GOD, FAMILY AND BLACK GOLD
Memento depicts life and loyalty to the old Humble Oil in Baytown
Flipping through the watercolor and pencil illustrations in Thomas Claud “T.C.” Smith’s retirement book from the Baytown refinery is a bit like flipping the pages back in time.
The book, full of dozens of illustrations by two artists who worked for the Humble Oil (now Exxon Mobil) refinery, Henry Rosser and Luther Mackrell, depicts both the rise of the oil industry in Texas and the men who made it possible.
At the time, the modern city of Baytown had yet to be knitted together from three communities: Baytown, Goose Creek and Pelly. There were two major churches (one Baptist and one Methodist), but just one employer: Humble Oil. Everyone who lived in the town was employed by Humble. Oil provided you a house. Oil provided your friends. Oil provided your church. Oil was family.
“Everything revolved, first, around church. And then around Humble,” said Dimple Smith , 87, the daughterin-law of T.C. Smith.
T.C. Smith, born in 1888, worked at the refinery for nearly three decades, and died in 1967 at age 79. The book is full of dozens of illustrations from the early days of Houston’s oil industry was kept safe in the family for generations. Smith’s grandson, Michael Smith, decided he wanted to share the book publicly this year.
“Family is something I think more about as I age,” said Michael Smith, 58. “As I started to appreciate this book more, I learned to understand its uniqueness in representation of refining history.”
The Humble Oil and Refining Company was founded by Ross Shaw Sterling, who later became a governor of Texas in 1931, in 1911 after he bought two wells in the area. The refinery was finished in 1920 and operations started in 1921. The rest was history.
Nearly a century later, the refinery still dominates the area’s culture and economy. It’s a major employer, with about 7,000 employees, but it’s not the only employer as it once was. It has the capacity to process 584,000 barrels of crude oil per day – more than 200 times what it ran in 1921. The complex spans 3,400 acres of land, 1,200 more acres than when ground was broken, and now includes a chemical plant, ethylene plant, plastics plant and engineering complex in addition to the refinery.
18 acres in Baytown
Smith’s family said not every employee who retired from the refinery received such an intricately illustrated gift for their work, but Smith, who spent nearly 30 years there, was an exception. He was among the first group of workers to start at the refinery when it opened nearly 100 years ago in 1921. He worked in the pumping and gauging department.
Smith was involved with his church and beloved by his colleagues for his positive attitude, loyalty and devotion to God, according to the notes they wrote to him upon his retirement
“For a quarter of a century we have worked together — through good weather, bad weather, hurricane and snow, acid fumes (and other fumes!) with never a complaint
from you,” wrote his foreman Howard Humphrey in the book. “You’ve shown a loyalty to company and friends beyond question.”
Smith was, as many others at the time, very committed to the company. It’s what allowed him to afford the $630.30 he needed to buy his family 18 acres of land (not quite a ranch, but it did have a few cattle). He gave an acre to each of his three sons to build their own homes next door to him.
Dimple Smith, who married T.C. Smith’s youngest son, Kenneth, still lives there today. T.C. Smith’s grandchildren, now middle-aged with their own children, grew up on the land that has since been chipped away by suburban development.
Mike Smith, one of the grandsons, said he has fond memories of the tight-knit community, which was conservative and traditional. While he has few memories of his grandfather, he said he remembers him as gentle and kind. He was, his family says, the traditional southern gentleman. Loyalty was a way of life, and your word meant everything.
“He was of the group of men that his word was his bond,” said Dimple Smith. “When you worked for a company, your loyalty was part of your employment. There was no such thing as, ‘You’ve got to sign this.’”
A way of life
Loyalty to Humble was fostered by intense reliance on the refinery. When it first opened, the men and their families were put up in company housing.
They went to work, church and home with their fellow oilmen. Even after the men moved out of the company housing to buy their own property, family events were still intertwined with oil.
An annual Saturday barbecue was held at the refinery for the workers and families alike. It was an all-day celebration of food, a baseball game organized by employees and a big dance.
Thanksgiving too, was at the refinery. One of T.C. Smith’s favorite stories to tell his family for a few laughs (and is also depicted in the book) is the Thanksgiving that he never got dinner. The company had prepared a large feast for the men,who left their stations, where they had been putting oil into one of the tanks.
One man was supposed to be watching, but, distracted by the food, allowed the tank to overflow. The men were just sitting down to eat when someone realized the problem, and they all had to leave to fix it. The way T.C. Smith told it, Dimple Smith said, it took three hours to get the tank under control, and when they came back, everyone was too tired to eat. Plus, the food was cold.
T.C. Smith worked for the refinery until the late 1940s, just after World War II, which transformed both the refinery and the town. A $10 million expansion of the Baytown refinery was mostly financed by the federal government.
The Humble refinery produced more gasoline for allied air forces than any other, and explosives made in Baytown were used in the European Theater, according to the Texas State Historical Association. General Tire and
Rubber also opened a plant in Baytown to make rubber to aid the war efforts, marking the entry of another huge employer in the area.
Family business
If the workers were family, the refinery was the patriarch. Three generations of Smiths have worked for the refinery in Baytown.
T.C. Smith’s two older sons worked at the refinery. One of them, Earl, died there in an accident when he fell into one of the tanks while workers were cleaning them out with hot water.
“It was a very difficult time,”
Dimple Smith said.
The third son, Dimple’s husband, Kenneth, who died in 2013 at 85, never was employed by the refinery, but stayed in the oil business, working on pipelines. One of T.C. Smith’s grandsons worked at the refinery, too, but he later quit because he was concerned about exposure to the chemicals, the family said.
Exposure to chemicals is hardly a new concern. Even in T.C. Smith’s retirement book, the emissions were depicted throughout – “The fumes from the acid / have all been disposed / and the odor of sludge / stops tickling the nose,” reads one part of a poem about shutting down operations.
Last spring, a fire at the at the refinery released toxic pollutants into the air for eight days. At the end of July, dozens of workers were injured in an explosion at the plant.
Despite the contradictions and complexities, the Smiths, and many other families in the area, remain tied to the refinery today. It has given and taken away.
“The company was just an extension of your own family,” Dimple Smith said. “This had just always been home. You learn to love the place that you live. You become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.”