by Bobby Weaver
Some people, usually of the male gender, just plain like to fight. That is especially true of oil field hands. Now myself, I never was much of a hand at fisticuffs. For one thing I was a tad small for the activity and besides my threshold for pain was always on the low side. That was not the case for a pair of brothers named Donald and Marshall with whom I sometimes kept company during my misspent youth working in the oil patch. They both stood a hair over six feet, tipped the scales at well over 200 pounds, and they never met a man who they didn’t enjoy visiting fist city with.
After a while word got out on the brothers and nobody in their right mind would mix it up with them. That tended to make them a little cranky so they devised a scheme they called the bait plan. As it turned out I was the bait: all 135 pounds of me. The plan was simple. My role was to make obnoxious advances to some girl in whatever dance hall we found ourselves. When the scuffle started, as it was bound to, the brothers would rush in and take over.
It worked too, except for one time over on the New Mexico line near Plains, when they decided to keep on drinking and let me go it alone. It was after that little fiasco that I decided to retire from the ring with ten consecutive wins and only one loss.
Spending 20 years laboring in greasy overalls in the oil patch and doing a hard time stretch collecting oral histories for Texas Tech has provided Bobby Weaver with a wealth of oil field yarns. He can be contacted at bobby-weaver@cox.net.