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As
a girl, growing up in Texas and Oklahoma,
some of my favorite times were spent traveling around with my dad,
having adventures. The best days were when we would go out to fish,
shoot tin cans, or visit a drilling rig. My dad was in the independent
oil drilling business and would sometimes take me with him when something
exciting was about to happen at a rig. He was the boss, and I was
welcome by the oil field workers. They liked my dad because he had
a reputation for being fair and even-tempered. He was a good man to
work for, and they knew he had started out as a roughneck, just like
them, when he was 17 years old.
One day, when a rig in the Midland-Odessa
area was about to spud in, hit oil sands, and end the suspense everyone
felt not knowing if the well would produce or be a dry hole, dad took
me with him for the big event. School could wait, more important things
were happening in the oil field. I liked the excitement, and I liked
the unusual names in the oil field. Sweetie Peck field was one of
my favorites.
This well today was in the Spraberry Field. Although oil field work
was hard and dangerous, and the men took their work seriously, they
liked to joke around good naturedly and call each other names. I remember
workers in the Spraberry Field were called Spraberry strays. Once
in a while, forgetting I was there, they must have called each other
names I was not meant to hear, because a worker would jerk his head
in my direction and say, "Watch it, there."
Mother believed an oil field was not the proper place for a young
lady, and she would say, “If you don’t stop taking her around the
way you do, we’re going to send her off to boarding school.” I asked
dad why she said that, and he told me not to worry. He explained that
he met mother when he, dressed in the latest style, a fine cream-colored
silk suit with Navy blue tie, had crashed a high society party at
the Corpus Christi Country Club.
He spotted mother from across the room and went over to introduce
himself. Realizing her date had too much to drink, dad gave him a
dollar to go back to the bar and buy himself another round. Dad then
whisked mother out to see his waiting new Ford coupe with the top
down, and he took her for a moonlight spin on Ocean Drive along Corpus
Christi Bay. My parents married three months later. Back then, oil
field workers were considered exciting and daring, and their pay was
much more than in many other occupations. Dad told me mother liked
adventure. A drunken college boy could not compete.
When dad and I headed out this day of skipping school in Midland-Odessa,
our first stop was Hadacol Corners where the Hadacol Corners Café
served over-sized hamburger steaks smothered in onions and brown gravy,
a fitting meal for big men working long, hard hours in the oil patch.
Each time we stopped at the cafe, I could see the waitresses liked
my dad and paid a lot of attention to us. My dad would beam proudly
when they told him I looked like him, with our black hair and green
eyes. |
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| Hadacol Corners,
a desolate crossroads on the barren West
Texas desert marked by tumbleweeds and sand storms, consisted
of four temporary wood buildings joined together that could be detached
and moved on later to another oil field. Although this rough oilfield
oasis had a short life span, it was quickly memorialized by country
musician Slim Willet when he wrote and recorded a song titled Hadacol
Corners: |
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"Hadacol Corners,
caliche road,
Once it rained, once it snowed,
Most of the time the wind just blowed.
Hadacol corners, caliche road,
The road is rough and dirty,
Your car will last 90 days if you don't go over 30…."
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While
we were enjoying our hamburger steaks, a call reporting trouble on
the rig came on dad's mobile car phone. This sometimes happened, and
dad said there was no telling when someone might fall out of the derrick
or drop a wrench into the well. More likely, a piece of equipment
broke down.
Oil well problems were my dad's specialty. He was so good at knowing
how to get the drilling going again that he was called "The Doctor,"
or "Doc" for short. Drillers or shooters running into a problem they
could not solve would say, "We need to call The Doctor." Dad was so
knowledgeable about the oil business, he could often solve the problem
on the phone.
This late afternoon, however, he told me he would go on ahead to the
rig, and if he could not fix the problem without calling in for more
equipment, or if he could fix it soon, he would come back for me and
we would go out to the rig or go home. Otherwise, I would have to
spend the night at Hadacol Corners. It was only a wood floor café
on one side and a United States Post Office on the other side. Where
was I going to sleep? Dad said the ladies at the café would take good
care of me.
I did spend the night. The ladies took me to an area that ran all
across the back of the buildings and had rows of separate small rooms
with a bed in each room. I heard one of the ladies say the back rooms
were now closed for the night. Two ladies looked after me. One told
me about her daughter and said the girl was my age, and the other
lady gave us hot chocolate with little white marshmallows. We sat
on one of the beds and talked and laughed into the night like old
friends.
Early next morning, dad came for me, and we had a big breakfast at
the café. I recall we had the special Tool Pusher Breakfast: T-bone
steak, scrambled eggs, grits, hot biscuits, and hash browns with red-eye
gravy on everything. The rig was fixed and we were going home. Dad
told me, "When we get home, it's a good idea not to give any details
to your mother about the back rooms where you slept." If I were asked,
I was just to say it was a motel, and for her to ask him if she wanted
more information.
Some of our adventures, such as the time dad used a car telephone
to shock some fish to the surface of a river, and we were arrested,
required we not trouble mother with details. That fishing misadventure
ended when dad turned on his West Texas charm and made peace with
the game warden, and we parted on relatively good terms.
Shortly after this Hadacol Corners adventure, word got back to eastern
journalists about a Midland-Odessa
oil field area United States Post Office that bore the name of an
alcohol-laced patent medicine named Hadacol that could allegedly cure
what ails you. Also, you could drink enough Hadacol to get drunk and
then take a few nips the next day to ease the resulting hangover.
Hadacol's popularity had started in Louisiana and then spread across
the nation. A big magazine such as Life or Time sent a reporter and
photographer out to Hadacol Corners to take photos of the post office
with the U.S. flag flying over the sign, "United States Post Office,
Hadacol Corners, Texas." I think one of the photos ran on the magazine's
cover.
The United States Post Office headquarters, embarrassed by the article,
immediately shut down Hadacol Corners Post Office. In a few years,
dad told me the magazine writer and photographer had missed the rest
of the Hadacol Corners story: A United States Post Office had a United
States flag flying proudly over a West
Texas bordello. This was the bordello where I had spent the night
when I was 11 years old.
October 1, 2014 column
© Barbara
Duvall Wesolek
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