Tag Archives: Conoco

January Research Trip

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I’ve just about caught up with sorting through photos and notes on scraps of paper and in my little spiral at this point on my second research trip for my work-in-progress, the nonfiction book West Texas Interlude. I spent most of last week at my grandparents’ place in Boonsville, before my aunt and I headed out on a two day trip to West Texas.

As happened on my first research trip in November 2011, many of my best recordings and notes were made while driving to doctor appointments for my grandfather or hovering behind my grandmother while she stirred something on the stove. I’ve done quite a bit of driving in the counties near where they live, as well as riding around on the Polaris Ranger or walking on their place. I haven’t seen as many deer as I did last fall, but a few are still hanging around. One morning I saw the largest jackrabbit I’ve ever seen, bouncing out of the brush near where I’d pulled over my truck on the gravel road. My grandmother and I spotted the red-tailed hawk that we’d seen a couple of times in November, and I couldn’t begin to count the cardinals that have flitted back and forth in front of me on the road or in the front yard, their vibrant feathers brightening up the dull browns of a January landscape in Texas.

Over the weekend, my aunt and I found ourselves in Stamford, Aspermont, Snyder, and Sweetwater. We were on a quest to find rent houses, an apartment, a motel, a couple of churches, an elementary school, and a roadside park where my grandfather played baseball on the Conoco team in 1950. We took photos all along the way, less for me to post online, more to show my grandparents (who would have come along for the ride if they could).

My favorite house that we found was this one in Aspermont (pop. 1021). A couple of ladies we talked to at the Pony Espresso cafe near the square in Aspermont surmised that this is the one where my grandparents rented an upstairs apartment as their first home after their wedding in 1950. Wouldn’t it make a perfect haunted house in a movie?

I love the dormers and the quirky diamond-shaped windows.

Alas, my grandmother took one look at the photos and announced that this was not the house where they lived. Our new friends at the Pony Espresso knew of no other house in town that was large enough to be divided into apartments that fit the bill, so we’re left to assume the house is gone.

Back to organizing photos and transcribing interviews…

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Back Roads Inspiration

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Since starting my research for West Texas Interlude in earnest, I’ve had to think of some creative ways to start piecing together a timeline of my grandparents’ life in the 1950s so I can plan the itinerary for the road trip portion of the project. I’ve gone through the hundreds of slides, only a portion of which have notes with them so far, and plotted out locations and years based on the number of candles on birthday cakes for my dad and his siblings. I’ll work more on the timeline and maps with my grandmother when I go to Texas in a couple of weeks, but it’s been fun to get started with this part of it.

To further my excitement, I found a couple of Texas road maps from 1954 on eBay for super cheap. I love that one of them is from Conoco (my grandfather’s employer at that time) and has a family standing in front of a 1950s model car — it perfectly captures the essence of this book I’m working on and its journey.

I can’t wait to sit down and pore over the maps and think through the differences between then and now when driving across Texas. One major difference is that I-20 from Fort Worth to El Paso was not in existence when my family lived out in far West Texas — the 1954 map shows the route they would have taken along Highway 80 to get from home to work. How cool that on this upcoming road trip I can look at the same type of map my grandfather might have used, rather than trying to guess at the old roads using my current atlas or GPS.

I guess I had that old map in mind when I went to the book sale at the Kennewick library this weekend — I came home with a book of sketches and trip notes from 1971, Back Roads of California. Later in the day I commented to a friend that I bought the book because it is “inspirational,” garnering a puzzled look and a question from her. Yes, old 1950s road maps and sketches from back road journeys in the 70s are inspirational. So many places left to see, so many roads left to travel. Sketches and trip notes have the potential to send me into a daydream lasting an entire afternoon, the outcome of which might shape the next spontaneous two weeks worth of travel. You never know.

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Pecos

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Dad holding Aunt Kay, Aunt Kathi, Uncle Jim, and Aunt Pat on her fifth birthday

Part 3 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

When the idea for a West Texas road trip came about, part of my motivation came from my roots on my dad’s side of the family.  As a kid I heard my dad mention growing up in several little West Texas towns, and I listened to my grandmother tell stories of the various motels and houses their family lived in during the ‘50s while my grandfather worked in just about every corner of the western part of the state.  Some of the stories I heard more than two or three or four times, but I never took the time to write any of it down or work at remembering or understanding the places they talked about.  Maybe it’s my being in my 30s now and seeing how frail life is, or maybe it’s that I’m learning more about storytelling, but something in me now desires to know my family’s story and be a part of recording it.

Recently my aunt and her husband have worked hard at taking several hundred of the family photo slides and scanning them into digital format.  Before my trip, I sat down with my grandmother to look through the photo CD and listen to her talk about the people and places in each slide.  I also had my dad list out every town he could remember living in as a child.  He listed 12 towns in West Texas and a few others back here in North Texas; my grandmother named a few others, including towns my dad didn’t recall because he was still an infant when they lived there.  Pecos, Fort Davis, Sanderson, Aspermont, Big Spring, Monahans, Texline, Sweetwater, Snyder, Seminole, Stamford, Coleman, San Angelo, Big Lake, Gainesville, Jacksboro, Wizard Wells, and finally, Everman.  I probably missed a few.  Hopefully I didn’t add any.

For some reason I get a little nervous when I ask my grandparents or dad questions about the story of their life in West Texas in an earlier era.  I’ve done tons of interviews for linguistic or ethnographic work in China, and I’ve started doing interviews as a writer here in the States—why is it that my own family makes me nervous?  All I can figure is that I feel guilty that I have to ask, that I should have been listening more carefully for the past three decades so I would already know all this stuff.

The short version of the story of why my dad lived in so many towns while growing up is that my grandfather worked as a land surveyor for Continental Oil Company, or as it is known more widely today, Conoco.  He was on the survey team that went out to every place in West Texas where Conoco put a well, and he measured and staked the land.  That’s about a zillion miles of land.  Just a few minutes before I sat down to write this, I showed my dad the photos of my trip, and he came to one of a striking mountain with a flat face as viewed from the entrance to Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  “That’s El Capitan—Daddy used that mountain as a sight for lots of his measurements all throughout that area because you can see it from a long ways away.”

I don’t know much about land surveying.  I don’t know if it’s sight or site.  But now I know that my grandfather was using that mountain to do his work two decades before that land became a national park in 1972.

And I know that my grandfather married my grandmother in 1950 when she was 18 years old and he was 20, and they left their hometown in North Texas to follow his job to West Texas.  A year later my father was born in Pecos.  Less than a year after that came my uncle.  Then three girls.  Five kids in seven years, away from home, often living in motels.  Tell me that’s not a story waiting to be told.

So, on the way from Fort Worth to Big Bend National Park, we drove out of the way so I could see Pecos.  Driving into town is like driving into 1955.  Square one-story homes, simple design, pastel paint.  I could picture my dad and his siblings playing in the front yard edged with cactus.

We were only in town long enough to take a couple of photos of the historical marker for the world’s first rodeo, fill up the tank with gas, and regret eating Dairy Queen in Odessa when we could have gone to La Norteña Tortilla Factory for their self-proclaimed world famous tamales.

Maybe one day I’ll get to go back to Pecos for those tamales and to learn more about the family story.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

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