As I have chronicled many times in these pages, my days as a geologist at Texas Oil & Gas were some of the wildest and wooliest of my life – and for me, that’s going a stretch. One party in particular was woolier than most and still sticks in my mind:
TXO usually hosted several parties every year, a hold-over from earlier days when oil companies like Cities Service hired employees for life, every person working there part of a family that played together as well as worked together. The party I am thinking of happened during spring, the weather more than pleasant.
There was a tennis club at the time built on the old Gaylord (think Opryland and the Grand Ol’ Opry) dairy farm. Residing in an upper class Oklahoma City neighborhood, Summerfield Racquet Club often hosted oil industry events such as the now defunct Midcontinent Oil Man’s Tennis Tournament (once won by a woman, but that’s a different story.) That particular year, TXO had rented the clubhouse for a sit-down dinner.
Miss C (a person that I have told many stories about in these pages) was my girlfriend at the time. Like every other oil patch party during that era, alcohol flowed in copious quantities, both Miss C and I consuming our fair share. It was still daylight, bright and sunny outside, when we sat down for dinner.
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The dinner went well, the noise level moderate but just high enough that I couldn’t converse with my boss across the large table without shouting. Still, I was trying hard to watch my P’s and Q’s and not embarrass myself out of a job. As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry.
The dinner, and dessert complete, people all around me were starting on their next adult beverage and lighting up cigarettes. Miss C was drinking and also lit one up, but her’s was not a cigarette. The moment I whiffed the odor of marijuana, my heart quit beating – well, only for a moment. After a long draw off the joint, she handed it to the person sitting to her right, and thankfully not to me.
I watched in awe as the joint began circulating around the table, one puff after the next, finally making it all the way around to my boss. My rear end puckered as I waited for his angry explosion.
The explosion never came. Honcho put the joint to his lips, pretended to take a puff and then passed it to the person next to him. There was little left of the joint when it finally reached me so I handed it to Miss C as nonchalantly as I could muster. Everyone was in a jovial, nay drunken mood by this time, nothing said about the joint passed around the table. Next morning, I sat in my office waiting to be called down the hall to confront the honcho about my personal shortcomings. The call never came. Nothing was ever said about the discretion and I wasn’t about to bring it up.
That was years ago, before Mother’s Against Drunk Drivers and before the War on Drugs. It was also the last hurrah for an oil industry that prided itself in being wild, flamboyant risk takers that wore gold nugget neckaces and rings, ten gallon hats and thousand dollar ostrich cowboy boots, and traveled everywhere in private jets. Hey, and it was a time when oil companies couldn’t afford to fire their best oil finders just because they drank a bit of whiskey and smoked a little dope.