Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter

16. "He is the sun and we are all the little planets that rotate around him."

What do you say when you’re about to marry a guy’s beautiful young daughter, and your future father-in-law tells you he likes to hunt, fish, work, and have sex, and then asks: “What about you?” How does a young man respond when the father of his new fiancée asks irritably, “Why don’t I just take you outside and whip your ass?” What does a daughter expecting her first child any moment tell her father when he checks his calendar to attend the delivery and says: “Friday would be a good day for me”? Nobody ever suggested it would be easy being a wife, an offspring , or an in-law of Clayton W. Williams Jr., father of five, grandfather of six, and master of almost all with whom he comes in contact. Not easy, but always eventful. The operative word is fun, according to daughters Kelvie, Allyson , and Chim, and sons Clayton Wade and Jeff. “Fun, crazy, wild, and loving,” says Kelvie, the first of two daughters by Claytie’s early marriage to his high school sweetheart, Betty Meriwether. “All the kids in Fort Stockton loved him because he’d get down and wrestle with you and chase you. Everybody called him Uncle Claytie.” Says her more rebellious sister Allyson, the second born: “He is so much fun, and he does everything at such a fast pace, fast forward . . . and he’s just bigger than life—although life does intervene every once in a while.” He is the sun and we are all the little planets that rotate around him.” 16 “ Clayton Wade, whom Claytie and Modesta adopted as an infant in 1970, talks forthrightly of his family entanglements during his youthful fling with drugs, but says: “We had a lot of fun. He’d teach me how to do stuff, work cattle and build water troughs and whatnot . He taught me how to hunt, mostly rabbit and quail . . . and that’s one of the great things we’ve always done together.” Describing his dad as “amazing,” Jeff, also adopted as an infant, in 1973, says he was mightily impressed when Claytie built a major irrigated farm complex piece by piece from portions of the family’s old Fort Stockton ranch. That’s where Jeff now lives and works. Adds Chim, youngest of the Williams brood and born on her dad’s forty-fourth birthday in 1975: “I say ‘thanks’ every night in my prayers that I was born into this family. We have so much fun. We love to shock each other and it all comes straight from the head honcho . . . . We get tickled at him all the time.” Really, how do you describe a vitamin-popping dad who once swallowed his hearing aid with a pocket full of pills; a hunter who waded into an icy lake in his boxer shorts to retrieve a dead duck; and a taskmaster whose nephews Scott and Clay Pollard, after a summer working the fence line at Happy Cove Ranch with Hispanic laborers, christened him “Tío Terrible”—pronounced ter-REE-blay. In Spanish, it means Uncle Terrible. Claytie has never been reluctant to impose his work ethic on anyone , family or otherwise. Kelvie relishes relating the time Claytie glanced out the window of his ClayDesta office and spotted a worker leaning on his shovel. He soon concluded that the worker was goofing off and sent an aide scurrying downstairs to fire him. Returning shortly, the aide reported, “You can’t fire him, Mr. Williams.” “And why the hell not?” “Because he doesn’t work for you; he works for the telephone company.” Greg Welborn remembers well his first meeting with his father-in-law-to-be. He and Chim joined Claytie and Modesta at the T H E G O - G O Y E A R S 205 Alpine ranch, and Greg and Claytie drove down to Fort Stockton together to go fishing. “We were fishing in this little bitty boat,” Greg recalled, “and I asked him what he liked to do for fun. He said, ‘Well, I like to hunt, fish, work, and have sex. What about you?’ “I said, ‘Oh, uh, I like to hunt and fish.’” But after his previous introduction to Modesta, Greg should have realized he was not joining an ordinary family. She was seated at a table with a friend at an outdoor restaurant when Chim brought...