Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter

5. "Fifteen minutes. That close. Fate."

Johnny May and Clayton Williams Jr. hit it off at once, quickly deciding to partner in the oil and gas business as lease brokers and well promoters. Claytie knew nothing about his new venture, but both his dad and his grandfather had represented landowners in oil and gas leases, and May and his father were already promoting money for drilling wells. “Johnny grew up in Pecos and we complemented one another in that he had ties to the existing oil business and I had a good solid agricultural background and a good family reputation with two generations who had lived and done business in Fort Stockton,” explained Claytie. “This enabled me to communicate easily with farmers , ranchers, and landowners when negotiating for oil and gas leases. And Johnny and his dad’s contacts with oil people in Midland helped us from the oil side.” Claytie’s grandfather had built offices near Comanche Springs, later shared by Clayton Sr. “After O.W. died, my dad moved into my grandfather’s office, leaving Dad’s vacant. Johnny and I cleaned it up, painted it, built a map room, and moved in on July 7, 1957. And thus the partnership was born.” Significantly, the partnership would ride out a bumpy couple of years and build a small pipeline to carry gas to farmers from a well in Pecos County thirty miles northwest of Fort Stockton. That opportunistic little enterprise would become Clajon Gas Co., which years later, with Claytie at the helm, would morph into the largest “Fifteen minutes. That close. Fate.” 5 64 P A R T T W O independently owned gas company in Texas and form the cornerstone of his first great fortune. His battle cry: “Bustin’ ass for Clajon Gas!” Williams and May quickly emerged as an interesting and engaging team, although not always a financially solvent one. Brick manufacturing, rare minerals, and oil-field trucking were imaginative but ill-fated ventures, and a fling with a paper-products corporation fared only marginally better. Even their oil and gas enterprises, though eventually successful, got off to an erratic start. May became the field man, the well driller, and Claytie the broker, the dealmaker, and they bonded as a team. They enjoyed not only working and partying together but also hunting . “Johnny and I were probably as good a pair of blue quail hunters as ever came along.” Working with information from the county clerk’s office on filings of oil and gas leases and mineral and royalty deeds, they developed a plan: call on ranchers, negotiate a price on a lease for a certain period, determine royalty, tack on their commission, and present the package to the oil companies. “Using our map as an information center, we started approaching all the local land and mineral owners to obtain listings,” Claytie explained. “Then we typed a written submittal to all the oil companies who had recently bought leases in our two-county area.” By necessity, they spent many hours in coffee shops and bars, gathering leads on drilling locations and leases from land men and geologists—an oil business tradition called “swabbing.” Then he and May would attempt to acquire listings on mineral interests on surrounding properties. They started with high expectations, but six months sped by with no sales. “We pushed forward with stars in our eyes, but for lack of contacts and experience we were unable to make any deals,” Claytie said. “The only money I’d made was fifty dollars for checking re- O I L - P A T C H D R E A M S 65 cords for my dad. I was able to provide for my family by selling life insurance on nights and weekends. To stay afloat, working weekends was a normal part of my life for several years.” Nine or ten months into the partnership, Maurice Bullock, the Fort Stockton attorney close to the Williams family, enlisted Claytie as a notary public on an estate he was closing and paid him $220 for affixing his notary seal on 440 documents. The experience became one of the many lessons Claytie would collect and nourish through the years. “Of the five different heirs present, only two were speaking to each other,” he said. “All were in separate rooms and had their own lawyers. It was a lesson for me to realize that a person can leave...