Dancing in a cotton field

It was the early summer of 1971 when we started drilling our north Mississippi well, and that next Saturday Vertis and I were having lunch at the Town Club in Corpus Christi. We were about halfway through lunch when the club manager came over and said, “There’s a Marshall Forester on the phone, and he wants to speak to you.”

Marshall Forester was our drilling engineer on the north Missis- sippi well.

“Hey, Marshall; what’s up?” “Richard, we were drilling at a depth of 2,500 feet, and we had a good show of oil and gas from the sandstone we were drilling in. So I called Halliburton to run a test. Richard, the well is flowing a lot of natural gas!”

“Marshall, there’s not any oil- or gas-producing well in the basin at that depth. Ignore it and keep drilling. Our best shot is the Sanders Gas Sand at about 5,000 feet.”

It took another week for the rig to drill down to below 5,000 feet. When we ran the oil and gas analysis surveys, which we call “logs,” the target Sanders Sand had about 10 feet of natural gas in the top of the sand, but there was water in the lower part of the sand, so if we tried to produce the gas, the water would make it non-commercial.

We ran gas production pipe to 2,700 feet, cemented it in, and made a gas well that would produce a small amount of natural gas from the shallow sand we called the Nason Sand, named for an old independent oil man, and we named the field for a crossroads store called Corinne.

We were quick to drill another well hoping to get the Sanders Sand gas productive, but the north offset was a ringer for the first well. Now we had two small insignificant gas wells in the middle of nowhere.

Our partners were beginning to grumble. I met with Hilton Ladner, the independent who had come up with the idea to drill the first well, and we picked a location.

“Hilton, we’ve got to drill about 2,500 feet due east.”

“Richard, that’s very risky, but let’s do it.”

It was a make-or-break well, and in the oil and gas exploration business, those wells usually are big money losers. A few weeks later, when the drilling rig had drilled down to 5,000 feet, I flew over to Jackson, Miss., rented a car, and headed north to where we were drilling. I was roaring through the dust across a cotton patch on a dirt road when I spotted Hilton’s car leaving the drilling rig, heading my way. I stopped, waved him down, and ran over. He was holding up the analysis logs when he got out of the car.

“What does it look like?” I yelled. “Do we have anything?”

“Maybe; I haven’t had time to really look at it.”

I grabbed the analysis log out of Hilton’s hand and spread it on the hood of his car and quickly looked down to around 5,000 feet. As the log values nearly went off the page, indicating a big productive oil or gas zone, I yelled, “We hit it! The Sanders Sand is loaded with natural gas!”

We both yelled and hopped around in that cotton field like wild men, knowing that the major gas-productive sand in the basin was proof that we had discovered a significant natural gas field. That was our “one good well.”

Even during all the oil and gas work, I had time to join a protest to keep a major chemical company from dumping wastewater into Corpus Christi Bay. We packed the Coliseum in Corpus Christi for a hearing, and when the representatives from the chemical company testified, our leader of the protest had told us to boo and not stop. They canceled the permit application the next week.

I also got the urge to enter politics, and filed against a long-term incumbent for state representative. Over 40,000 votes were cast, and I lost by 122 votes. We would probably still be living in Texas if I had won.

The dust had barely settled from my race for state representative when the state senator from Corpus Christi retired. My supporters from the state representative race urged me to file, and I agreed with their premise that my name recognition from that race would probably make me the favorite in the special election.

I finally decided I couldn’t afford to be a politician. I would have to give up too much work on oil and gas deals.

A year later, after we had sold our interest in the new oil and gas field, I purchased a bayfront lot overlooking Corpus Christi Bay, and we hired an architect to design a house. We put the plans out for bid, and our architect encouraged us to take what he thought was great submission. That night I asked Vertis one question.

“Vertis, if we take this bid and build our house, we’ll have made a commitment to make Texas our permanent home, and we’ll never move back to Arkansas. Is that what you want to do?”

She said, “No.”

We were having a great life in Corpus Christi, but really didn’t like the humid no-seasons climate. El Dorado was our first choice, but after being turned down repeatedly as we tried to find a suitable lot to build on, we started looking elsewhere.

We passed on Tyler, Texas, Shreveport, and Little Rock, and finally decided to look at Columbus, Miss. All our oil and gas activity was focused around that area, and Columbus seemed to be the rightsized town in the mid-South. It was Thanksgiving, and before we headed home to celebrate Thanksgiving in El Dorado, we spent three days in Columbus looking for houses, and found one. It was a 10,000-squarefoot antebellum mansion in a great section of town. It was only $175,000, but it was in sad shape. However, we could see great potential.

“This is it, Vertis,” I said. “Let’s head back to El Dorado and have Thanksgiving with our folks, and on Monday we’ll come back and buy this house.” She nodded, and we were set on moving to Columbus. We talked all the way back to El Dorado about how we would renovate the house, and we were certain it was a great choice.

Then things changed. As we entered the El Dorado city limits on Calion Road, we passed the old Palace Beer Joint. It was for sale, along with the 19 acres it set on.

I was on the phone the next morning with attorney Richard Mays, who I knew from college, and told him to buy the property. I think it was overpriced, but I had just sold my lot on Corpus Christi Bay for more than enough to buy the El Dorado Property.

Come back next week for the rest of the Richard Mason story.