My family moved to Odessa in 1949, just a year after George Bush moved his family there. George went to work peddling “rope, soap and dope” for one of the oilfield supply houses while my dad began building tanks for the National Tank Company. The Bushes left for Midland shortly after we arrived in town. They got involved in the drilling business and later in politics. We just kept on working in the patch.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but when we arrived there in that immediate post-WWII period a significant change was taking place in the oil patch. It was a time when much of the old ways of doing things were going by the way. The portable jackknife rigs were coming into vogue, deeper drilling caused mud to become a much more sophisticated tool, steam power had already become almost obsolete, and a host of other changes were in the air. For those closely associated with the work it was not so obvious due to our busy day-to-day involvement. Yet, despite all that change, the one constant that remained was the nature of the hands. Perhaps the situation was best described by my friend Ziglo who put it into the vernacular of the patch when he said, “It’s hard to count the beer bottles in the air when you are in the middle of a bar fight.”
I first met Ziglo in 1955 right after I finished high school and began going out in a tank crew because by then I was big enough to tote iron. He was an old tanky, well I thought he was old, but looking back on it he couldn’t have been more than forty or so. Everybody called him Ziglo. It was years before I learned his real name was Jimmy Zeigler, but like so many oilfield hands he was generally known only by his nick name. Anyway, Ziglo had broken out in the oil patch back in the thirties during the East Texas boom. Since then he had made most of the booms around Texas, working all over the state at everything from roustabout to roughneck before settling on tank building at his chosen profession.
He wasn’t a big guy, maybe five ten or so and probably weighed in around one sixty or seventy, but he was a good physical specimen who could put in a long hard days work. The thing that set Ziglo apart from the others in the tank crews was his colorful use of the language. For example he described himself as having a head like a mockingbird’s egg, a belly like a frog, and killdeer legs. He went on to say that his walk was like a man trying to shoulder his ass. If that isn’t colorful I don’t know what is.
He was just as adept at summing up some of our fellow tank hands. From time to time we went out in “Wild” Bill Walker’s crew who was no slouch in the colorful language category himself. Bill was so onery that everybody was about half scared of him. Once when our crew was working on a tank battery next to Bill’s we were in a sort of contest to see who could finish first and have bragging rights on which crew was the fastest. About mid-morning Ziglo hollered out to the hands in Bill’s crew, “Our setter can whip your setter.” One of them shouted back, “I’ll bet you five he can’t.” Well one thing led to another and we beat them through on finishing the job and as it turned out our setter could whip their’s.
Ziglo had the knack of using just the right descriptor of people and his of Bill’s was right on target. Bill was one of the best examples of the screaming and hollering school of management that I ever witnessed. Almost any real or imagined mistake the hands made would set him off into a tirade of profanity. Ziglo nailed the sound about mid-afternoon one day as Bill went into one of his tantrums. My friend cocked his head to one side and whispered, “Did you hear that? It sounded just like the scream of a wounded wart hog.” From then on every time something like that happened somebody was sure to say there goes that wounded wart hog again.
It all came to a head between Bill and Ziglo one day when Ziglo and I were completing a section of walkway for Bill. We had just finished about an eight or ten day stretch in Bill’s crew at
the time and we were careful to build the walkway just like the old man instructed. That particular day Bill was in a particularly bad mood and walked up and, using an unusual number of descriptive adjectives, informed us we were doing it all wrong. Old Ziglo got right in his face and allowed as to how that was the way we had been doing it for almost two weeks and we were not going to change one little thing. Before long it became a first class cuss fight you could here all over the location and things started to look real western. But it never came to blows, probably because at the time Ziglo happened to be holding a twelve once ball peen hammer and looked like he was willing to use it. The upshot of it was that Bill fired my buddy. I guess old Bill was a little scared to do it right then and there so the next morning about five o’clock when he came by to pick him up Ziglo heard the car stop and then drive away before he could get out of the house. There on the curb, in a neat pile, sat his work clothes and boots. I found out later that was how you knew “Wild” Bill Walker let you know you were fired. It didn’t really mean a whole lot though because the next time Bill needed a hand more than likely he would call you up just like nothing had happened.
Another one of Ziglo’s favorite targets was Henry Larsen. Now Henry was one of those hands prone to taking a drink now and again. He was probably what we would today call a binge drinker. Henry would make a steady hand for several weeks and save his money which he invested in good clothes including nice sports coats, alligator shoes, and other expensive accouterments the rest of us seldom ever wasted money on. Then he would go on a drinking spree. He was one of those mean drunks who tended to get into fights when in his cups. According to Ziglo, Henry had a two stage fighting strategy. During the first phase he would stick his head out and let his opponent beat on it until the adversary finally tired out, then Henry would finish him off in phase two.. Unfortunately, our hero never lasted long enough to implement phase two.
Once Henry spent all his money and sobered up he would be ready to go back to work. We would usually front him enough money for lunches and work gloves and he would work in his newly bought finery including those expensive low-quarter alligator shoes which were soon oil soaked and ruined. Once he got the funds together to buy proper work clothes he would begin to rebuild his finery wardrobe and the cycle would start over again.
The last I heard of Henry he got injured on a job off down in South Texas. They say he got a big insurance settlement from the company. Being the big spender he was, Henry hired a cab on a twenty-four hour basis to take him wherever he wanted to go. I don’t know how long that lasted, but Ziglo told me that within a year of getting the settlement he was tending bar at a little place outside Houston and still working on his boxing skills.
Beyond keeping us entertained with his wild stories and colorful language, Ziglo, like most of those old hands, could accomplish amazing things with an absolute minimum of equipment. I remember an incident on a job located up on what we called the Hagerman Road several miles north of Maljamar, New Mexico. For those not acquainted with those environs it is located in the approximate geographic center of nowhere. At any rate, just as we drove up on the job that morning the fan belt on our vehicle broke leaving us stranded about thirty or forty miles from Lovington, the nearest outpost of civilization. We were using an air compressor on that job that started with a little pull rope similar to those used to start lawn mowers. Ziglo allowed he could make a fan belt out of the pull rope. So about an hour before sundown he took that thing, unravelled it about four inches on each end, and backspliced it together to make a complete circle, put it on the vehicle’s fan pulley, and it worked well enough to get us back to town. He claimed he learned the skill from an old cable splicer while working on a cable tool rig back in East Texas when he was just a kid.
But where Ziglo really shined was in what I call beer joint yarn spinning. When a bunch of us would gather for some evening refreshment at our favorite tavern he would hunker down behind a frosty long neck and spin some of the most outlandish stories you ever heard. He told about the time they were building some six ring grain tanks up in Kansas when the setter decided they were quitting too early in the day. So the boss took a pistol and walked around the tank and fired a round up in the air now and then which indeed kept the crew at work on the scaffold.
Another was the time he was working on a 5,000 out at Salt Flat way out on the New Mexico line north of El Paso. They were decking the tank and while part of the crew finished the deck others took the scaffold down. Evidently they forgot to mention it to one of the deck crew who walked over to the edge and hopped down on the scaffold which wasn’t there any more. When he hit the ground he broke his leg. After due consultation the entire crew loaded up and took their wounded comrade to a hospital in El Paso where they unceremoniously dropped him off and headed for Juarez to hold a wake in memory their wounded companion’s bad luck. About four days later, after they had blown all their money on wine, women, and song and sobered up, they stopped off at the hospital, loaded their broken legged companion up, and drove back to the job to complete the four hours of work necessary to complete it.
After I left the patch in the 70s I lost track of Ziglo. Some say that he took to driving a taxi cab as tanking faded out as a profession and he grew too old for the hard work and long days required by the patch. I could not swear to that, but what I can say that the memory of him and all those other old hands will live in my mind forever. Ziglo, Wild Bill, Henry, and all those others of my youth were pretty much typical of those who made the oil booms boom. Sometimes, in the still of the night, when I am all alone with my thoughtsI can still hear the faint sound of that wounded wart hog scream in the far distance.
