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
