science or technology available to him. His decision would be based more on experience and gut instincts than anything else. Trendology, following the direction set by successful wells, had long been an effective method for finding oil, However, two wells did not a trend make.
Holifield would have to gamble.
He knew how to read the earth. But no one had ever been able to read or unravel the puzzle of the Austin Chalk. The forbidden layers of limestone were as defiant in 1976 as they had been when that first renegade band of wildcatters came stomping through Lee County in the 1930s. The old school ways of exploring a field had never worked below Giddings. However, Holifield was convinced that if someone came along with the right idea and the right application, he had a chance of making a large and important field. It would require a special understanding of the limestone formations and the utilization of unconventional methods of recovery because the oil was down there lying in wait. Ray Holifield could sense it. But what would it take to unlock the crude? Who had the magic wand? The old chalk definitely wasn’t for amateurs; then again, maybe it was.
But as geologist Parke A. Dickey had once written, “We usually find oil in new places with old ideas. But sometimes we find oil in an old place with a new idea. Several times in the past, we thought we were running out of oil when actually we were only running out of ideas.” Ray Holifield had come to the chalk searching for a new idea.
He took a deep breath and selected the location for his initial venture into Lee County soil. No seismic readings. Just going down blind. Many had drilled on the land above the Austin Chalk trend. Only one well, after all of these years, remained standing. Flame outs. Blowouts. Dry outs. The rest were little more than deserted holes in a deserted field. If he missed as others had, his name and reputation both would probably be nothing more than mere afterthoughts in the annals of Giddings. If he hit, however, if he could find some way to decipher the code of the chalk, he would be recognized for his discovery of a major oilfield that had long been blasphemed and abused, feared and ignored, bypassed and condemned, but never forgotten.
Ray Holifield thought he had it all figured out. He didn’t. Historically, he knew, faults almost always ran back up from the coast at a forty-five degree angle. That’s what he had been taught. That’s what experience told him. Holifield was convinced, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he had been able to pinpoint the critical fault line that fed the City of Giddings No. 1.
Drill. Hit it. Head to the bank.
He later recalled, “My science was all wrong in the chalk. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I didn’t have a clue. A seismic reading may have told me altogether something different. We’ll never know. We simply drilled on a hunch. Mine.”
It wouldn’t be easy, and the venture got off to a rocky start. The Austin Chalk was tough enough, but it looked in the beginning at though red tape and city ordinances might present even worse problems. Ray Holifield had selected his prime location. Believed in it. Stood his ground. Wouldn’t move. The trouble was, however, his proposed drilling site lay inside the city limits of Giddings. By all rights, Windsor, which owned the permit, would not be allowed to drill without the city’s cooperation. As a community, Giddings was suffering much as it had during the Great Depression, and Lee County had always been recognized as one of the two poorest counties in Texas. Giddings needed the well. Giddings needed the business. Before any drill bit touched the ground, Max Williams and Irv Deal needed approval from the Texas Railroad Commission and a permit from the Giddings city aldermen.
They received both in July of 1976, and the newspaper reported: The well will be drilled on the H. T. Moore land. It will be located on the north side of Highway 77. Windsor Oil officials have repeated that once the work begins, they should know if there is oil within a month. The company has deposited in the city’s name a total of $25,000 in lieu of a bond in the First National Bank of Giddings.
Max Williams and Irv Deal drilled the M&K – named for landowners H. T. Moore, an African American shoe repairman in his late seventies, and James Krchnak, a traveling paint salesman of Czech descent – on acreage offset from the big chalk well. The men were staring hard at a drilling cost of about $320,000, which amounted to the total annual budget of both companies. The drill bit carved its way quickly through an overlay of eight thousand feet of soft earth, then bore heavily into the tight layers of limestone.
All or nothing. That was the creed of the chalk. All or nothing, with the emphasis almost always on nothing. The chalk was hard as concrete, and nobody ever knew exactly where the drill bit was. Ray Holifield may have been drilling for a precise spot, but there was a lot of wiggle in the chalk. Jack Killigan was an investor who had worked with Irv Deal on building a shopping center, and he told Randy Stewart, “Finding oil in the chalk is like trying to open the lock on a car door with a coat hanger that’s two blocks long.”
Day after day, the long hours weaving themselves around him like a spider web, Max Williams watched the drill bit turn with Bill Walker, an investor from Arlington, Texas, who had earned his riches by hiring an artist to paint bright-colored murals on the sides of vans and created a whole new line of vehicles he called the “Good Time Machines.” Walker needed a break. He had sold his business to his partner on a leveraged buyout, realized one day that the company was headed for the legal pitfalls of bankruptcy, and hoped he would one day see his money. Bill Walker was still waiting.
The string of pipe went deeper.
The intensity around the well was so thick, Max Williams said, that it was often difficult to breath. Emotions were running the gamut from wild expectations to a belief that the M&K might be little more than a pipe dream with more chalk than oil.
Lord, they needed the oil. Chalk was so cheap a man couldn’t give it away.
The pipe suddenly shuddered, and the well kicked wildly out of control and wide open. Oil the color of honey came bursting out of the ground. The M&K hit exactly three years to the day after Chuck Alcorn brought in the City of Giddings No. 1.
Fate? Perhaps.
A little luck? No doubt.
Irony? If a man didn’t have the good sense to be superstitious, he wouldn’t be playing in the oil game.
Max Williams stood with a face of stone, his eyes never wavering from the well as it painted the slush pits around him the color of honey gold. It had hit big, bigger than anyone had the right to expect or imagine. The rush he felt was overwhelming. It was, he said, better than hitting a fifteen-foot jump shot at the buzzer to beat Kentucky.
Bill Walker was beside himself. An oil well, he thought, came much closer to being a good time machine than a van any day of the week. Oil rushing through the pipes was not unlike the blood running through his veins. Williams, however, tried to temper his excitement with a hard dose of reality, which was always a bitter pill to swallow.
Wells had hit big in the chalk before. Would the M&K begin to slowly die out by morning? Would it be nothing more than a stagnant seep by the end of the month? One side of his brain was overcome with sheer, unadulterated emotion. The other side was numbed with concern. Wait and see, he told himself. It might be over by the end of the week. Then again, the M&K might go on for as long as Chuck Alcorn’s famous old City of Giddings well. He caught sight of Ray Holifield walking across a dirt road stained with mud and grease. Holifield was grinning in spite of himself.
“How’d she come in?” Williams asked.
“Looks like about five hundred barrels a day.”
“Any sign of her slowing down?”
Holifield shook his head. “She’s still
