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Swift Energy Company History
 
 


A Father Remembered


by Lorraine Swift-Abbott

(First Published in the Swift Energy Newletter, September/November, 1990)

 

Virgil Swift, the patriarch of Swift Energy Company and the father of its founders, died on July 26, 1990.

No one can enter Swift Energy through the fourth floor reception room without seeing the picture of our father on the wall facing the door. It was originally unveiled in an earlier suite of offices when the company held its first open house. He was there, along with our mother, not quite comprehending the honor bestowed upon him.

Somehow Dad never fully understood his importance to Swift Energy. It was far more than being the father of its founders. He was the teacher, the inspiration, the support. And until the day he died, he was vitally interested in the company's well being.

As the oldest kid and only daughter, I witnessed his tutelage of my three brothers in the oil and gas business. He found my own interest in his work unusual and not to be taken too seriously. Still, during these last few years I think he enjoyed recalling for me the many incidents that defined the role, however small, that the Swift family had in the oil and gas industry.

Dad was the fifth of six sons, all destined to work with their own father or older brothers in the Oklahoma oil and gas fields even before they reached their teenage years. George Sherman Swift and his wife Lillie did not plan to be an oil and gas family, but the discovery of oil on or near the farms they share-cropped presented new possibilities for income. And those possibilities were not limited to the male members of the family. The hardest worker of all, Dad always said, was their mother, who ran a boarding house for the oil men from the eastern states and the transient workers who moved from well to well. It was she, helped by her four daughters, who rose at 4 AM to bake biscuits, pack lunches, and perform the never-ending tasks required to board eight or ten men, in addition to raising a large family.

When Dad was six, the family moved to a 160-acre farm north of Tulsa owned by a man named Wheatley. His mother continued running a boarding house, and other family members had various farm duties. By then his father and oldest brother Bert were using their teams of horses to haul wagon loads of oil equipment and supplies for drilling teams and to assist in various construction tasks.

Dad himself became fascinated with oil and gas activities when oil was discovered on the Wheatley farm, and rigs began surrounding the family home. The tin-covered power houses erected after the wells were drilled were particularly intriguing with their "big ol' gas engines" inside providing the power to pull and push lift jacks at several surrounding wells, some as much as a half a mile away.

When Dad was 12 he began working for about 75 cents a day for a farmer, who also happened to be an oilfield pumper. "Whenever he had to pull a well, he let me tail the rods out, and I got $2 a day for that. That was my very first oilfield work," Dad said.

By that time Bert, 25, and the second brother, Earl, 19, were working with drilling crews full time. Two other brothers, George (called Coss) and Jesse, 16 and 14, respectively, were finding oilfield work as they could. Their father continued to divide his time between farming and hauling for the oilfields with his team of mules, but World War I had broken out in Europe, and "the government came along buyin' mules for the English and Dad sold those mules for $600."

With the mules gone, the family decided to move to Shamrock, a new boom town where Lillie promptly opened a new boarding house and George began working in the oilfields full time. Soon American boys were going to war, Dad's brother Coss included, and the Oklahoma oil industry was "desperate for good hands." At the age of 15, Dad began working as a roustabout for Sinclair Oil Company.

In a few months he transferred to a job as engine man (pulling rods and tubing from wells) with Cosden Oil Company. But he also left Cosden within a few months, heading for the big boom town of Burkburnett, Texas. It was 1919, and he was 16 years old.

At Burkburnett you could step off one rig floor onto another. "The wells were up and down ever' alley," Dad said. "That was my first time to see rotary rigs. They just used cable tools in Oklahoma."

In Burkburnett Dad began as a roustabout "pullin' wells" at $8 per day for a 12-hour shift, but in a few days he was promoted to the engine man at $10 per day and then almost immediately received a raise to $12 per day.

He stayed there less than a year, but the 17-year-old who returned to the family in Oklahoma was a seasoned oilfield hand. Among other things, he had learned how Burkburnett wells were "stimulated" by nitroglycerin explosives brought into the city and lowered into the wells at night to circumvent a city ordinance against them. "The underground racket didn't add much to all that other drillin' noise, so they got by with it." In later years, his own children were to learn that their Dad carried up to a hundred quarts of solidified nitroglycerin ("it wasn't as dangerous as the liquid stuff") in the back of his car to shoot Swift wells.


Lillie Swift surrounded by her sons, Bert, Earl, George (Coss), Jesse, Virgil, 
and Adrian (circa 1930)

 
 

By the time Dad returned to Oklahoma, Bert was a drilling contractor in the town of Owasso and Coss was working for him. Dad joined them, and, after a short stint as a tooldresser, became a driller at the age of 18. "We drilled wells with manila rope 3 inches in diameter. Cable cost too much and jarred the drillin' machines too much, so we would go down as far as we could with rope. We drilled one well more than 1800 feet and never put a piece of wire line on it. Later, though, they added big springs on the wires to absorb the shock and everybody stopped usin' the rope."

Dad worked for Bert around Owasso for several years and it was there that he met our mother, Edith Jackson, who was a telephone operator and part-time high school student. Dad decided to join her and add to his abbreviated grade school education, but the lure of the oilfield was too great. Instead he convinced her to join him in marriage on April 15, 1924. Together, they vowed that their own sons would be "educated" oil men.

Dad and Coss continued working with Bert all their lives, first as his employees and later as his partners. During periods between wells, they worked for other drilling com­panies, but always regrouped in family efforts. Their other brothers joined them intermittently, but the youngest, Adrian, subsequently developed his own natural gas busi­ness and Jesse migrated to Cali­fornia, where he became superin­tendent of a gold mine. Dad's brother Earl ended up as superintendent of production for a large oil com­pany in East Texas, after going there to assist Bert in drilling one of the first gushers in the East Texas field. Reeling from the depression years and owing wages back in Okla­homa, Bert sold his interests in the well and returned to Oklahoma.

Dad had many stories to tell about their work, and we revisited several "locations." One was north of Tulsa, where they drilled three wells in the winter of 1926. "We came in with teams of horses pullin' 30 wagon loads of rig. We worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week and stayed out there about 90 days.

Ever' once in awhile we'd get to go home, and one night my tooldresser and I came back in a Model T and couldn't get across a swollen crick. Some farmer loaned us a couple of horses and we rode bareback across it."

That particular story is reminiscent of one told by one of my own brothers (A. Earl). He was Dad's teenage helper when another swollen creek separated them from the  rig. That time they abandoned their pickup truck and waded through rushing water to get to work, and, Earl recalls, they stayed on the job until the creek went down. That was only one of many lessons Dad taught his sons, his motto for the job being "stay on your feet with somethin' in your hand to work with." Frequently the "somethin"' was a sledge hammer for reshaping fired bits.

Another story described Bert standing over a newly drilled gas well they were trying to get to flow. "He got right over that hole and when that gas let loose it caught him under his britches, turned his pockets wrong side out, and threw his matches all over the rig floor."

My favorite story, however, is about an incident that occurred in Minnesota where the three brothers were drilling 36-inch-diameter holes to pump water off an iron ore mine during World War II. Unbeknownst to them, about 40 feet below the surface, the drill bit had angled out around a hard deposit of tachenite. When they tried to drive pipe down the hole, the end bulged out and was caught in the tachenite.

"We had to do somethin' to get that pipe out. So we stuck a long-jointed ladder down that hole and I went down in it with an acetylene cutting torch and cut the bulge off the end of that pipe. The superintendent of the mines happened by and when he looked down in the hole he started runnin' off and screamin' 'Get that fool out of there!' I came out, and we got the pipe out, too."

By some standards Dad and his brothers never made it big. During their working years, oil seldom sold for more than $1 per barrel, and at one time was as low as 10 cents. Natural gas, frequently considered a waste product, usually remained well below 10 cents per thousand cubic feet. Still they made what we all considered "a good livin'."

The real mission of the six brothers, it seemed, was to teach their sons everything they knew about the oil and gas business and to urge them to supplement their skills with a formal education. Thus, each of the sons in the third generation were introduced to field work at an early age.

Tragically, separate accidents robbed the third generation of three of the Swift brothers' sons (and critically injured our own brother Kenneth Merle), As a result, the third and fourth generations of Swifts now engaged in the oil and gas industry consist entirely of sons and grandsons of Dad and Coss, all of whom are petroleum engineers and/or lawyers. Though small in number, they are striving to carry on the family tradition planned by the six Swift brothers.

Today, of course, much of that family tradition is focused in Swift Energy. Dad and Adrian both knew about that and were extremely proud. Had the others lived to see it, we think they, too, would have felt that their mission had been fulfilled. They also would have been assured that Swift family members would be participating in the oil and gas industry for some time to come.

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This page was last updated on Wednesday, April 30, 2003, at 02:38:00 PM.

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