Growing Up in the Oil Patch. John Schmidt J.

       Chapter 2

       Apprenticeship in Findlay, Ohio

      Gas wells had been brought in during the oil rush on Oil Creek but gas was treated as an unwanted byproduct. Most was flared off as there was no other use for it. A well at Murryville, Pa., blowing out 34 million cubic feet a day, burned out of control for 1½ years. This well proved production was large enough and constant enough, that users could depend on the supply for commercial use to replace manufactured gas.

      Curiously, there was public resistance to switching to natural gas, as people had developed a healthy fear of it after several had been injured in explosions.

      When Tiny arrived at Findlay the big excitement there was the Oesterlen gas well, which had touched off the oil and gas rush in that state. The drillers for the well were Brownmyer and Martin of Bradford, Pa. The Martin end of the team was Milton Martin.

      Milton and his brother, James Gelot Martin, were both drillers, sometimes working together, sometimes independently or teamed with others. Frosty was the son of James and nothing could keep him in the old Taylor School after age 16 to stop him from becoming a driller.

      The Martin brothers got into oil drilling in 1861 — earlier than the Phillips. They lived a rough, hard life, almost nomadic in character, following a schedule of moving around but part of a pioneering society that somehow stuck together.

      Ticksford, Grease City, Crown Pulley, Glycerine Hollow, Karns City, Butler, Red Rock and Bradford were all Pennsylvania boom towns at which the Martins were employed during the first dozen frenetic years of the Keystone State’s new-found industry.

      In 1873, the best home James Martin could find available for his wife, Hattie Jackson, was a shack near a well-drilling site in Grease City field. Frosty first saw the light of day in that shack Sept. 6. By his own accounting, he tried to drown out the noise from the hillside stripper wells with his squalling.

      Grease City is not on the map today. Thus it was that an “obit” writer in the Long Beach Independent upgraded his humble birthplace to “Greece City.”

      Another Grease City native was Maud Jamison. Neither child knew of the existence of the other, until 19 years later when they met at a ball game in Findlay. Maud was a young teacher in Findlay College — and she was going out with a speed-crazy young man, Barney Oldfield.

      Barney and Frosty were members of the Findlay Bicycle Club, which had a quarter-mile dirt track with turns banked 10 feet high. Oldfield always beat Martin — but he was left out of the competition for Maud’s hand the day she met Frosty. They married that year. Oldfield continued racing and later became one of the stars at the Indianapolis Speedway 500-mile races.

      The first quarter-century of the Martin marriage was one of constant moving and travel under varying conditions of poverty and affluence. There were periods of loneliness for Maud while Frosty was away in the field. There were several trips around the wourld.

      In their later days of lavish living in Long Beach, California, the days of living in tents in the field were forgotten. Their 57 years of marriage were exciting and full of devotion and ended with Maud’s death a year before that of Frosty.

      Their first child was John Walter, born in Medicine Hat, Alta., in 1912. He acquired the nickname of Spud almost from birth when the proud father, with his off-beat sense of humour, told some of the boys on the rig: “I spudded in — and look what I got.” (Spudding in was related to the necessity of digging a hole before setting up a cable tool rig.) They raised as a son, Harold J. Blythe, the infant son of a cousin who died. He, too, acquired from Frosty the nickname of Baldy and it stuck with him better than his Christian name, until he died in 1963, after following the drilling trade in his younger days.

      A note in the Phillips’ scribbler on nicknames: “Frosty was bigger and huskier than me. His blond hair and light complexion earned him his name, Frosty. In the rough-and-tumble drilling fraternity, I would start fights and Frosty would step in and take over.

      “No matter how far we drifted apart we never lost contact with each other. Sometimes he would be in California and I was in Pennsylvania. It made no difference: he would look me up or I would look him up. We were pardners and we helped each other finish many jobs.”

      By 1884, the Martin brothers could see the end of oil drilling in the Pennsylvania fields. When the chance came to move to Findlay, to drill the Oesterlen gas well they seized it. The success in drilling this well resulted in them being given contracts for a series of good producers. Findlay became the Mecca for the biggest and best pool of drillers in the United States, for more than a quarter of a century.

      Although only 11 when he moved to Findlay, Frosty had already begun an apprenticeship with his father. In his time, youngsters were initiated into family enterprises at an early age and it didn’t hurt them a damn bit. Parents didn’t believe in child labour; it was mostly that, to keep the kids from getting underfoot in the house. Mother often suggested the boys “go with Dad today.” As soon as many could walk, they proudly “went with Dad” and Dad was just as proud to take the son along. Oil was a dinner table topic and by the time he was old enough to take on household chores, night and morning young Frosty had a good indoctrination into the drilling business.

      When he was eight, his father and uncle had acquired three little old strippers, (wells in the last stages of efficient production), near their home. It became his job to “do chores” around the wells. He was up with the family at daylight to stir up the banked coal fire under the boiler, get up steam and pump off the wells. Then it was time to go to school.

      Returning in the afternoon, there was more work to do. On Saturday he had another job — helping Dad dig up enough coal to fire the boilers for the coming week.

      And did he ever get heartily sick of choring around these wells? No, he couldn’t get enough of hanging around drill sites and picking up all the knowledge available. School palled upon him. There was no excitement, compared to watching a well come in or watching the men torpedo a well with nitroglycerine.

      Going to school was boring beside the excitement generated by the Martin family in the big Findlay field. Frosty became an expert at knowing which days to play hookey to see some big action like the Karg gas well come in. It burned for four months before being controlled. People could read newspapers by its glare at night 10 miles away. It heat was so intense the ice melted on the river, flowers came out in bloom, trees into leaf and grass grew profusely.

      Nobody cared that 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas were wasted. Wastage of gas, (nobody ever thought of shutting off a gas light and gas street lights burned all day), and a lynching, (a good old American institution), were the subject of a page in the Phillips’ scribbler:

      “It happened when a North Baltimore man went beserk and shot his wife and started after his daughters. They escaped. He was jailed.

      “To show how mob psychology works, a bunch of oil men who were normally good fellows, were incited to march to the town cop and demand he unlock the jail. When he refused, they obtained a big drill bit and broke down the door.

      “They grabbed the accused, put a rope around his neck and led him up the main street to a bridge. They threw the rope over the top girder but when they pulled on it, the girder cut it and it broke.

      “They knotted the break and took him down the street to the first hydro pole. One fellow climbed the pole and put the rope over a crossarm and the mob started to pull the prisoner up again.

      Some of the inflamed mob out for