The pump jack has presided over the oil landscape for more than 100 years. In Electra, the “Pump Jack Capital of Texas,” folks know about the historic hardware. And about the difference between a pump jack and a pumping unit. And a whole lot more.
By Hanaba Munn Welch
Don’t underestimate the power of an oilfield pump jack, whatever the size. Along with drilling rigs, pump jacks are venerable icons—a stroke of luck for an industry that must pay attention to its public image. What’s not to like about a machine that looks like a horse, powerful yet tame, nodding its head?
For strangers to the industry who are making their first visits to places like West Texas, pump jacks often capture their attention more than any other feature of the landscape, natural or manmade. At Electra, Texas, “Pump Jack Capital of Texas,” a multitude of pump jacks is what Highway 287 travelers see when they drive by or through the town.
“What are those things out there on the highway doing ‘this’?”
It’s the question Electra convenience store operators Carolyn and Herbie Adams heard over and over from uninformed passers-through. The couple quickly recognized the pulling power of the pump jacks—enough power to draw curious travelers off the highway to stop and ask their naïve questions.
Carolyn Adams, now president of Electra’s Pump Jack Capital Association, gets credit for gathering statistics and prompting the state legislature to recognize the town officially in 2001 for its remarkable concentration of pump jacks—some working, some idle, some retired, and a few now awaiting their final disposition in the scrap yard.
Meanwhile, relics from the oilfield—two pump jacks and a boiler—stand alongside the railroad track and West Front Avenue in Electra, two blocks south of the historic Grand Theater.
The boiler represents Electra’s specific claim to fame in the history of petroleum exploration in Texas, not to mention that the town is named for Electra Waggoner (1882-1925) of the oil-rich Waggoner Ranch dynasty.
“It’s from the Clayco No. 1,” said Jannis Hayers, manager of Electra Main Street, a downtown revitalization program that is part of the city’s effort to preserve history and to boost the economy through heritage tourism.
The Clayco Oil and Pipeline Company’s gusher put Electra on the map on April 1, 1911, increasing the size of the town by five times—from 1,000 inhabitants to 5,000 within months. Within four years, the county boasted over a thousand wells.
The number of Electra area pump jacks still working nod their affirmation of the longevity of the famous field.
A part of the story that does not get such uniform affirmation is the use of the term “pump jack” to refer to all pump jacks.
In the savviest circles in towns like Electra, where oilfield service and equipment businesses have underpinned the economy for a hundred years of boom and bust and boom again, “pump jack” refers the old-style pump jacks that were rod-driven by a central power source called a “power.” The term “pumping unit,” by contrast, refers to any pump jack powered by its own motor or engine, which means it’s no longer a pump jack in the traditional sense of the term.
As if to illustrate the vocabulary lesson, the old Clayco No. 1 boiler is flanked by a pumping unit on one side and a pump jack power on the other, with an old pump jack and an equally old engine for the power already in hand and destined to be installed on the site.
Ken Rondeau, electrician and Electra Main Street Board member, has spent some of his career in the oilfield—“in and out,” in his words—long enough for him to understand how things work and to assemble the representative pieces of Electra’s pump jack history for proper display. The engine for the power is stored at his house; the pump jack is at a salvage yard, where it awaits repairs to members bent in its latest move. Once Rondeau gets all three elements in place, anyone driving through Electra proper will be able to stop to inspect the classic equipment up close.
Both Rondeau and local retired equipment and service company owner Red Thomas agree on when and when not to say “pump jack.”
Thomas has been in the business 55 years and is retired enough to sit by the heater at the business now managed by his son, Jimmy Thomas. “I retired four or five years ago,” he said. “I haven’t got out of here yet.”
Thomas has seen ups and downs through the years—less predictable than the bobbing of a pump jack. Things may have started on a hopeful note, but it took a while for a major upswing. “My dad took retirement from Gulf Oil,” he said. “I quit a good job to help him.”
The first year, father and son saw no profit. The second year they made $1,200. “I made $250 a month for years and years,” Thomas said. “Every hand I ever had made more money that I did.”
Thomas has dealt with all sorts of pump jacks. “My first lease had wooden ones on it,” he said.
Thomas and his father serviced wells. “I had to dress all the pumps,” he said. “We mostly did it on-site. We had to work in the old days.”
Now the work is typically done indoors in places like Thomas Pump and Equipment, where young Blake Criswell worked on an icy Monday in March, polishing bearings and reassembling a down-hole pump.
Thomas complemented Criswell’s skills but he decried the work ethic of some of today’s workers entrusted with the maintenance of pumping units—hands who get paid while someone like Criswell does the work. What’s more, it’s the work Thomas used to do in his own younger years in the shade of the pumping unit.
“Then they go get their lunch out of the pickup and come in and eat it,” Thomas said. “It’s that bad, plus they don’t know nothing.” Words spoken with the authority from his vantage point near the heater—a place he’s earned.
When Thomas started his business, he primarily wanted a discount on the parts he needed for his work. “I put in my little shop out here in the back,” he said.
The business grew to meet demands of the industry. “In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, I was selling everything I could get in here.”
He had a quarter of a million dollars tied up in inventory. It was the upswing. Then things went bust, and so did the value of Thomas’s equipment, his pumping units in particular. “I didn’t sell one for 20 years,” he said. “I used them up on quarter-barrel wells. I was lucky I had them paid for.”
Thomas himself is an example of a start-up business that thrived through a boom. What he’s seen since has been the opposite. “There aren’t as many companies anymore,” he said. “The big companies bought out the little companies.”
Not so much a fan of bigger and better and newer, Thomas has a heart for things like little old pump jacks (although not all the old pump jacks were small) and, in particular, his Model A truck-pulling unit. “It’s a ’29 model,” he said. “I guarantee I could pull them as fast as what they do now.”
Like his wife, Glenda Thomas, who literally wrote the book—two, in fact—on toy sewing machines, Red Thomas likes to see old equipment kept in working order. That’s why he’s rebuilding the truck, and it’s no doubt why he shares his wife’s interest in the collectible miniature sewing machines.
Or maybe it’s because they go up and down like pump jacks.
“I just haven’t done it yet, but I’m going to build a pumping unit that is a sewing machine,” he said.
Maybe right after the Model A.