Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter

11. "Claytie outworked everybody—and outtraded everybody."

Two grumpy veterans of the oil industry had gotten together again in late 1973—Claytie and Bill Haverlah—and the new oil-patch journey they charted would eventually propel them to career highs. Haverlah had quit the Williams companies in 1967 when the thrill of working for Claytie became more wearing than rewarding and his liver cried uncle. Their personalities inherently blended like water and the oil they sought: Claytie, the bold, high-octane, risk-taker whose hard-drinking, brawling persona belied an oilpatch prescience and optimism reminiscent of legendary wildcatters ; and Haverlah, the conservative, nervous, worrywart pessimist whose brilliance as a lease man and dealmaker was overshadowed only by his inability to keep pace with the frenetic work-and-play style of his boss. The chemistry of their reunion would prove, eventually , both enduring and bountiful beyond belief. “Haverlah was a great asset all the way,” Claytie recalled. “I am extremely aggressive and optimistic; he is extremely conscientious, extremely conservative, extremely cautious. It was like that all the time. So we were a great team.” Thus, in late 1973, Claytie welcomed the opportunity while at deer camp with Haverlah to try to persuade him to rejoin him. Claytie had been researching the Austin Chalk play in South Texas, and he thought Haverlah the perfect one to pull together some lease acreage. Claytie outworked everybody—and outtraded everybody.” 11 “ T H E G O - G O Y E A R S 147 Haverlah did not exactly rush back into Claytie’s corporate embrace . Neither would he come cheap. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna wait until after the New Year, and then I’ll go into buying leases for you.” Whatever misgivings Haverlah harbored about returning to the fold were likely dispelled by Claytie’s generosity: a 1 percent override on production from the acreage he leased. That’s how, from 1974 until 1976, Haverlah and his team of buyers wound up purchasing two hundred twenty thousand acres of leases in the socalled Austin Chalk Trend, a limestone formation in what’s known as the East Texas Basin and the Gulf Coast. The formation extends from the San Antonio area across southeast Texas to Louisiana , Mississippi, and Florida and into the center of the Gulf of Mexico. “Haverlah did a brilliant job buying those leases,” Claytie said, evoking shades of their early Clajon days in West Texas. The leases were for ten years and provided for a one-eighth royalty and a one-dollar-per-acre annual rental. “I later gave varying percents of overrides to many of my top hands on all this acreage,” Claytie said. In those early days in Giddings, in the mid-’70s, Claytie and his gang drilled five wells, but they halted operations when four of them proved to be noncommercial. Fortunately for Claytie, oil and gas production in West Texas was at the time enjoying a surge, thanks to Gataga #2 and the ever-productive Rhoda Walker developments in Ward County. But Giddings was another matter. “We went into a twilight zone from ’77 to ’79,” Claytie said of his efforts in the Austin Chalk Field. Giddings looked so bleak in that two-year span that in 1978 he tried to sell his acreage. Fate stepped in, again—fate, with about ten minutes or so to spare. In late 1978, with oil still languishing in the seven-dollar range, Claytie made an appointment with a Houston oil company in an attempt to unload his two hundred twenty thousand acres of leases. 148 P A R T T H R E E “I was going to ask twenty dollars an acre,” Claytie recalled, telling his story this way: He is sitting in an anteroom of the office, waiting to see the vice president of the company about acquiring his acreage. The appointed time comes and goes. No meeting. Ten minutes pass. No meeting. Twenty minutes. “He keeps me waiting thirty minutes, so I walked out, because I knew that anybody that makes me wait thirty minutes is already trading me out of ten dollars an acre.” Claytie would one day be grateful for the man’s rudeness, because those two hundred twenty thousand acres would become the heart of the Giddings juggernaut. “That is how fate works sometimes. Once again I was protected from my own ignorance by events. If he’d come out of his office, I’d...