Innovators & Innovations:
A look at famed oil well firefighter Red Adair.
When Paul Neal Adair was 14, he attended a Houston swim meet. Too poor to afford shoes, he walked over in a pair he borrowed from his father.
After hours in the water, Adair’s feet were swollen. The shoes no longer fit. He had a fistful of ribbons in hand but was too proud to let anyone realize his predicament, so he waited until darkness fell to walk home barefoot.
Years later, that boy became known as Red Adair, the worldrenowned oil well firefighter. From the 1950s onward, as he grew into a larger-than-life persona, others in the business would boast that one day, they would be just like him.
But none of them had ever been a boy without shoes.
Adair’s wife of 65 years, Kemmie, always told other firefighters that story, said Philip Singerman, Adair’s authorized biographer. It has stuck with him.
In many ways, Adair embodied the American dream. He built a company from the ground up, making himself known worldwide, so much so that John Wayne loosely portrayed him on screen. Adair also personified the things that would come to define Houston, and Texas — a booming oil industry, a fierce fortitude and a knack for thinking big.
Born on June 18, 1915, Adair spent his early life in the Heights.
He attended Harvard Elementary and Hogg Middle School before briefly enrolling at Reagan High. In 1929, he dropped out to support his impoverished family. Jobs at a drugstore and laying railroad tracks left the ambitious Adair unfulfilled. Itching for the oil fields, he started working at Otis Pressure Control Co. in 1938, and the next year, began intermittent work for oil well firefighting pioneer Myron Kinley.
During World War II, Adair became part of the elite 139th Bomb Disposal Unit, an assignment that foreshadowed a career using explosives to tame wild wells. When he returned home in 1946, he began working for Kinley full time.
In 1959, he struck out on his own, forming the Red Adair Co. Adair became adept at using dynamite to subdue flames, a technique he did not invent but perfected over three decades. He feared no fire, but safety was paramount: he never lost a man on the job, and serious injuries were rare. Over his career, he would subdue around 2,000 oil well fires and blowouts.
Throughout the 1960s, he was the biggest — nearly only — name in the game. If a well burned or blew anywhere in the world, it was likely Adair would soon be there. He went to the Sahara Desert in 1961 to fight a raging fire later named the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter. He flew to the North Sea in 1977 to battle the Ekofisk blowout, for which he was reportedly paid $6.6 million, though he later denied the sum. Eleven years later, he was off the coast of Scotland, grappling with a huge explosion on the Piper Alpha rig.
He would not face serious competition until 1978, when his top employees, Asger “Boots” Hansen and Edward “Coots” Matthews, formed their own firm.
“Everybody respected him, and whatever he said was what was done,” said Richard Hatteberg, who worked for Adair for nearly three decades.
The danger and tumult of the work took a toll on family life. A phone call could mean Adair and his son, Jimmy, would be on a plane in an hour, off to another state or overseas.
“You didn’t really know if they were coming back,” said Candy Adair, Jimmy’s first wife.
Adair’s reputation grew with every headline, and the nature of the work inevitably lent itself to hyperbole. His red hair — and insistence on outfitting everything from his firefighting gear to his office furniture in that color — made for an easy nickname.
“Send for Red Adair!” ran one headline in November 1962. A few months prior, the Wall Street Journal featured Adair: “A Red-Haired Texan Does Brisk Business Taming Wild Oil Wells.” In 1972, the Associated Press declared Adair loved to “outsmart danger.”
His fame peaked in 1968, when John Wayne starred in the film “Hellfighters,” which depicted Adair's career. He served as a technical adviser on set.
Adair’s headstrong, unguarded demeanor solidified him as an outsized character. A short temper made him “hell around the office,” Singerman wrote, noting he never really belonged in an office anyway. When a Houston Post reporter questioned him in 1979 about criticisms that he abandoned attempts to plug a well in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche, he grew “redhot mad.”
“Hell, no, we haven’t given up,” Adair shouted. “I don’t ever give up.”
Raymond Henry, a close friend and longtime employee, said Adair would never admit that the job couldn’t be done, and in truth, there was little they couldn’t do.
For all his bluster, Adair cared deeply for those close to him. He required family members and employees to constantly check in with him, even when they weren’t on a job.
Houston remained Adair’s lifelong home. He owned a house in the city and another in Clear Lake, where he frequently boated. At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, he placed hefty bids on champion steers. When the steer he bought for $140,000 in 1983 was disqualified for show violations, he donated the money to charity.
At one point, he entertained purchasing the Houston Oilers.
When he testified about offshore drilling before Congress in 1977, he called himself “just a country boy from Texas.”
In 1993, after 34 years, Adair sold his company but remained an active consultant until his death in 2004, at the age of 89.
Years earlier, he had told his closest friend, Rush Johnson, how he wanted to be known after he was gone. “When I do die,” Adair had said, “I’d like to be remembered as a man who gave everybody an even break.”