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Detours: Even a little oil floats town along for now

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In print: Monday, September 22, 2008

Daniel Grizzle, left, with fiancee Ashley Mitchell in back, rides alongside Michael Little on Oklahoma Highway 99. Little prefers horse rides because of the high cost of gasoline.
	[CHRIS ZUPPA | Times]

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ADVERTISEMENT [CHRIS ZUPPA | Times] Kim Meek of Visalia, Calif., takes a photo of a statue of Woody Guthrie in Okemah on Thursday. She and a colleague were on their way to Nashville, and “I said we gotta stop,” Meek said. Related Links Multimedia: A country in search of direction Loading Video...

As the election approaches, a reporter and a photographer set out for Washington, D.C., via America. We tell stories from seven towns, touching on seven issues from politics and real life.

OKEMAH, Okla. — On a morning when oil is selling for $102 a barrel in New York, Melvin Moran steps out of his Buick near one of his 80 wells in eastern Oklahoma.

Five thousand feet beneath his black loafers flows a field of Oklahoma sweet crude, the lifeblood of this part of the country. The pump jack bowing in front of him sucks it from the earth like a milk shake through a straw.

The independent oil producer has ridden the ups and downs for five decades, and at 87 is witnessing the most profitable period in Oklahoma oil history. "Right now," he says, "this is the business to be in."

As America looks to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, small towns like this reap the benefits. Since oil prices started to climb a few years ago, Oklahoma — the nation's fifth leading producer behind Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana — has experienced an unprecedented boom.

Producers are drilling new wells and reconditioning old ones to suck more oil from the earth. New businesses are blooming in small towns that had all but dried up after the last bust.

But Moran knows the black stuff under his feet is finite.

Someday, it will run dry.

• • •

The old folks trace the boom to a hot afternoon on July 16, 1926.

The men working around a discovery well called Fixico No. 1, in nearby Seminole, brought up the drill bit to bail cuttings out of the hole.

It was dripping with black gold.

By July 27, Fixico No. 1 was producing 5,000 barrels a day.

Word spread like prairie fire and people flooded into Oklahoma. Late in the '20s, a third of the world's oil came from the Seminole oil field. Tin-can tourists drove to Florida on oil from Oklahoma.

The population of Seminole exploded from 864 to 35,000, and everybody was digging. Okemah and surrounding towns changed overnight.

Young Woody Guthrie, who was born here and who signed his initials in the new sidewalks, took note in writings published later:

Okemah was one of the singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest of our ranch towns and farm towns, because it blossomed out into one of our first Oil Boom Towns.

Just as quickly production fell, the market shifted, and the town dried up.

I looked in the lobby of the Broadway Hotel. Nobody. I looked through the plate glass window of Bill Bailey's pool hall. Just a long row of brass spittoons there by theirself in the dark.

• • •

In 1937, Melvin Moran's father, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, bought a well called the W.C. Davis in Maud, Okla. It pumped five barrels a day. Seventy years and a handful of booms and busts later, it still pumps five barrels a day.

In the 1950s, oil sold for $2.80 a barrel, which means the W.C. Davis grossed $14 a day. Now the same well brings $500 a day.

"We're doing really, really well," Moran says. "It has given us the opportunity to participate in a lot of new drilling."

In the early '80s, 200 companies in the area were oil-related. Within a decade, 80 percent had closed their doors. Now the industry is coming back. Moran says about 70 oil-related firms are open around Seminole now, in a state where one in seven jobs is related to oil and gas.

People here complain about gas prices as much as they do anywhere else, but Oklahoma oil and gas taxes raised more than $1.1-billion in 2006 for schools, roads and bridges.

But the answer to oil independence isn't just drill, baby, drill.

An oil field is like a balloon, Moran says. If you poke a balloon with one pin, air rushes out the hole. If you poke it with 10 pins, it deflates faster, with less pressure.

"If we didn't drill another well, production would decrease 10 percent a year," he says. "There's no question that in a few more years, we'll be needing more from other places.

"We will never be independent," he says. "In a few years, we'll be importing 70 or 80 percent of our oil."

Moran is a Democrat who believes in opening new areas to drilling as well as in conservation. "We need every kind of alternative energy we can get," he says. "We really, truly are headed for an energy crisis."

Not far away, a firm is working on a method of turning switchgrass into ethanol. Wind farms are sprouting in Texas, backed by oil men like T. Boone Pickens.

Outside town, Michael Little is riding down State Highway 99 on a paint horse named Sky. Little, 47, doesn't drive much anymore, not when it takes $85 to fill his Chevy pickup.

"I don't drive it except to work," he says. "I ride her everywhere else I want to go."

He works in the oil business. And business is good.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8265.