What It Takes (47 page)

“How long was my day?” Dean said, later, when it was just a wistful memory. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t as long as Bob Dole’s. I’m sure of that.”

When the votes came in, it was Dole 1,133, Ostrum 948. And Bob Dole was in politics.

They called it the independent oil business, and that was one of the lures for George Bush: it even sounded right. He liked the strange, fierce language of this last American frontier, the barren Texas plain: the land men, promoting a deal, to carve out an override ... buying mineral, or royalty, at The Spot, over a bowl of red ... grabbing off a farm-out from a major, or wildcatting a field where there was show, but they plugged and called her a duster. ...

It was the only foreign language George Bush ever took to. But, for him, its highest incarnation was the honorable title borne by all the young go-getters:
independents
... now, that was something to be. That’s what he was out here for, and it worked: he won his independence. It wasn’t till he’d been a Texan for years, and was an oilman himself, shopping around for investors one day, that anybody thought to introduce him as “Pres Bush’s boy. ...” It sounded so strange, by that time, struck him so odd, that he went home and told Bar about it: first time in
years
he’d heard that.

But, of course, there was more than the name: there were all the truths it implied. It was a perfect business for George Bush—he had everything it took. The first fact was, the business rested entirely on personal relations. The goal of the independent was to put himself in the middle of deals. That meant finding out where deals were being done. You could find out some from the maps, where a dot marked each oil well, and you could find out more from the county land records, which showed who was buying land, or leasing mineral rights, in which tracts, and for how much. But once a deal hit the maps or the courthouse, it was done. What you wanted were deals in the making, the newest geology, the plans of the majors ... and for that, well, you had to chat up the geologists for the majors, and their scouts, and the ranchers around the countryside, the abstractors around the county courthouse, and your fellow independents ... you had to ply them, wine and dine them, ask about their kids, be sure to say hey in church. ... In short, you made friends. And no one would have more friends than George Bush. Once a deal was in the works, it was all done on handshakes—there were no lawyers around a table. Hell, lots of times, there was no table! Your word and your good name were your primary business assets: you had to play by the rules, the code. And no one was more sensitive to the code than Bush. It was like school, but better: the rewards weren’t grades, or honors, but cash.

In fact, it was like an eastern boys’ school, in those days, in Midland, Texas. Many of the young independents came from back East, from Ivy League schools. The locals called them “the Yalies.” Actually, they weren’t all Elis. Toby Hilliard and his partner, John Ashmun, were from Princeton, as was Pomeroy Smith—class of ’46, was Pom. There was a Princeton Club in Midland, with thirteen members. ... And the Liedtke brothers, Hugh and Bill, were Oklahoma boys, from an established oil family in Tulsa, but they came out of Amherst and Dartmouth. ... Earle Craig, like Bush, was from Yale. There was an ad hoc Yale Club in Midland, too. And, of course, a Harvard Club—there were dozens of these bright, young Yankees around. They were the best and the bravest of the Ivy League, the boys who weren’t going to sit in some office, after they’d seen the world in the war. And smart—they were all smart, it went without saying—but that was another thing about this business: it was better to be lucky than smart. It didn’t matter what you knew, or even whom. You could have all the geology on a formation, and production figures from working wells five hundred feet away on every side, and you’d put a hole smack in the middle ... and nothin’, not a drop, a duster. Go figure. ... So, no matter what else he did, an independent had to roll the dice. At a certain point, you had to trust to your luck. And no one was luckier than Bush.

The third thing about the business had to do with the same hard, dusty fact: everyone bored some dry holes. So, the trick was to drill a
lot
of holes. If you were in one deal, it was make or break; but if you were in forty deals, you’d get production
somewhere
. The essence of the business was activity: new friends, new deals, a sixteenth of an interest here, an eighth there, maybe three thirty-seconds, and you’d carry the friend who got you into it for the drilling costs, down to the casing point. ... The deals were anything the market would bear: whatever you could get a handshake on. Most of the independents didn’t have the capital to act like majors: simply lease the mineral rights under a piece of land, drill the wells, and sell the oil. Instead, they had to do a lot of little deals: maybe leasing mineral rights from a rancher, then running, that very afternoon, to the office of a major to sell that lease for five percent more. Or they’d take on a drilling contractor as a partner, and keep a share of the production, if a well on that lease hit. But even for the littlest players, it was the same game: in general, the business would reward hyperkinesis. And George Bush never could sit still.

In fact, none of those boys could: it was go-go-go, every day during the boom years—and most of the nights. By seven or eight in the morning, you’d see the Yalies hustling up Wall Street (for a long time, the only paved street in town), to The Spot, which was the coffee shop in the Midland Tower, or to Agnes’ Café, or the Scharbauer Hotel, with the flush of a big-deal-to-come on their cheeks, and maps under their arms, ready to unfurl on the first table they saw, after which their finger would trace the line of that trap ... right there, see? ... while they explained that this thing was surefire! Just barely got in there ahead of those bastards at Texaco! ... At night, while they sipped beer and barbequed in empty oil drums, they’d talk about one thing—oil—who was buying where, who was drilling, what kind of rock they hit at three thousand feet, and what royalty was fetching now on the west edge of Ector County. They’d dream and scheme and talk about the Big One ... the one they all meant to hit, the one that would put them on the map. It only took one. That was the beauty of the game. At one party, when all the Yalies gathered (they always were together, it seemed), Toby Hilliard leaned back in a chair and mused to the crowd at large: “You know,” said Toby, “some of us in this room are going to be
very, very
rich.”

The thing with Bush, it wasn’t just about wealth: sure, he wanted to get rich, like anyone else ... but not private-island rich, Monte-Carlo-in-the-winter rich. What drew him, what he had to have, was the game itself, the great doings ... so absorbing, so
do-or-die
. This was a game where he could shine! But, alas, by 1950, when he and Bar moved back to West Texas (over two years, Dresser Industries had moved him from Odessa, Texas, to a subsidiary in Huntington Park, California, and then to Bakersfield, then Whittier, then Ventura, then Compton, and, finally, back to Texas ...), George Bush was not in the game—not really. He was only a salesman of drill bits.

By the time George and Bar came back, the Scurry boom, a couple of counties away, to the northeast, was pumping out a fortune in oil, and the fortune was landing on Midland. Ideco, where Bush was employed, had its warehouse in Odessa. But Odessa was just a blue-collar town, home to roughnecks and equipment engineers (whose sons were perennial champs in the local high school football league). The West Texas offices of the major oil companies, and the brightest of the Yankee independents, were twenty miles northeast, in Midland. That was the place for Bush. ... Problem was, finding a place. Midland now had
three
paved streets, but almost fifteen thousand souls packed into a town built for half that number. Oil was booming during the war, and for all the years thereafter. But it wasn’t till a few years after the war that anyone, or anyone’s money, could beg or buy enough wood, steel, or cement to build a block of office space, not to mention a thousand houses. So when the Bushes got back, there was no house. And now they were four. Little Georgie was almost ready for school, and back in one of those godforsaken California towns, he’d been joined by a baby sister, a beautiful little blonde whom George and Bar named Pauline Robinson Bush. Still, best they could do, for the moment, was a ratty motel called, by happenstance, George’s Court.

Well, it was a wonderful adventure. They checked in, and every day, Barbara Bush would entertain two kids in one room, while George Bush drove the twenty miles southwest on Route 80—as bleak a drive as the U.S. offered; the sandstorms would take paint off your car—to his Ideco warehouse in Odessa, then back, at night, to his wife and kids in their motel. At last, someone built a tract of houses—wrong side of town, and no great shakes: all the same floor plan, 847 square feet (including carport), and an extra slab of cement, called a patio, that was buried in sand whenever the wind kicked up—but hell, they were houses. The tract got the nickname Easter Egg Row, for the way the developer painted these boxes—yellow, green, blue, or pink—mostly so you could tell which was yours. George and Bar bought one for $7,500—a bright blue egg, on a street called Maple. Of course, there wasn’t a maple within five hundred miles.

But a lot of the independents were moving into Easter Egg Row. Red and Ferris Hamilton (brothers and proprietors of the Hamilton Oil Co.) lived one street over. Ashmun and Hilliard got an Easter Egg to share, couple of blocks away. John Overbey, who was a Texan, an independent, just starting out, got a house across Maple from George and Barbara Bush. And that was how Bush made his move. Even at the start, it was all about friends. George would get home around six at night, and sometimes, Overbey would get back then, too. George would call him over for a drink, a cold martini on the patio (inside, if the dust was blowing), or maybe burgers from the backyard grill. He’d say to John, “Whad’ja do today?” And Overbey would tell his stories.

Overbey was a land man who’d scout out a likely property and try to cut a deal with the rancher who owned it, for a lease on the mineral rights. Overbey never had a pool of capital, so usually, he’d broker the lease, quick as he could, sell it to a major, or a big independent, who might be interested in drilling there. Sometimes John would take the money and run, maybe make a few hundred dollars over cost. Sometimes he’d sell the lease at cost, but carve out an override: that is, he’d keep a sixteenth or a thirty-second of any future production. The point was, he was in the game, and he always had a story to tell. ... Maybe, that day, it was a tale of his travels to a dusty little town called Monahans, where he took the local abstractor out for a beer at the only joint in town, and found out Gulf Oil was buying, right there, on the edge of Rattlesnake Air Force Base. Or maybe he’d spent the day on his maps in his office, which was a single room in the old Scharbauer Hotel, which he shared with five fellows, one of whom, Charlie Roberts, always had a crap game going in the back. ...

“Well, I had a hell of a day,” Overbey would start out, after a few sips. “Took a trip downta Rankin ... piece-a land looked pretty good. Looked like, on the map, like it might be open, so I went down to have a talk with this ol’ rancher, Ad Neil ...”

“Yeah?” Bush was soaking this stuff up.

“Yeah. So, I hunt him up, see if I could get a price outta him. ... Well, he’s brandin’ cattle ... he wouldn’t come outta damn corral. So I sat around on his fence half a day ...
then
the sonofagun wants me buy him a beer, before he’ll even
talk
to me.”

“So did you?”

“Yep.”

You could just about see Bush’s eyes shining with the stories, the exotica of old Texas ranchers, the snooping around on the majors, the lure of the game. ... Poor Bush only had a few stories about the guys he worked with at Ideco, and occasionally something funny some old roughneck would say at a well site, when George Bush stopped by to see if they’d need any bits. But that wasn’t the game, no. ... Overbey, even in his tiny way, was just where Bush wanted to be.

Pretty soon, with every story, he’d be asking Overbey a raft of questions. How much money could you make from a lease like that? Well, what could you have made, if you’d kept it, instead of brokering it? How much would it cost to drill one test there? ...

Finally, one night. Bush said: “Geez, if I could raise some money, do you think we could do that? ... Maybe get in business?” Overbey considered the proposition for about thirty seconds, before he said, yeah, he figured they could.

In the short run, money was equal or better than know-how. And money—to be precise, OPM, Other People’s Money—was the calling card of the best young Yalie independents. Earle Craig was playing with Pittsburgh money. So were Ashmun and Hilliard. (H.T. “Toby” Hilliard was actually Harry Talbot Hilliard, of the Talbots of Fox Chapel, where the Mellons and friends had their houses.) Hugh and Bill Liedtke were keyed into oil money from Tulsa. Without outside money, you could spend a long while hustling leases before you could call any oil your own. So Overbey would be happy to show Bush everything he knew ... Bush happily flew east to talk to Uncle Herbie. And Herbie Walker was
delighted
to place a bet on his favorite, Poppy, and to tell his Wall Street friends all about the doings of Pres Bush’s boy. Pres himself went in for fifty thousand, along with Herbie, and some of Herbie’s London clients, who all got bonds for their investment, along with shares in the new company—Bush-Overbey, they called it. Herbie Walker had decreed the name. After all, it was his money.

It was about $300,000, when they added it all together. So Bush and Overbey rented an office on the ground floor of the Petroleum Building—got it from Fred Turner, an independent who was moving up. But Bush-Overbey only took half—one room (the other was rented to insurance agents). A cautious player was George Bush. He wanted to be in the black every quarter. One room was enough, and a desk for each, two chairs, two typewriters, file cabinets, and a map rack. That was the sum total of equipment of the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Co. They weren’t going to sit in the office, anyway.