In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

11: Working for “Big Texans” in Oil—And in the White House

1/: 7/l:,.kl"n'lfor ''!Jl" kana " In O,I-71nJ in Ihe 7flile Xuse«Ifwe [womenJface the fact . .. that there is no arm to cling to) but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women) then the . .. dead poet who was Shakespeare)s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.» - Viwinia Woolf ~st of my life I earned my living as a free-lance writer. The exceptions came when I took salaried positions on the Lubbock and Fort Worth newspapers and also when I worked for two "Big Texans." My stints with the Texans did not come in consecutive order. I worked for one in the fifties and the second in the sixties. I link the two bosses because I find it useful to compare them. They were alike in that each had a dynamic personality, appearing to be "bigger than life." But each differed in how he saw me, as an employee who happened to be female, and what he expected of me. It was only because I could compare my earlier work experience with Earl Baldridge, head of a Fort Worth-based oil company, that I could better understand why I was so miserable in the sixties working for Lyndon Baines Johnson. 109 110 In Their Shoes A huge bear of a man, Earl Baldridge had an outsized personality and was expansive in his thinking. He had literally moved up from the ground, having been a roughneck and wildcatter, searching for pay dirt on his own, the hard way. He had a rough-hewn face that spoke of grime, dirt and guts, with a large misshapen nose and skin disfigured with unsightly pockmarks. Although tall, when standing he did not project a straight line but a mass of human flesh, appearing more like a statue of Balzac, a lump of a man with shoulders that were not wide. Back in the Baldridge era, one could meet countless American businessmen who had started as he did, with little or no money in their pockets but with a driving ambition. Once they got to the top, they literally knew their company and its operations like an orchestra leader knows his players and their notes. Baldridge had started work in the oil fields of south Texas, where he talked a banker into loaning him fifty thousand dollars which he used as a down payment on a secondhand rig. In those days, a wildcatter could dismantle a rig and move it around by truck and, if lucky, become a millionaire overnight. Today, a rig could cost in the millions , even tens of millions of dollars. And the independent producer such as Baldridge has become a more endangered species than the buffalo or whooping crane. Working with a geologist who, Baldridge claimed, could "smell" oil, he began to hit pay dirt and soon the Chicago Corporation, a holding company in the Windy City, asked to buy him out. "I had only a few shallow wells, but those suckers in Chicago thought any oil well was a gold mine," Baldridge recalled. "My shallow oil and gas wells were nothing, really. But they looked good on paper. They could get good money for that paper." A deal was struck, with the Chicago holding company buying Baldridge's operation and Baldridge becoming executive director and later president of the Chicago Corporation, which was about the time I came along. Working for ((Big Texans)) in Oil-And in the White House 111 The year was 1953. Now thirty, I was back in my parents ' home, having lived out of a suitcase in Europe for the past year, and ready to settle down for awhile. I heard Baldridge wanted a public relations director, and when I went in to see him, I expected to give him a sales pitch about myself. But he assumed I was capable: "Would this job interest you?" He did not ask for a resume, or where I went to college or what I had done. Instead he spent his time selling the company. Like a wise professor, he knew that if he could motivate me to be interested, I would take it from there. Immediately after I started work, I began putting in ten-hour days, completely engrossed. "I'm going to build a big company," Baldridge...