That is, until they found the oil.

In my lifetime, you got along just fine without going to high school. I had actually signed up to go to school, but my father said no. He wasn’t so high on education, believing that we should be at home working to grow the farm. He was an old time German like that, thinking you should learn what you needed to in order to work and provide for your family. That was always the priority, doing whatever you had to in order to take care of your people. My next older brother and I were expected to farm, first on my dad’s land, and then to grow our own farms. My dad was good to me, but I would say that was one thing I didn’t like so much. It was never a fight, because if there was work, there was work. But I didn’t like it.

I had always liked school. I guess I liked school as much as a kid could, and even got to be pretty good at spelling and math, but when I went to first-grade, I didn’t speak any English. My dad was able to use enough words to get by with the farm side of life, but my mom may have only known a few words here and there. There was just never a need for English before school. That’s another thing about growing up on the farm—folks just didn’t need to learn English. It wasn’t how we did things. But I learned it. I loved reading. Not a day would go by that I didn’t read the newspaper cover to cover. That was all it took to learn to speak and read English just fine.

The nuns at school would punish us if they caught us speaking German. They could be so strict. If you were lucky, you only had to write out lessons when you were caught. I remember when we rushed out for recess, and we would all circle up so we could secretly speak German. Of course, we always got caught. But there was this one kid, Billy, who never got caught. I think every other one of us had to write lessons, but he never did. I’m not sure how he managed.

But yes, spelling and math were always my favorite. All of us would line up along the wall and be given a math problem, and if you beat the person next to you, then you moved down along the wall and tried to be first in the line. It was like a game. I didn’t always get to be first in line, but I did pretty well. That kind of thing went on until I was in eighth grade, the year before high school. I had signed up to go on to high school before my dad put an end to that. Boy, I really did want to go. Instead, everything that I would accomplish in life would have to be done with an eighth-grade education. To think about everything looking back now…just going to eighth grade.

So at twelve years old I found myself working to grow a farm.

Joe & Anna Dechant Family, Walter age 12 far right front row

My dad was never mean to me, not a single day. No, he was always good, but of course, he was a strict man. I think my own kids may have been scared to death of him. But he knew by then that he couldn't run the farm without me, so he was so thankful for the hard work I did. It was hard work, too. But once I was there working the farm, he never got upset with me. My dad needed me. I think I probably could have been happy being a farmer. There was meaning in the work, something deeply fulfilling about turning sweat and dirt and seed into a livelihood.

But part of me always knew that it was never truly in me or my brother—not the way it needed to be. It wasn’t the work, and it was never the work, but farming had to run deep—it had to exist in your blood. I guess I knew that what I had as a child was not what I wanted for my own children. I wanted to give them more.

Dad had deeded to both me and my brother, giving each of us 160 acres, but he retained 80 acres of each that he received the revenue from. So it wasn’t a lot, and also we really weren't destined to be farmers. It was more or less my dad insisting that we live on the farm, which worked out real fine growing up, but we had to work on the side too. We both worked in town doing odds and ends or different construction gigs. We farmed our ground. We grew wheat and milked cows and raised chickens—everything. That's the way the farming was at that time. But 80 acres would never be enough to raise a family on.

In the end, we weren't cut out. We just weren't satisfied with the land we had. Neither one of us tried enough to build the farm up, or increase the farmland. I did rent some ground at that time, but back then, you had smaller equipment and a lot of time...that's about the size of it.

Walt and Marie still dancing after 65 years

After I met Marie, my life began to change. We danced once or twice a week, and we kept on dancing until the very end. For decades, at weddings and anniversaries and celebrations, we would dance. All of it began with those barn dances. I would say dancing was the biggest entertainment that we had. It was one of the first things that we ever did together, and we always came back to it. More than bowling, and more than even playing cards, we danced.

Of course, it wasn’t as if there were a lot of options in Hays at the time. I would roller-skate, when I was younger and single, on the sidewalks of Antonino, the small town South of Hays where my family had a winter house that they used when it became too difficult to travel to and from the farm. That worked out well, because later Marie and I would go to the skating rink. I don’t know when they closed the rink down, but I don’t think that there has ever been one since. I wouldn’t be much of a skater anymore—that was a long time ago.

We would also go to shows, even back then. We would go to the Strand, and for a quarter you could go to the show. You could even stay for the second one so long as no one noticed.

When I was younger, I went to the Star Theatre on Main Street for Westerns staring Buck Jones and Gene Autry. Later, if a fella had a dollar in his pocket, he could make a pretty good date of it. With that dollar you could have a girl along, and even have enough for some popcorn. Oh yeah, Marie and I would go to shows before we were married, and that ended up being another thing that lasted all along the way. When we got older, we would go to the Encore series at the college. I think we went every single year for thirty years. We didn’t miss any of them. And you know, they had some pretty good acts come through there.

There was nothing else to do except go to beer joints during the week. We had a plenty of fun doing all of the things that you could do in Hays at the time.

Marie wasn’t the only aspect of my life that would begin early, and remain part of me for decades. I had worked my first well when I was 17, a full two years before I met Marie. I was still far from an oilman, although by then, I knew I didn’t want to be a farmer. My brother had moved onto my dad’s land to farm it and his own 80 acres. My land wouldn’t even have a house on it until 1948, so I was still living with my folks, doing farm work, but also driving a bus and other odd jobs. None of this was life building, and I knew it. Later in 1951, they drilled the first well on my dad’s land, and Rich and I both worked it. I would say that is when I started roughnecking.

It took four men to run an oil rig. The operator that runs the rig, the derrickman, and two guys on the floor. I worked on the floor. When we had to handle a strip, the drill bit wearing out, we would pull all the pipe out, put the new bit on, and then run the pipe back down again. That’s all it took to drill the hole. This is one thing that hasn’t changed all that much.

Believe me when I say, being a floorman was none too nice at times. This was especially true if the weather were bad, and we were out there working the floor. Our gloves got soaked through, and we were freezing—it was tough.

The deeper you drill, the more wear and tear is put on your equipment. One of the most frequent failure points was the drill bit—when it gets stripped, it has to be replaced for drilling to continue. The process can get pretty tricky. The drill bit was attached to the end of the pipe we were running into the ground. These pipes were huge, with each one weighing hundreds of pounds. So, when it was time to replace the bit, we had to pull all the pipe out and replace the bit by hand. There were no tongs or automation back then—just the men on the floor.

I was the backup man. When we pulled a pipe up, I had to catch it and, in industry terms, stab it. This meant putting the pipe we pulled inside another pipe, making a double pipe. This whole contraption was suspended by ropes, which had to be tightened with a pipe wrench.

Typically, a well was around 3,600 feet deep. But the drill bit gets changed multiple times during the process—maybe once at 1,000 feet down, then again at 1,600 or 1,700 feet. Eventually we would need to change it past 2,000 feet as well. Every time the bit gets changed, there’s more pipe to pull out. With modern technology, it takes around an hour and a half to change a drill bit. Back then, it took a lot longer. In the wintertime, we often had to pull as much as we could before having to go in and dry our clothes or warm up. It could get really cold on the floor.

When we got that far down, we had to take soil samples all the time. There was a geologist on site to inspect the samples. Every so many feet deep, we had to catch a sample and dry it out, then take them to the geologists, so they could check to see if there was any oil in it.

Well, when they were drilling and you didn't have anything else to do, you stayed in the doghouse where it was warm in the wintertime. The doghouse was basically just a shack that would be put up, and it would move with the drilling rig. The doghouse was always set up right next to the operator, so we were never far from the drilling if something went wrong. After we had the drill bit changed out, we had quite a bit of free time, so that is where we would go. That time was nice since you could just sit and talk with the guys, maybe play cards or talk about a girl you were going with.

Sometimes we had quite a bit of extra time. But we had other responsibilities too—checking the motors and various infrastructure around the well. There was always a job to be done.

I wish I could remember more of those fellas. Maybe I could a few, if I really tried. But a lot of them were from a different area. I knew the floorman that I worked with for a while—I was his backup man for a long time. And the other floorman, well, he put the wrenches on there for us. The operator that runs the rig and the derrickman was clear up in the nest hole. He's the one that lined up the drill pipe. I truly wish I could remember more of those guys. It was good to work with them. All of us had our things to do. We were a team. I learned everything oil from them, but the work ethic came from my dad.

Meeting Marie changed some of my ideas, I suppose. Changed my plans you, might say. I knew I wasn’t a farmer then, but I wasn’t an oilman yet either. But I knew one change that needed to happen—it was time to get serious. I wasn’t going to act so wild and free. I needed to become the kind of man that could give to his family someday.

2

WEDDING BELLS

The young couple

In Volga German tradition, the most grand event at a wedding reception is the wedding march. It is actually quite an honor to lead the wedding march, and often someone in the family would fill this roll at several weddings. For Marie and I, it was my first cousin that led the march; the same man who would later help me build our first home. It had been two years since I first walked up to her door. The wedding march symbolized something else too, the beginning of our life as part of a greater community—our life as part of a greater future. Not everything was settled about our future, but there was no question we would be together through it all.

Not to be outdone by the culminating event at the end, our wedding was spectacular by itself. The community came together at times when there was work to be done, and they joined together in the celebrations too. We invited everyone: friends and family from Antonino, Munjor, Schoenchen, Victoria, Catherine, and Pfeifer, as well as the surrounding farms, all gathered at St. Joe’s church, for not one, but two meals, with dancing in between. It was an entire day dedicated to the bringing together of two individuals and two families. On September 30 th, 1947, our life together began.

Mass was said at 10:00. Of course, there was Mass, no question. So much of what we did, and do, begins with the church. We were all altar boys, the priest ate at our house most days, and later I would join the Knights of