San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A deeper look into club’s history foretells the future
We all have our preconceived ideas. If we consider the notion of an exclusive club for oil and gas executives, a particular image may coalesce in our brains.
I mentioned the Petroleum Club of Houston to my wife, who grew up in Texas in the 1980s, and she responded “Oh, yeah. That’s all the old power brokers of Houston, drinking and smoking and doing deals together.”
This year, the Petroleum Club of Houston celebrates 75 years since its founding, which was to culminate in a black-tie gala Friday.
Paula Harris, Petroleum Club board president, is using the gala to celebrate the civic leadership of club members by awarding the R.E. Bob Smith Awards, named after the first board president.
We all have our prejudices. I doubt Harris would deny this. Harris, though, seems to have made a sport of smashing expectations and preconceived ideas. Like, it’s her life’s mission.
She grew up in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Houston, a kind of wrong-side-of-the-tracks place that might lower one’s expectations of what is possible for a young Black girl to achieve in life. In 2013, Sunnyside was declared the sixth-most dangerous neighborhood in America.
But as a young woman, Harris did what hardly anyone else from home was doing: She earned a degree, in petroleum engineering.
She graduated in 1987 as just the second African American woman to get a petroleum engineering degree from Texas A&M. She joined oil and gas services business Schlumberger, a firm she considers an industry leader in recruiting women. Nevertheless, Harris told me, “99.9 percent of the time when I went offshore for (Schlumberger) I was not only the only female on the rig, I was also the only African American on the rig.”
The discomfort, and the preconceived notions, went both ways.
“You become this anomaly, and then you get used to it,” she told me. “It could be an intimidating place at first. Out in the field, I didn’t want people to notice me at first.” But later, “after I knew I was going to add value, and became more comfortable in my role, I could become more proactive about creating my space, and my comfort, both on the rigs and in the industry.”
After retiring from a 33-year career as a global director at Schlumberger, Harris joined the Petroleum Club of Houston, was recruited to the board four years ago and became its president in April.
So a Black woman is president of the Petroleum Club of Hous
ton? Yeah, that’s just more of Harris smashing people’s expectations. It’s certainly not what my wife expected to learn. Of course, women weren’t allowed to join the club until the 1980s, back when my wife would have first heard of the place.
But from there, Harris tells an even more unexpected story of the club’s beginning and her predecessor on the board.
The club’s original funding came first and foremost from oilman R.E. “Bob” Smith. Harris introduced me to Smith’s greatgrandson Mason Hunt, who is writing a history of his ancestor as one of the truly great men who shaped Houston.
In 1946, Smith was an oil magnate who became the first president of the board of the Petroleum Club of Houston and its major funder. He remained in charge long enough to move the club from the Rice Hotel downtown to the top two floors of what became known as the ExxonMobil Building in 1963.
According to Hunt, Smith held some dangerously progressive ideas for an oilman in the mid-20th century South. Before passage of national civil rights legislation, he forced the powers that be in Houston to reckon with racial divides within the city. Smith was a major force behind funding and building the Astrodome, seeking partnership with Houston civil rights leader Quentin R. Mease to ensure a racially integrated sports facility.
Smith worked at the state’s southern border to integrate schools or, failing that, paid to build new, better integrated ones.
According to Hunt’s research, this insistence on pushing expectations was a hallmark of Smith’s civic leadership.
As Harris tells it, there’s more continuity in her leadership of the Petroleum Club than first meets the eye.
“I see myself as R.E. Bob Smith’s vision of not only the club but also the city,” she says. “He was an integrator, a freedom fighter, and promoter of women and minorities.”
Harris cites Smith’s role in the club’s history as an additional reason why she’s proud to lead it at its 75th anniversary. And why the surprising “change” she represents as a Black petroleum engineer is, in a sense, a continuity of a founding member’s vision for a better Houston.
“It took people like Smith, and stories like his that are untold, to get us to integration,” she says.
Yes, we all have our little weaknesses.
Mine happens to be for clubs with wood-paneled rooms and leather chairs. A tumbler of whiskey in a place like that sends me into an enjoyable time warp. I imagine myself back to when J.P.
Morgan might put together an industry-controlling trust in the time it takes to smoke a cigar.
Still, for all their past power and prestige, places like the Petroleum Club of Houston do not have a guaranteed future. That is to say that if they don’t evolve, they’ll die. Without Harris having to say that out loud to me, her leadership is its own indication of that truth.
In New York City last week, for example, Bloomberg reported the Princeton Club of New York is in default on its bank mortgage.
The Princeton Club’s bank, in turn, is trying to sell off the debt so someone else can foreclose on the building, which is in a prime location on 43rd Street in Manhattan. It’s a lovely place, one where I enjoyed drinks back in my old banker days. Do these types of spaces have a future?
They probably have a better one if they keep smashing expectations. Their futures may depend on whether the past they link to still resonates today, like R.E. Bob Smith’s story does for Paula Harris and the Petroleum Club of Houston.