This is a story about the closest I got to “gett-in” the oil business back in 1963 in Texas.
My best-worst job was between my freshman and sophomore year at Southern Methodist University (SMU). I had gone back to Kansas City for the summer and secured a job in the river bottoms at a chrome plating shop. The floor was dirt and the wooden building was falling down. The company did everything that needed chrome plating, from carburetor parts (50 at a time) to 400 lbs. shock absorbers for the railroad (1 at a time). The process is to use hydrocloric acid to clean the steel, then put a positive charge on it and drop it into a tank of mud red chromic acid. The chrome in the acid sticks to the steel, and the thickness is related to the time it is left in the tank.
The process is highly specialized, requires use of highly toxic, volatile, and carcinogenic elements (such as hydrocloric acid, chromic acid and sulfuric acid), and produces very hazardous waste. The bad part of this job was the chromic acid. A minor cut would cause a volcanic scar with unhealing scab in the center. Also my clothes would dissolve where ever the acid touched upon washing. If I fell in bed without taking a shower my sheets would also dissolve on the next washing. I am not sure why my mother did not make me quit.
The owner of the business pulled me off the job for an hour or two one day to try to talk me into quitting college and going to work for him full time. I never considered it.
The good part of this job was the pay, minimum wage in 1963 was $1.25/hr. and gas cost .22 cents. I was getting paid 4.75/hr.
Now you ask, “What does this have to do with the oil business?”
Well I am getting there, I just had to get the story set-up.
I went back to SMU at the end of the summer and the first person I ran into in the Student Union was a friend Ray Hunt. (Son of H.L. Hunt) We sat down for coffee and I wanted to tell my story of really hitting the big leagues on hourly pay. So, I said, “So Ray what did you do this summer?”
He said, “I went to East Texas and ran my oil company.” And proceeded to tell me everything about it.
I sat there dumbfounded. If I had any wits about me, I should have asked, “How can I get into the oil business?”
I never told my story of working in the Chrome Plating business to Ray and my picture of SMU changed right there. I knew that some SMU parents were richer than my parents, but now realized that some SMU kids were richer than my parents. Up until that point I thought the kids didn’t have their own money, and that their rich parents bought them cars, etc. I now realized that some of the kids at SMU were very different. And that it was not obvious – Ray for instance, drove an older car than I did and did not appear to be rich.
The Chrome Plating job was the Best-Worst job ever. I learned:
- It was the best paying job I had ever had, up to that point.
- The job was all I needed to think about to make sure I finished college. No class seems tough after that. I just buckled down and studied harder, there was nothing that was going to stop me from graduating and working with my mind and not my body.
- It taught me much much more than I realized at the time.