Jammie Woodall

I’ve been asked what we did on the Fourth of July.  The main thing I can remember as a youngster is that on the Fourth of July, we would put the stock racks on Dad’s one-ton truck, throw on four or five bales of hay, and head to Cassoday for Countryman’s rodeo, a three-decade Independence Day tradition that began in 1939.  A neighbor  family, the Bings had two kids about our age and often came along with us.  Dad would drive; Mom and Velma Bing would ride in the cab; Raymond Bings, a cowboy and farmer, rode in the back with us kids as we rode the 25-30 miles up through the Flint Hills.   The Countryman family, cattle people, had put up a six-foot tall fence of hog wire to create an arena in one of their pastures.   Dad would back our truck up to the fence and we’d cover the stock racks with a tarp to give us some shade for watching the rodeo.  While we waited for the festivities to start, we four kids would walk an eighth of a mile from the arena to a little creek that ran through the pasture to throw the few firecrackers we had into the water to pass the time.  The families had brought a picnic lunch of fried chicken, potato salad and the like, which we ate in the back of the truck.  They had also 

brought a tub of ice water and sodas, which he hardly ever got except for this special occasion. 

Many of the competitors were cowboys from Butler, Chase, and Greenwood Counties as well as adjoining counties.  There were usually cowboys from elsewhere and even professional cowboys.  Normally we knew probably half of the contestants.  That was an outdoor outing we looked forward to every year.

One of the shops in Latham when I was growing up was the shoe repair shop.  I always liked going in to visit with Frank Ferguson, the gentleman that ran it.  The smells of leather and glue were nearly overpowering.  It was interesting to watch him work.  The shop had one power source to create electricity, then a big belt took power off the shaft to run equipment, like his grinder.  Mr. Ferguson had two wooden legs, which he moved by turning his hips.  His legs had both been amputated after a hospital injury where x-rays were accidentally left on his legs for too long a time.  He was, however, able to make a living and support his family, and I really enjoyed watching him work.  Back then, instead of buying a new pair, people tried to have their shoes repaired.  If possible they would replace the heels, sometimes by themselves with a rubber replacement heel if they had the tools, or have Mr. Ferguson refurbish them, to extend the life of their shoes.

Our friends from England, John and Margaret Edge, whom we met and worked with on the Thailand project, came to visit after we were all retired.  Pat and I had been going for the winter to Destin, Florida, and several times the Edges joined us there to visit the usual tourist spots together.  We also enjoyed time in the Orlando area.  They wanted to visit Yellowstone so I made arrangements for all of us to go there in June.  Pat and I had enjoyed visiting the park several times.

We drove up through South Dakota and Wyoming, and stayed a week in Cody, Wyoming, at the historic Irma Hotel, named for Buffalo Bill Cody’s daughter.  We enjoyed the sights there including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which is five separate museums featuring the history of the people from the native Americans to the cowboy days; western artists including Frederic Remington; natural history of the Yellowstone area; and the most comprehensive firearms museum in the entire country.  

The day we started out to drive to the east gate of Yellowstone, a rancher happened to come in the hotel door and asked if we were headed there.  He had just come from that direction, and warned us that a pretty bad snowstorm there had probably closed the east gate.  He called a friend that worked at the tourist office, who confirmed that we would need to reroute up through Montana and come through the north gate.  

John and Margaret enjoyed driving through the park and John took lots of pictures.  We stayed in a Yellowstone Lodge.  Many of the wait staff at the restaurant in the lodge were from  countries all over Europe, and enjoyed visiting with us and giving their opinions about Yellowstone.  

When visiting Jackson Hole, we attended a play where we met four people from France, who spoke a little English.  Luckily, John and Margaret had spent a lot of time in France and spoke quite a bit of French, so we had a good conversation with them.  We drove back to Missouri and ended the trip with a stay in Branson.

The Edges became good friends.  John was very interested in Americans because when he was a little boy in England, he got acquainted with our troops that were gathering there for the Normandy Invasion.  He just thought they were neat and had never heard of people with nicknames like Mike and Ike.  He was a little boy, right in the middle of what was going on.  They were different and became heroes to him.  He got up one morning and went to check on them—and they were all gone!  During the night they had moved out and didn’t even say goodbye.  He had very hurt feelings because he liked them all so much. He didn’t know they were leaving for the invasion of Normandy.  Years later he found a cemetery where many of them were buried.  John told us he had stolen some of their k-rations and always felt guilty about it.  They had gum and cigarettes and all kinds of stuff he’d never tried before.  I told him that I imagined the soldiers knew all about that, and he shouldn’t worry about it. 

Many memories have been made at our lake house.  When we first moved here, we noticed that many of the other nearby houses were built back up away from the water.  Our house, on the other hand, was close enough that with a couple of beers, you could easily stumble into the water.  On an early stay here, Tori was into roller skating.  She decided to try skating down the driveway, which is pretty steep.  She got going so fast that she could not navigate the horseshoe turn and ended up grabbing the trunk of a tree to stop herself.  

I had to think long and hard about telling this next story.  (It might need the disclaimer, “Kids, don’t try this at home!”)  

The railroad that ran through Latham started at Winfield and terminated at Beaumont, with a train that went through once a day, stopping at probably half a dozen little cities on the way to deliver and pick up freight.  The train workers would stay at the little hotel in Beaumont and return to Winfield the next day.  We all knew the schedule of that one train going through each day. 

I had a ‘41 Ford car; the distance between wheels on the car was exactly the width of the railroad tracks and the tires fit the rails well enough that they were pretty stable.  Emboldened by the story of someone else having done it, some friends and I loaded up in my car and got onto the rails where they crossed the road.  We started toward Beaumont, cruising at 35 mph through pastures and across road crossings, though going over bridges was nerve racking.  We had to be careful not to touch the steering wheel as it could make the car jump off the track!  At Beaumont, we got off the rails, went into the hotel restaurant, and got a coke.  When we got back into the car, I said I wasn’t riding the rails again, so we took the road home.  Eventually this little railroad spur shut down.

About 25 miles from our lake house where we live today is a cave restaurant, where we have often taken our guests.  To get into the restaurant, we had to take an elevator up about two stories from an area near the bank of the river that runs nearby.  The parking lot is about a quarter mile from the restaurant; we would call on their intercom and a guy would come pick us up in a golf cart.  

The owner had cleaned out a lot of dirt and rock to build the restaurant, which would hold probably 75 people.  The ceiling of the cave was approximately 40 feet above the roof of the restaurant.  The draft of cool air from the cave through an open door provided natural air conditioning.  

As the local legend goes, years earlier, people accessed the cave via a ladder from above, holding dances and consuming illegal moonshine.  Whenever they suspected revenuers or other authorities were snooping around, they would just take down the ladder until the killjoys were gone.  

Butler County, the largest county in Kansas, once had a lot of oil production.   In 1918, the El Dorado oil fields yielded nearly nine percent of all the oil produced in the United States.  The county boasted four refineries; Eldorado had Skelly and El Rico, Potwin had Vickers Oil Company, and Augusta’s was Mobil.  

Around El Dorado, one of the major producers was Cities Service, for whom Pat’s father worked.  Cities Service had their own little town called Oil Hill.  The company built everything they thought their employees would need, including a grade school, a community swimming pool, ball fields, stores, and restaurants.  Most students attended high school in El Dorado, but some went to Towanda.  Pat has good memories of attending school there.  

The Butler County area had several ball teams one being from Skelly Oil where half of the team was made up from employees.  Some would hire professional baseball players to come in and play for a season or maybe just for one important game.  One such professional baseball player was Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Yankees.  Several of Skelly’s players also worked at the refinery.  

In 1997, I got a call from an engineering firm headquartered in Houston, which was planning to do consulting on two refineries in Nigeria.  The Nigerian government wanted to get out of the oil producing business because they were unable to keep the refineries operating at 100% and were losing money.  Mobil Oil Company was gathering data to inform their decision on whether or not to buy the refinery, and our reports would be part of that process.  

I flew out of St. Louis ending up in Amsterdam, where I ran into one of the individuals I worked with on another project in Houston.  We both had reservations at the same hotel in The Hague where we stayed for a week.  The team consisted of four of us in refinery operations and four mechanical engineers.  After the week, we all loaded up on KLM, the only major airline that would fly into Nigeria.  Lagos is the capital of Nigeria, the most populous city on the African continent, and one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.  We were housed in a Sheraton hotel in Lagos, though we would later be separated and assigned to two different refineries.  Across the alley from the hotel, there was a nice, big building partially finished, but weeds were growing up around it.  I asked one of the people that worked in the hotel why construction had stopped on it.  I was told that every time a new administration took over the government, any projects started by their predecessor were shut down and not finished.  It was to have been a parking garage.  This was my introduction to the graft and misappropriation that was rampant in Nigeria during nearly three decades of unrest, in which there were several successive military coups and the country was governed by dishonest military leaders, one of whom, at the time of his death in 1998, had several hundred million dollars stashed in European banks.  

While in the hotel in Lagos, we determined who would go to which refinery.  The individual who was to work with me in conducting an operations study was from Venezuela.  He had been the assistant superintendent of a Venezuelan refinery but when things started to go badly there, he moved to Houston and started doing consulting work.  

Flying out of Lagos—not an international airport—was rather an adventure.  Each passenger was weighed with their luggage and belongings so that the exact weight of the plane was known.  The runway was not long enough for takeoff of these large airplanes, so when the plane was ready, soldiers, some of whom had been standing by in the concourse, would open a gate in the airport’s chain link fence, and stop traffic on the four-lane highway that ran perpendicular to the runway.  Then the plane had access to an additional 60 feet of extended runway across the highway.  

My partner and I were assigned to check over the refinery in Warri, Nigeria, but when we arrived, the airport there gave us a forewarning of what we might find at the refinery.  The people movers weren’t working.  It was raining and the ceilings were leaking.  When we went to get our luggage, parts of the belt were missing and we could see suitcases had fallen through the empty spaces.  I told my partner that maybe we didn’t even need to visit the refinery if the airport was any indication of how things worked here.  We stayed in a poor-quality hotel one night, certainly not like the Sheraton we had stayed at in Logos.  The next day we were taken to a compound of probably five or six houses surrounded by an eight-foot concrete fence, the top of which was embedded with broken glass to keep out intruders.  The compound was owned by the engineering company that we represented; their four full-time employees lived and  operated out of this compound.  My partner and I were housed in a two-bedroom house with a kitchen and living room.  The first thing we did when we were assigned a driver and car was to shop for groceries.  There was not much selection at the store, so we ended up with mostly eggs and a few other items.  We cooked eggs or ate at the local restaurants for our evening meals.   For lunch, we frequented the refinery’s cafeteria, where we were the only non-Nigerians.  The managers’ cafeteria was off limits to us.  The cook realized that we didn’t like hot, spicy food, so we were directed to what was less spicy.  

In the mornings we went to the refinery on a road with potholes big enough to hide a Volkswagen Bug.  Seriously, the potholes were about a foot deep and we had to dodge on-coming traffic to go around them.  When we arrived at the refinery, we met two individuals in engineering who would take us where we needed to go and make sure we had everything we needed.  My partner and I observed the different areas and the operating units, getting information by talking to the operators and their supervisors.  Their bathrooms were just partly operational; behind the wall, about half of the copper tubing for the waterline was missing.

I was to become convinced that Nigeria was the most corrupt place I ever visited.  It seemed that everybody was stealing whatever they could get their hands on, and punishment was non-existent.

We spent the next two weeks reviewing the refinery, which had been owned by oil companies outside the country before the Nigerian government took it over.  It was our conclusion that the manager for each of the units was stealing the operating money instead of putting it back into running the refinery.  For example, when chemicals were needed for operations, the money to purchase the chemicals ended up mostly in the pockets of the managers.  Funds for repairs went the same way.

When the crude oil came in, it was split using heat and pressure, creating a top product lighter than the bottom, which is more like a tea kettle, top is steam and bottom would be where you would find lime build up.  The refining process continues to split the resulting output into lighter and heavier materials until eventually products such as gasoline and propane are created.  If any of the units was down and couldn’t take the product being sent to it, there was no other place for it to go and no option but to send it to the flare.  To stop one unit was to stop the entire refinery.  The refinery’s flares burned fully open all the time.  

The other team was at another refinery, finding the same problem:  operation of the refineries wasn’t the problem, corruption was.  In Americans refineries, safety is of primary concern.  Some workers at the Nigerian refineries wore flip flops or were barefoot, confirming their third-world situation.  The Nigerian government owned most businesses outright, or at least had a hand in them.

The Nigerian army and police were corrupt also.  As we drove to and from the refinery, we’d see policemen stopping people on motorbikes, the main transportation there.  The officers would be talking to the people, trying to find out where their pocket money was, and would just help themselves to it.

An English newspaper had an article on the front page with pictures of people holding cans and bottles—anything that would hold liquid.  As the article explained, it happened quite frequently that somebody would drill a hole in a gasoline pipeline, and it didn’t have to be a very big hole because of the pressure on the line.  The leaking gasoline would create a pond maybe as big as a house and the people would wade in with their containers.  The gas stations always had lines because gasoline was scarce.  Motorbike riders bought their fuel by the liter, sometimes from people standing at the curb in front of their house, probably peddling gas gotten from one of the holes.  Sometimes someone would generate a spark with metal cans or some other way, causing the entire pond of gas to flare up into a huge fire.  Those who got burned would not go to the hospital for fear of being arrested for stealing.  They would use some home remedies and heal, or just die.  

The whole country, from the locals all the way up through management, was corrupt.  It was eye opening, and I did not enjoy being there.  

At the hotel, I had bought a pair of bookends carved of African ebony blackwood.  One side was a woman; the other, a man.  I had packed them in my luggage.  Nigeria didn’t want foreigners removing any items from the country that were considered part of their ancestry, and inspectors at the airport checked for such things.  Before the inspector opened my bag, I reported my purchase, and had to pay him the equivalent of ten dollars or so to let me go through, another indication of the endemic corruption there.  If  a person wanted to put a bomb on an airplane, I suppose there was a way to pay off the inspector.  As we entered the concourse from where our plane would depart, we were approached by one of the army officers who asked if we “had anything” for him.  There was no other reason for him to stop us.  I told him we had just paid the last of the Naira we had to a shopkeeper, who had tried to get additional payment from us by asking if we had any watches.  I had replied to him that I had only the watch I was wearing.  Next time, he told us, we’d better bring him a Mobil watch.  It seemed everyone had his hand out, or a hand in your pocket. I don’t know how the locals could even survive in a place like that.  I guess eventually they all learn to live that way if it goes on long enough.

We had made notes of what we saw and gathered technical information on production volume and the like, that we took back to the Netherlands to write the reports of our findings.  In some cases, what we wrote was verifiable; in others, we could only describe what we had seen.  

When we were safely back in the Netherlands, Pat came over to spend the three or four weeks we needed for writing the reports.  She flew into Amsterdam and I caught the train to meet her there.  The Amsterdam airport and railway station are in the same location.  No one was allowed to wait in the arrival area, so I walked around keeping an eye out where I thought she would come.  And finally, she did.  Our team was staying at a hotel in The Hague, so we took a taxi there.  

Pat was able to meet up with our English friends, the Edges, who had brought their camping trailer to the mainland.  While I was going to the office to write reports, she and the Edges took in the sights.  Among other points of interest, they visited Delft, famous for its blue pottery.  In the evenings, we would go out to a nice restaurant with them.  When I was off on the weekend, we went on an art museum excursion, seeing works of  famous Dutch artists.  After the Edges returned to England, Pat and I enjoyed walking along the canals; it seemed any place was as accessible by boat through a canal as by a street.  We saw boats approach a small bridge, where the boater would tie up, hand-crank the bridge open, maneuver the boat through the opening, then hand-crank the bridge closed again.  Bigger roads and highways had bridges high enough for boats to pass under.  The homes we saw on our walks, though often small and nearly identical to the other houses in the neighborhood, commonly had beautiful flowers out in front, and the friendly people tending them enjoyed visiting with us.  

On the 20-minute walk from our hotel to the office, I often saw a lot of people riding bicycles.  Outside the train stations, it was not uncommon to see perhaps 500 bicycles parked all in one area, provided by the government for free public use.  People would ride to wherever they were going, then leave the bike for someone else to use.

The guys in the office invited my partner and me to have a beer after work at an establishment that was featuring live music that evening.  Two ladies, probably in their fifties or sixties, were also enjoying the music as they each rolled a baby carriage, back and forth, back and forth, and tended to the child.  Later, as they pushed the carriages past us, we saw that the babies were lifelike dolls.  We never did figure out what that was all about.

We were very conscious of the effect World War II had on The Netherlands, and how it had stayed with them for a long time.  Amsterdam is a beautiful city with numerous museums; the history has been carefully preserved, even of such places as where American servicemen were housed.  We visited the Anne Frank museum and took a guided boat tour through the canals.  

When we rode the rails between Amsterdam and The Hague, we saw many little houses about the size of a single room.  People from the city would have gardens in the country and these were their weekend shelters with a bed and cooking facilities.  Amsterdam had many street vendors and performers.  There were also areas where the wind was blocked and people sunbathed, topless women even.  I suffered only two black eyes as a result of observing this phenomenon.   

After several days’ layover, we left Hong Kong and flew into Bangkok, Thailand, the biggest city in the country.  There were three of us consultants and our wives.  We spent the night at the airport’s hotel and were picked up the next morning by a minibus the company had sent to drive us to Pattya.  We spent a couple of nights in a hotel there until our apartments were ready in Ban Chang.  This area of Thailand, a third-world country, had been cleared of jungle for maybe ten years at the most.

We were assigned drivers as a way of employing a Thai citizen, as well as to eliminate culpability if we had an accident while driving ourselves.  We were taken first to a golf course that was part of the apartment complex in which we would live in Ban Chang, newly constructed for housing foreigners who were helping with the design and construction of the refinery.  Each of the four towers had six floors with two apartments per floor.  Our apartment was assigned to us, with the loan of several pieces of furniture—beds, a divan and chair—until our furniture, shipped over from Texas, arrived.  Another part of the complex was a club house, where we could have dinner or lunch or drinks.  

After we had settled in a bit, we were taken to where the refinery was being built to get our work assignments.  I was in training and was assigned a class who would be working in the area I would be supervising when we got started. My first class had probably ten employees, and the second had about eight.  Many Thai girls attended school until fourth grade; boys would often go on to tech school, many training to be mechanics for repairing cars and motorcycles.  Our employees had learned basic English and could speak to and understand us.  Some had been  sent to Fort Worth, Texas, for further language instruction at American Airlines’ school where their own employees were taught different languages.  We had gotten to know several of them when we lived in Dallas.  It was common for the teachers to assign an American nickname to each student, like Jake or Joe, for example.  Once during a barbecue given for the Thais and the Americans who were working on the project, two Thai fellows kind of latched onto Pat and me.  Although they were hard for us to understand, they did a good job of understanding us.  One kept trying to tell us the nickname he had been assigned.  “Biwwy.  Biwwy!”  But we just couldn’t get it.  Finally he said, “You know Biwwy the Kid.  Bang!”  In Thailand, our friendship with “Biwwy” grew; although he wasn’t working in my area, he still found ways to gravitate toward wherever I was.

In our observations of the Thai people, we noticed that women actually did more work  manually than the men did.  We would see them sweeping the streets, doing landscape work,  and the like.  As I did some hiring interviews, I often needed a translator because some of them didn’t speak any English.  It was common to hear them express the desire to have a good job,  a home, a car, and then a family.  They sounded much like American youth.

We had training sessions every day with each of our classes, and went to observe the construction of the refinery to acquaint ourselves with where structures were located.  Part of the assignments to our classes involved locating different tanks, pumps or other equipment within the refinery grounds.

Near the refinery were manufacturers of electronics, like televisions and cell phones, which provided bus transportation to and from work for their employees.  The refinery, too, furnished a ride to work from some areas.  Companies that were constructing the refinery had what looked like grain trucks to transport their employees.  While they waited on the truck, the Thais would squat on their heels rather than sit or stand.  Then they’d load up onto the truck, standing packed to go wherever they would be working. 

I was assigned to the tank farm and the marine terminal.  We also had an SPM, a single point mooring, 15 miles out in the Gulf of Thailand.  The big tankers bringing in crude oil would unload there and an underwater 48-inch pipeline brought it to the refinery’s crude tanks.  Refinery employees worked off a boat near the unloading point to make sure that nobody tampered with or stole anything off that single point mooring platform or damaged the 24-inch hoses attached to flotation devices. They were also there to prevent big ships from coming in across our pipeline with their anchor down.  This boat also did spill recovery.  If any product spilled in loading and unloading the tankers, they were there to lay down booms and recover the spill.  We also had to be trained on that work also, and spent several days onboard the ship.  Although it was fun, there was a lot of work to it also.  

The wives had projects of their own.  Because they were from all over the world, it was an adventurous thing when they got together; the language barrier caused them trouble making conversations and getting acquainted.  Pat started contemplating what would help and remembered her mother used to belong to a quilting club.  She asked them if they would like to learn to make quilts, so that each lady would have her own quilt to take home.  Taking turns hosting, once a week they would get together for the afternoon, to get to know each other as they sewed and got things done.  They each made blocks with their name and the country they were from, then exchanged them with all the other ladies.  The completed quilts made really a nice keepsake of their time together in Thailand; Pat gave hers to Tori.  I teased Pat that they must have served margaritas because they were always giggling.

We got Saturdays and Sundays off.  On Saturday mornings, our international group of guys had a golf gathering and were the first bunch to tee off just as it got light.  I just started playing golf about a year before I retired, and I was not very good.  We kept scores and added a handicap.  Afterwards we went to the clubhouse and got a couple of buckets of beer, paid for by the golfer with the best score.  Luckily, I never had to buy the beer.  I got good enough to know I needed to quit after I came back to the states.

We had a lot of social life also in the evenings.  A bunch of us would go to the clubhouse for dinner, or we would load up in cars and go to the different restaurant areas and resorts within about 15 miles from where we lived.  We’d have maybe eight people around the table and had a good time.  One place had a band; we Americans got up and danced sometimes, which the band appreciated, and so did we.  We ate mostly pork, chicken, or seafood.  What we in the U.S. call shrimp, they called prawn and were as big as your hand.  Some were from the sea and some were farm raised, a very different kind of livestock from Kansas farms.  There was only one restaurant in Pattya where you could get a steak.  That was the only place I know of that served beef.  The only cow animal you would see was water buffalo they used to farm in the rice paddies and such.  

Crops they had included bananas, coconuts and tapioca.  Before the bananas were  ready to be harvested, the banana growers would build little shacks out in the banana orchard.  Someone would stay there to keep monkeys out of the orchard until harvest.  After harvest, no one needed to stay there for another several months.  They also had elephants used for clearing the forest, and I don’t know what else they used them for.  We were out once when our driver was off for the evening.  I was driving home in the dark and came up behind a truck without tail lights and nearly ran into it.  I told Pat, “That guy better get his lights on!”  But as we got a little closer we discovered it was the butt end of an elephant!  He almost got rear ended by me.  

Pat and the other ladies visited a farm where elephants were trained and gave rides.  No saddles were available so she rode one bareback.  The prickly hair on the elephant’s skin made the experience like riding a porcupine.  As Pat walked around the yard, a young elephant came running toward her, ears flopping.  The trainer hollered, “No banan, no banan!”  Apparently that little elephant thought she was going to feed him a banana.  He was running so fast that if the handler hadn’t gotten him turned, he’d have run into her.  Pat was afraid she’d be a floor mat for a baby elephant.

 In Thailand, there were many street vendors that sold food.  Some had a four-sided glass box attached to the front of their bicycle, or a wagon that had their food and equipment.  Inside that glass box were ducks that had been killed and plucked and were hanging by their heads.  The vendors would stop on the street, and people could pick out the duck they wanted to have cooked.  The vendor would use their hotplate and a five gallon bucket.  When the food was ready, the people would stand there to eat it.  They would hand back their plate when they were through; the plate would be dipped into the bucket of water, and was then ready for the next diner.  We never ate food from a street vendor because they didn’t have very good sanitation. 

In a restaurant, we would usually get the prawns or pork chop or something like that.  We’d get fried rice with an egg mixed in; or they’d serve rice with an “over-medium” egg laying on top. 

When my driver took me to work at the refinery every morning, there were activities I knew would be going on at a certain location before I got there.  For example, a ring was set up in a yard where fighters trained in boxing and kicking.  Every morning there’d be several boxers standing around outside the ring watching those inside the ring sparring.  

At another location was a slaughterhouse for hogs.  The hogs were transported in the back of a pickup in cages so short that the animals couldn’t stand but had to crawl in on their knees.  By the time we drove by, they had already butchered the hogs, I don’t know how many a day but several.  They had to start early in the morning to be able to make their deliveries to the stores.  Most of the meat had already been hauled off by that time and someone was using a water hose to wash everything down to be ready for the next night’s work.  It was different from what we’re used to.

The population of Thailand is 95% Buddhist.  If I rode with my driver through the town or sat on the street somewhere, I often saw Buddhist monks, perhaps five in a group, each one carrying a little pail.  As they walked by the different storefronts, the proprietors would run out and give them food, like rice and such.  That’s how they got their rations, I guess, every day. Although it wasn’t mandatory, each Buddhist male was expected to spend a couple of months as a monk during his lifetime. 

Bangkok is a dirty city.  In Thailand the sewers run under the sidewalks and the slab of the sidewalk is the top of the sewer.  Often the cracks between the sections of the sidewalk  were not sealed very well and the ammonia coming through would burn your eyes. 

Most families didn’t have a car, but the luckier ones had a motorbike.  Two riders were the limit, but we would frequently see the dad driving, the mom always sitting side-saddle on the back and often holding a baby, and several children standing up and hanging on somehow.  

Not only were we expected to support the local economy by hiring a driver, employing someone to clean our apartment was also assumed.  Pat, being Pat, didn’t want or need help, but eventually got the same woman who cleaned many of the other Americans’ apartments to come in four hours a week.  Les didn’t know much English, but she and Pat could mostly understand each other.  Before she arrived, Pat would be hurrying around, doing the dishes or picking up, but Les would correct her, saying, “No, no.  My job.”  She was very kind, like most of the Thai people, and an older lady; I think she and Pat mostly just goofed off.   

Our caddies, when we played golf, were women in big bonnets with veils to block the sun; they were anxious to keep their skin from getting browner.

Pat and a friend from California had been at a luncheon at the clubhouse.  When they returned to the woman’s apartment on the fourth floor (ours was on the fifth), they found the door locked.  Thinking initially that her husband had come back and locked the door, they soon discovered that the apartment had been broken into.  Missing were some Levis and tools.  Pat and the woman went to the floor’s lobby window overlooking the parking lot and shouted to the drivers that they needed help right away.  The drivers came up, got the door opened, searched the rooms, and found another driver, who they later discovered had a drug problem, laying on a shelf behind hanging clothes in the master bedroom closet.  The rescuers dragged him down all those flights of stairs, beating on him the whole way.  

Our drivers took good care of us, and we tried to take good care of them.  Our first driver, Bamein we helped with paying his rent.  We often tipped our helpers as well.  Our second driver, Sushot, was from an area in northern Thailand populated by artists such as potters.  

We enjoyed our year there and came home to America before the refinery opened.  

Following retirement from Texaco and the many years of working there, I could see in about three weeks that I was not going to be happy doing nothing, so I took another job.  I went to work for SGS out of Deerfield, Texas; my territory covered the south half of Kansas, border to border.  SGS worked with the World Bank in the process of loaning money to people in third world countries. The bank required inspections on site on behalf of the people who ordered a product.  As we got an order, SGS would inspect for quality, as well as quantity, on products being loaded in shipping containers. 

I worked a great deal with Rubbermaid down in Winfield, inspecting water bottles they were sending to the Philippines.  I assumed the products were going to a reseller there.  

A Cessna airplane, going to the Gold Coast in Africa, had to be checked.  I needed to take pictures, verify serial numbers on the radios and all the equipment.

One of the oddest products I was sent to verify were cattle hides from packing plants in Dodge City ordered by a company in the Philippines.  The hides had to be rejected if they had too many holes or were too large.

In Hutchinson, I reviewed stainless steel restaurant or food service equipment.  A company in Parsons made oil tanks in sections, to be bolted together on site.  My job was to inspect the sections and make sure they had the right number of parts before it was shipped to South America.  A company in Peru needed machinery to manufacture chicken feed, so I inspected that equipment.  Oil products in El Dorado needed examination as well. 

These inspections were not just a simple glance; a great deal of precision and security went into the job.  For example, I had to break open cases of whatever I was checking to make sure it met the required criteria.  When a shipping container was being loaded with products, I’d have to lock the doors on it while the workers had a break for lunch so that nothing could be taken in or out until we were ready to get started again.  When the container was loaded, it was sealed, and a report was written and sent.

It was also my responsibility to inspect the jet fuel to be loaded onto Air Force One if and when the President of the United States flew into Wichita to fuel up.  I would order testing on a sample of the fuel on the truck.  The truck would then be locked until the test results came back, before the plane could be filled with fuel.  Fortunately, that never happened on my watch. 

In July of 1993, we bought our place on the Lake of the Ozarks and moved here in September.  That ended my work with SDS because I was out of the region they were covering.  About six weeks after we moved to Missouri, I got a call from the man who was previously the  Manager for Operations at Texaco, asking if I was interested in a job in Dallas writing training manuals for a new refinery to be built in Thailand.  Pat and I went to Dallas and I interviewed with Caltex, owned by Chevron and Texaco, conducting operations overseas.  I worked there about a year.  My boss there, John Edge, was from the UK, living in southern Wales, and he had worked for British Petroleum as a captain on ship tankers hauling crude oil.

John’s wife Margret and Pat got along well, too.  There were people from all over the world working together on this new refinery, from South Africa, Australia, the U.S., Canada, and other countries.  After we had been in Dallas for a year, we got another company to help with writing the manuals, training material, and operating procedures.  There were 15 or so writers who needed oversight and clarification.  John was in charge of a tank farm and the marine terminal.  I had never worked around a ship, so I had things to learn also.  He went on to Thailand and we went to Houston for six months until that work was completed.  

Although the company was unsure about whether I would go overseas, John wanted me.  There were four of us from the El Dorado refinery, though I was the first to go to work for them.  When we flew from Houston, we laid over for a couple of days in Hong Kong.  When we landed and went downstairs to the main entrance, there were thousands of people, some holding signs with the name of the person or persons they were there to pick up.  I felt very out of place among all the Chinese people.  I was conscious of how it would feel to people from other countries to come to a city like New York and be surrounded by people of a different nationality.

As Pat and I did some touring in Hong Kong, one area was right next to the boundary with China.  We got our picture taken with an elderly Chinese lady on one of our tourist stops where they sell knick knacks; Pat bought a brocade tablecloth that she gave to Tori.  When we left Hong Kong, a man we spoke with was very concerned that Hong Kong would be handed back over to China in just a couple of years after we were there.  We could tell he was concerned and almost frightened about the prospect. 

Dad and mom lived their dream of owning a farm and livestock. Now it was Pat and I’s time to start our life dreams.

In May 1957, Pat and I left the farm and moved to El Dorado, Kansas.  I went to work for the Kansas State Highway engineers, doing surveys and testing on the new road they were building from El Dorado to Leon, Kansas. We would do sampling of the gravel and clay and different sizes of gravel to be put on the roadbed to see if they were the correct amount of each size of gravel and enough clay to hold the gravel together.  I worked for the engineer department until September 1957, at which time I went to work for Skelly oil refinery in El Dorado.

I was hired the same day as another guy by the name of Bob Duncan. Bob and I were the first of 25 new employees hired in the next 45 days. The first two weeks of our employment Bob and I spent cutting weeds with the idiot stick.  I thought I didn’t know they made gasoline out of weeds and our sweat. After about one year of assent to work at the boiler House where they made steam for the refinery and cooling water for the cooling towers to keep the equipment cool and air for instruments. I worked there for the next 10 years. My good friend Johnny Ramp worked for Skelly but at a different part of the refinery and we both worked shift work on the days off we would cut firewood in the wintertime to sell. In the summer we would haul hay.

I had an opportunity to buy into a fertilizer plant after 11 years working for Skelly. I quit and became part owner of Mears Fertilizer in El Dorado.

We built the fertilizer business and had to hire two more employees.  We sold liquid fertilizer and anhydrous ammonia. I saw a lot of the farmers around the area. After three years we built a process unit on the semi and started making our own fertilizer as well as converting acid, and hydrous ammonia and water.  Of the three ingredients of an inline reactor would produce a 10-34-0.  Fertilizer product after each tank was filled we sampled and sent to the state we never had a failure on the product we sent. After two years being the minor owner it looked like I was going to be away from home running this machine all over the Midwest so I sold my part of the business and went back to work for Skelly oil refinery . I was the first employee who had quit to be rehired in the last 20 years. I felt quite lucky to get back to work where all my friends are. I did not go back to my old job at Skelly Oil as there weren’t any openings at that time and I went to part of the refinery  that was called light oils I worked there for about two years doing jobs that the operators units did. While working at Skelly I ran for county commissioner of Butler County District 2.  I won the election and took office in January 1977.  I continued working for the refinery while serving on the county commissioner job.  The county commissioners job we would meet one day a week but actually it consumed more than two or three days a week.  I worked with a bunch of guys at the refinery where I could trade my days for their nights and continue working for Skelly also.

I was promoted over the next several years and retired in July 1992 as unit Forman in the chemical department with 25 employees.

Why did you decide to put your stories in a book?

Well, my dad passed away at 46 and mom at 53.  I had never talked to them about their life, prior to me coming on board to the family. But I always wondered you know, about what I could find out if I was still talking directly to them.  I have remembered some of the stories as I lived them.  Hopefully, my friends, kids, grandkids, and family will be able to get some information from this.  And they will start asking me questions about my life or some of the family’s life, and they can get it down and have it for future references.

As I got older and was able to remember the stuff that had affected me. I kind of remember those better than what my parents had passed along to me. I got some information from my dad’s second brother, Fred Woodall, before he died at the age of 94. He lived in St. Louis in his later life, and I got some of the answers through him. His memory was fading as he got older.  I am almost eighty-five now and I can tell that my memory is slipping, and it takes me longer to remember accurately.

What would you like your grandkids and great grandkids to know about your parents?

Well, dad was a farmer rancher and he loved animals, big and little, and he would never get rid of any pet. The cat population around the farm was probably between 30 and 40 about all the time.  Dad fed them good enough that none of them ever ran away they just kept breeding, expanding the population. His horses and cattle were something that he had a lot of pride in and he took well care and fed them well. So, mom, she was a very good cook. She cooked at the school for several years.  But at home, she always had big meals, always had desserts.  She was very caring and nice to be around person. Although, if one of us kids, I have one sister and if we did something that shouldn’t have been done by me, we always got a little switch or  sometimes.

What would you like to say to your future generations?

Growing up I was an ornery kid. I wasn’t distructive.  But hopefully you grandkids will remember to do the right thing. That’s about all the information or advice I would give.  Just you know what’s right and what’s wrong.  Be kind to others.

Love you.   Grandpa

Pat and I returned to the farm in Kansas around the middle of December 1956. The weather was cold and wet.

Mom hired a high school boy to help her with the farm after dad had died in October. After I was home a few days she moved to Wellington, Kansas where most of her folks lived. I knew I didn’t want to be a farmer but I do like living In the country.

Friends and neighbors came one day and we cut sixty acres of sorghum and shocked in one day. Man, what a good feeling to have that done, and what a good bunch of friends they were.

I was busy feeding the livestock and couldn’t go and get a job to take care of Pat and my expenses, so mom said we would have a sale in April, 1957 and rent out the farm. We sold most of the older cows at the livestock sale barn. We had the auction of the the rest of the cattle, horses and machinery in April. It really hurt to sell my horses and Dad’s work team, it made me feel like I had failed. I rode my two horses around the barn yard while they were being auctioned off, it still hurts now after fifty plus years.

The next move was to El Dorado, Kansas and we rented out the farm.

About ten Airman left Biloxi, Mississippi on the train and arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico in August, 1955. We were picked up in a bus and taken to our radar site in north central New Mexico. The site was about 20 miles southeast of Chalma, New Mexico with an elevation of about six thousand feet. We were given our barack’s and room numbers as we departed the bus. I was assigned to a room that was occupied by Frank Herman who was from Garden City, Kansas. Frank had been there for several weeks and I was assigned to the same crew he was on. He was a good roommate and we became good friends. Also on my team was James Cable and the three of us hung out together.

The radar site was there to keep all aircraft away from Los Alamos Atomic bomb proving ground. There were several other radar sites spread around that area. Our site had around three hundred people on site. The radar operation was a 24/7 we worked as teams, there were four teams and we were “Dog” team. We had private aircraft who would call us to guide them out of storms as they were flying over the Rocky Mountains. We also would be tested when the Air Force would fly unidentified B-52’s. We would call for fighter aircraft out of Sandia AFB to intercept any unidentified aircraft or any aircraft that was flying towards Los Alamos. We would direct the fighters where to intercept the Air craft. Sandia AFB is located at Albuquerque, NM. Our site was five miles from Elvado Lake where there was a bar/restaurant, filling station and a few old rental cabins. Zeke and Carlotta Bruswelos opened and operated it, Zeke also worked at the radar site as a handyman.

Pat and I got married on December 23, 1955 she stayed in school and graduated in May – June 1956. I had rented a 18 ft trailer from Zeke which was close to the bar/restaurant. Pat would help in the restaurant while I was at work sometimes just for something to do as there wasn’t television. There was an Apache reservation on the other side of the lake with their village about ten miles from the bar. When they would get their monthly check they loaded up in the pickups, males in front females in back then off to Zeke’s for a evening of fun and booze.

In October 1956 mom called and said dad was in the hospital and not doing very well. I got a emergency leave and we started home. We got five miles east of LaJunta, Colorado and our car broke down. We had a wrecker pick up the car and take it to a garage for repairs. We then walked to the bus station and in just thirty minutes the bus was to leave for Wichita, KS. Dad died a few days after we arrived of cancer and we went back to pick up our car then went back to our trailer. Uncle Fred and mom went to the Red Cross and I got a honorable emergency discharge to help mom on the farm. We loaded up our stuff the first part of December, 1956 and came home to Kansas.