Growing Up in the Oil Patch. John Schmidt J.
I had been on hand to record the historic event for The Calgary Herald, had asked the right questions in a businesslike way; hence Murray’s invitation.
He fitted in well with the easy informality of a small foothills city, where everyone knew everyone else and business was carried on on a handshake basis. He deemed it a privilege to introduce a greenhorn from the East, to some of the players in the agriculture field and the oil patch. Both were rapidly adding wealth to the city’s surging economy. After a couple of Hudson’s Bay Jamaica rums, he said:
“You ought to write a book about some of the fellows who did the bull work, to get this province under way from its inception, in 1915. There’s one of them sitting in this very room. Hey, Tiny, come on over here. I have a pencil pusher here, who can whip that book of yours into shape for you.”
From a table along the far wall came a wiry, bespectacled little wisp of a man who sat down at the table and, in a mild, tremulous voice began spinning yarns about his experiences as a driller and mechanic, in the oil patch all over the continent. He had worked in them all. He brought in thousands of wells spewing thousands of barrels of oil and wells whooshing millions of cubic feet of natural gas per day — wells which made a lot of people rich, as the result of his know-how about pounding bits with old cable tool rigs, hundreds of feet into the proper oil- and gas-bearing strata.
This was A.P. Phillips, whom everybody knew as Tiny because of his small stature. In a few minutes the air was filled with a freshet of high-energy yarns, tales and myths about the commercial oil industry which sprang up near Tiny’s home town in Pennsylvania, only a decade and a half before his birth.
He knew many of the players in the new industry and knew how they operated. He was proud of his own accomplishments in the oil patch, yet he talked more about his “pardner,” Frosty Martin, who had died three years previously in Long Beach, Calif., at age 82. Tiny was still mourning the loss.
“Yes, we saw it all from almost Day One in the United States,” he said proudly. “We were both born in 1873.”
That put Tiny’s age at 85 and here he was spry and chirpy, downing drink for drink with the upscale crowd at the Elks Club.
He was born at Oil City, which was near the scene of the famous Drake Well. It was the first big commercial well in the U.S. Being so close to this historic event, its impact had never dawned on them. Although they later participated in drilling similar wells in their time, they were just workaday assignments in a new age of technology.
“Frosty was a terrific mechanic, inventor and entrepreneur who made and lost two fortunes but died rich. But he always came to see me. He never forgot me. I was always his pardner,” said Tiny.
“I have it all written down in a scribbler at home, how we drilled all those wildcat wells which opened new fields. You come on over and I’ll show you my scribbler about the oil patch.”
Using the back of a couple of coasters on the table to make drawings, he launched into a detailed description of the inventions made by Frosty to allow drillers to sink wells faster.
A few days later I was sitting in Tiny’s comfortable living room in his small, modest home on 12th Ave. S.W. Yes, he was right, he and Frosty had seen it all. The scribbler proved to be an informal oil patch history textbook covering half a century. The first sentence in the scribbler read:
“Albert Parker Phillips was born Jan. 13, 1873, in Oil City, Venango County, Pennsylvania.”
Such a bald statement is of little moment. But to an oil historian there is plenty of significance, realizing the added fact that his father was an oil driller before him, right on the ground floor of the commercial industry.
In 1859, Seneca Oil Company despatched Edwin L. Drake to have that first commercial well drilled at Titusville, only 20 miles from Oil City. Drake’s qualifications in an industry with no benchmarks: He was a young railroad conductor with crippling arthritis. His usefulness to Seneca — after being high-pressured into buying $200 worth of company stock — was, he could travel free on his pass.
Although drillers in Oil Springs, Ontario, dispute Drake’s claim he drilled the first commercial well in the world, it was production in the Oil Creek Valley, that showed an oil-hungry American industrial complex it could depend upon oil drillers for assured future supplies. The drillers played a significant part in maintaining America’s world industrial leadership right into the space age.
Phillips’ accident of birth in the heart of the area that cradled the infant industry, allowed him to grow with it. His own career parelleled oil’s startling expansion and, at the proper time, both were Alberta-bound. As he noted in his scribbler:
“I was brought up around an oil rig. An oil rig was my playground. My dad taught me how to fire a rig boiler at an early age. In fact, I could tell how many pounds of steam were on a boiler’s steam gauge before I learned to tell the time.”
The most unlikely persons were engaged in the oil industry: sawmillers, lawyers, prize fighters, brakemen, professors, water well drillers and actors. Phillips’ father, Samuel Anthony, could be considered in the “unlikely persons” class when he left his job at the Pennsylvania Tack Works in Norristown, to go to Titusville about 1869. He had apprenticed as a blacksmith. He had heard there was plenty of work for men of his ability, in the oil fields forging drilling tools.
When Tiny came along things had not tamed down from the wild, unruly and hectic times that marked the transformation of a quiet rural area. The gambling, lawlessness, loose women and two-fisted drinking, which were the hallmark of most early American mining camps had now become part of the oil town but had not yet been submerged by a more respectable society with the family as its centre.
However, by this time men who had previously worked seven days a week, now had their pockets full and were content with only six days of labour for themselves and their employees. Machine and blacksmith shops which had been busy 24 hours a day, were down to a steady 12-hour day.
A.P. Phillips at age seven, is pictured third from right in the front row. This classroom photograph was taken in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Albert Parker (Tiny) Phillips. Photo: Lanes Studio, Calgary, Alberta, circa late 1920’s.
Away from the Findlay Oil Field, A.P. Phillips played guitar in local theatrical productions.
At first there was work for hundreds of coopers making oak barrels that held 300 pounds of oil. The cooperage business was pinched off, when somebody got the bright idea of mounting two wooden tanks on a railway flatcar. Flatcars were later discarded, when somebody else got the idea for the industry’s first successful pipeline.
Blacksmiths were the kingpins in the years prior to S.A. Phillips’ arrival. “Uncle Billy” Smith, the man whom Drake hired to drill his well, was a blacksmith. Up to that time oil had been collected from seepage along the creek banks — and yielded about six gallons a day. But the Seneca company wanted a faster way of bringing more oil to the surface. Smith, with experience in drilling salt wells at Tarentum, Pa., was hired at $2.50 a day.
The ubiquitous scribbler recounts Tiny had visited bewhiskered Uncle Billy, when he had retired to his farm to hear him tell stories about drilling the Drake well. After he had begun the job, he had been offered a blacksmithing job at Franklin for $4 a day. Although he was tempted to take it because he liked blacksmithing better than drilling, he decided to stay with Drake and see the job through.
Tiny Phillips (foreground). Bearded man is Uncle Billy Smith, other individual unidentified. Moberly, Missouri, circa 1900.