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Chapter 2

Apprenticeship in Findlay, Ohio

Gas wells had been brought in during the oil rush on Oil Creek but gas was treated as an unwanted byproduct. Most was flared off as there was no other use for it. A well at Murryville, Pa., blowing out 34 million cubic feet a day, burned out of control for 1½ years. This well proved production was large enough and constant enough, that users could depend on the supply for commercial use to replace manufactured gas.

Curiously, there was public resistance to switching to natural gas, as people had developed a healthy fear of it after several had been injured in explosions.

When Tiny arrived at Findlay the big excitement there was the Oesterlen gas well, which had touched off the oil and gas rush in that state. The drillers for the well were Brownmyer and Martin of Bradford, Pa. The Martin end of the team was Milton Martin.

Milton and his brother, James Gelot Martin, were both drillers, sometimes working together, sometimes independently or teamed with others. Frosty was the son of James and nothing could keep him in the old Taylor School after age 16 to stop him from becoming a driller.

The Martin brothers got into oil drilling in 1861 — earlier than the Phillips. They lived a rough, hard life, almost nomadic in character, following a schedule of moving around but part of a pioneering society that somehow stuck together.

Ticksford, Grease City, Crown Pulley, Glycerine Hollow, Karns City, Butler, Red Rock and Bradford were all Pennsylvania boom towns at which the Martins were employed during the first dozen frenetic years of the Keystone State’s new-found industry.

In 1873, the best home James Martin could find available for his wife, Hattie Jackson, was a shack near a well-drilling site in Grease City field. Frosty first saw the light of day in that shack Sept. 6. By his own accounting, he tried to drown out the noise from the hillside stripper wells with his squalling.

Grease City is not on the map today. Thus it was that an “obit” writer in the Long Beach Independent upgraded his humble birthplace to “Greece City.”

Another Grease City native was Maud Jamison. Neither child knew of the existence of the other, until 19 years later when they met at a ball game in Findlay. Maud was a young teacher in Findlay College — and she was going out with a speed-crazy young man, Barney Oldfield.

Barney and Frosty were members of the Findlay Bicycle Club, which had a quarter-mile dirt track with turns banked 10 feet high. Oldfield always beat Martin — but he was left out of the competition for Maud’s hand the day she met Frosty. They married that year. Oldfield continued racing and later became one of the stars at the Indianapolis Speedway 500-mile races.

The first quarter-century of the Martin marriage was one of constant moving and travel under varying conditions of poverty and affluence. There were periods of loneliness for Maud while Frosty was away in the field. There were several trips around the wourld.

In their later days of lavish living in Long Beach, California, the days of living in tents in the field were forgotten. Their 57 years of marriage were exciting and full of devotion and ended with Maud’s death a year before that of Frosty.

Their first child was John Walter, born in Medicine Hat, Alta., in 1912. He acquired the nickname of Spud almost from birth when the proud father, with his off-beat sense of humour, told some of the boys on the rig: “I spudded in — and look what I got.” (Spudding in was related to the necessity of digging a hole before setting up a cable tool rig.) They raised as a son, Harold J. Blythe, the infant son of a cousin who died. He, too, acquired from Frosty the nickname of Baldy and it stuck with him better than his Christian name, until he died in 1963, after following the drilling trade in his younger days.

A note in the Phillips’ scribbler on nicknames: “Frosty was bigger and huskier than me. His blond hair and light complexion earned him his name, Frosty. In the rough-and-tumble drilling fraternity, I would start fights and Frosty would step in and take over.

“No matter how far we drifted apart we never lost contact with each other. Sometimes he would be in California and I was in Pennsylvania. It made no difference: he would look me up or I would look him up. We were pardners and we helped each other finish many jobs.”

By 1884, the Martin brothers could see the end of oil drilling in the Pennsylvania fields. When the chance came to move to Findlay, to drill the Oesterlen gas well they seized it. The success in drilling this well resulted in them being given contracts for a series of good producers. Findlay became the Mecca for the biggest and best pool of drillers in the United States, for more than a quarter of a century.

Although only 11 when he moved to Findlay, Frosty had already begun an apprenticeship with his father. In his time, youngsters were initiated into family enterprises at an early age and it didn’t hurt them a damn bit. Parents didn’t believe in child labour; it was mostly that, to keep the kids from getting underfoot in the house. Mother often suggested the boys “go with Dad today.” As soon as many could walk, they proudly “went with Dad” and Dad was just as proud to take the son along. Oil was a dinner table topic and by the time he was old enough to take on household chores, night and morning young Frosty had a good indoctrination into the drilling business.

When he was eight, his father and uncle had acquired three little old strippers, (wells in the last stages of efficient production), near their home. It became his job to “do chores” around the wells. He was up with the family at daylight to stir up the banked coal fire under the boiler, get up steam and pump off the wells. Then it was time to go to school.

Returning in the afternoon, there was more work to do. On Saturday he had another job — helping Dad dig up enough coal to fire the boilers for the coming week.

And did he ever get heartily sick of choring around these wells? No, he couldn’t get enough of hanging around drill sites and picking up all the knowledge available. School palled upon him. There was no excitement, compared to watching a well come in or watching the men torpedo a well with nitroglycerine.

Going to school was boring beside the excitement generated by the Martin family in the big Findlay field. Frosty became an expert at knowing which days to play hookey to see some big action like the Karg gas well come in. It burned for four months before being controlled. People could read newspapers by its glare at night 10 miles away. It heat was so intense the ice melted on the river, flowers came out in bloom, trees into leaf and grass grew profusely.

Nobody cared that 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas were wasted. Wastage of gas, (nobody ever thought of shutting off a gas light and gas street lights burned all day), and a lynching, (a good old American institution), were the subject of a page in the Phillips’ scribbler:

“It happened when a North Baltimore man went beserk and shot his wife and started after his daughters. They escaped. He was jailed.

“To show how mob psychology works, a bunch of oil men who were normally good fellows, were incited to march to the town cop and demand he unlock the jail. When he refused, they obtained a big drill bit and broke down the door.

“They grabbed the accused, put a rope around his neck and led him up the main street to a bridge. They threw the rope over the top girder but when they pulled on it, the girder cut it and it broke.

“They knotted the break and took him down the street to the first hydro pole. One fellow climbed the pole and put the rope over a crossarm and the mob started to pull the prisoner up again.

Some of the inflamed mob out for blood — anybody’s blood — started to shoot at him. The fellow who climbed the pole had to climb up to the top to keep from getting shot, too. He would have been killed without a qualm had he not taken this evasive action.

“The wretch on the end of the rope met a horrible death — and I remembered the savagery for a long time.”

Tiny was out of school and working in the Findlay field as a tool dresser and driller at 14. But Frosty had to put in time with the books until age 16. Since both were in the same trade, they met somewhere in the field about this time.

Like all drillers, it was their ambition to buy a string of tools and go to work for themselves.

Frosty achieved this goal first — by the time he was 20 — and undertook contracts in various Ohio fields. He managed to do this by limiting his whisky drinking. The scribbler explained:

A tour of duty, (they pronounced it “tower”), was 12 hours. In the other 12 hours there was usually no place to go. Most of the men spent their pay as soon as they made it. There was always the next day’s wages.

The bulk of the pay packet went for booze. After the first shot, the original idea of saving to buy a rig or lease and become a millionaire usually evaporated. But Frosty transcended the temptations to which his fellows succumbed. He was determined to become independent.

It was this burning ambition that overcame the gruelling physical demands, of working on a cable tool rig. Also, he had recently become a married man.

Few outsiders could understand the psychology of oilfield crews and their capacity for whisky, which was bottomless. They could always depend on working hard the next tour to sweat it out of them. A wag posted his schedule in the bunkshack:

11 p.m. — Get up

11 - 11:30 p.m. — Sober up

11:30 - midnight — Eat

Midnight - noon — Work like hell

Noon - 3 p.m. — Get drunk

3 - 3:30 p.m. — Fight

3:30 p.m. — Go to bed

In this atmosphere, there was an air of recklessness, some shooting, fights, a few murders, (oil tanks hid bodies for years), and general hellery. And not a few suicides.

There were good and bad employers, but one Tiny always remembered was Honest Jim Kirkbride of Rollersville, Ohio. On the third well Tiny drilled in that field for Kirkbride, the crew lost control of a gusher spewing out 20,000 barrels a day 150 feet into the air. It took two days and the efforts of two other crews to close it off.

As the crews walked into the wellhead to install a casing nipple and two eight-inch flow lines, choking, stinking crude oil covered them from head to foot ruining all their clothes. Kirkbride gave the three crews an unforgetable Christmas present when he had his brother, Ed, come down from Toledo and measure every man for a new suit.

As in every other industry, the oil industry goes in boom-and-bust cycles, despite what Keynesian economists would have the public believe. It was during a bust cycle that Tiny Phillips and Frosty Martin found themselves on a Chicago-bound passenger train in 1897. In the suburb of Harvey, Ill., their curiosity was aroused by a large sign, “Well Tools,” above the yard of the F.C. Austin Manufacturing Company.

When they left Chicago both had new jobs: Frosty was hired as a salesman and designer of water well tools and Tiny was hired in the warehouse. The idea was, Frosty would sell a string of tools and Tiny would go into the field to erect a drill rig, with the help of experienced drillers he would hire in Findlay. They would string up the tools and start drilling for the buyer.

Tiny figure the Austin company had given him his first big start in life, with some security. It was therefore on May 1, 1902, Tiny married Zulah May Hagerman, a telephone operator in Findlay. She was also a friend of Maud Martin. The honeymoon was partly business and partly sight-seeing.

The business was to superintend the drilling of a wildcat gas well, in the semi-desert mountainous area near Woodside, Utah, for a syndicate which bought the rig from the Austin company. The newlyweds had never heard of the place, but Zulah said she was willing to go and live in a shack in the field, after a trip to Salt Lake City.

It was with a sense of adventure and thrill and possibly a little trepidation that the young couple boarded the train. They were a handsome pair, she dressed in the long floor-length dress of the period with white blouse and huge flowered hat, and he in the plug hat and typical high white collar of men’s fashions at the turn of the century.

At Denver, they boarded the narrow-gauge Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad for the trip to Woodside. This was one of the last narrow-gauge railways in the U.S. It was built that way to enable the engineers to round the sharp curves and make the steep climbs through mountain ranges and river canyons. From the windows of the toy coach, they observed some of the most spectacular mountain scenery and also some of the most desolate stretches of terrain in the West.

Tiny Phillips helped bring in the J.W. Kirkbride well in 1895, at Rollersville, Ohio.

The train crew were friendly, as are all railway men with newlyweds and joshed them a great deal about that new job Tiny was going to at Woodside. The scribbler noted:

“They asked us if we knew anyone at Woodside. We said no, but we weren’t worrying because the syndicate would look after us. We didn’t catch the knowing winks the two men exchanged.

“After lunch, the brakeman asked if we wanted our trunks put off. I assured him we wanted to have all our belongings with us. I couldn’t understand why he laughed.

“The train left the small town of Green River and the country became more wilder and desolate. In a while, they stopped at a small station. We got off — and could only see one house. The conductor assured us that this was the whole town of Woodside. He laughed uproariously at our discomfiture.

This camp at Green River, Utah, was built out of railway ties in 1902. Tiny and Zulah Phillips arrived here as honeymooners.

“We at last tumbled to the fact the crew had been kidding us all along. We got back on the train with sheepish looks and a little frightened and crestfallen. We continued on to Desert Siding, which was a mileboard with the name on it, nothing else. The crew was helpful and suggested we go on to Helper, a small railroad town near the famous Moffatt Tunnel.”

It did have a hotel and they took a room there to await events. A company man came in from Salt Lake City and told Tiny to make his plans to set up camp, back there in the desert. Tiny ordered the materials, then while they were being shipped in, he and Zulah boarded the train to Salt Lake City, to enjoy the sights and listen to the organ in the big Mormon Tabernacle.

Tiny’s boss came out from Chicago and told them he was glad they had enjoyed their honeymoon, but that the drilling location out in the desert with temperatures that went as high as 110 degrees, was no place for a woman and suggested Mrs. Phillips return to Findlay, “for the time being.”

The “time being,” turned out to be a year before the newlyweds saw each other again. But they accepted this as a way of life in the drilling game. There were no complaints. The wife of a driller never knew when he went away on a job, when he would return.

The reason for his enforced stay at Woodside, was the poor and irregular supply situation. Often the crew had to shut down for days awaiting delivery of casing, pipe, tools or parts.

So while Zulah sat it out in Findlay alone, Tiny and his crew spent some of their spare time exploring the Green River Canyon, whose scenery is almost as spectacular as the Colorado River’s famous Grand Canyon. They saw many rare and awesome sights.

After all the effort and time spent on the well, it turned out to be a water well. It was half a century before drillers came along with more powerful equipment that could make more than pinprick perforations in the ground, as Tiny’s rig did, (1,000 feet) — and they discovered trillions of feet of gas.

Tiny arrived back in Findlay the next May, vowing to Zulah never to be out on a job so long again.

To make good his pledge, he bought a small store.