Clayton Williams, Jr. & a Life Full of Surprises! A Right Cross, Success from Failure and an Aty
It was the right cross that did him in: chipped his tooth and put him out for the evening. But the worst part? He never saw it coming. Over the years, oilfield pioneer Clayton Williams Jr. had seen his share of bar action, in most cases at least emerging unscathed. But this evening, which started so quietly, was not to be so. He and several of his oil business buddies had stopped into Midland’s Sans Souci bar to share a few tall drinks and an equal number of tall tales. Before long the group of married men encountered some attractive and flirty young ladies who announced that they’d come in from Alaska. Here’s where it started to head south. “This one lady sat next to me—I guess I must’ve invited her,” Clayton recalls with a wry chuckle, “and she said her shoulder was hurting.” So, trying to be helpful, Clayton stood and began rubbing her shoulders. About that time his wife, Modesta—whose father had played football at TCU with the legendary Sammy Baugh and “who inherited some of his toughness,” barged into the establishment seeking the husband who had stood her up for a movie date three hours earlier. The first to see the steaming Modesta was the late Bob Smith, who blanched helplessly, knowing there was nothing he could do to protect Clayton Williams from the coming explosion. “I’m standing up there massaging this girl’s shoulders—I was just trying to help(!)—and she (Modesta) comes in….and jumped in my back and screamed and dug her fingernails into (his back).” “That’s where she got the nickname the ‘Little Eagle.’”
Even the most desperate explanations were of no avail. She dragged him outside where, without warning, her right cross caught her husband across the jaw. The physical damage was minimal—a chipped tooth—but the end result was that Clayton spent the night in exile with his buddies. “I crept home the next day,” he relates. Other than a few slipups like that one, the marriage has been one for the ages. When asked about his greatest accomplishment, Clayton quickly says, “Marrying Modesta.”
Perhaps his second greatest success, one in which he and his company swayed precariously between rags and riches almost hourly, happened on New Year’s Day 1976. “That was the most exciting well!” he recalls,
fondly. He was drilling the Gataga #2 well in Loving County, near Mentone, with mostly his own money, having invested all his net worth along with some borrowed money into the project. This was all-or-nothing, do-or-die time. Expecting to find gas at around 20,000’ in the Fusselman Formation, instead, at around 18,000’ he learned that the drilling samples made it appear that the well would be a dry hole. That was on December 30, 1975. While his heart sank at this news, he was not drilling simply on a hunch. Seismic data and information about wells in the vicinity indicated that this should be a successful well. “I was drilling where I thought was the top spot.” As the bit approached the target depth he parked himself in the drillsite trailer to await the results, without holding out much hope. As it began to look like a dry hole, depression and panic set in. “Oh,” he moaned, “I’m drilling a dry hole, I borrowed the money, I’m broke.” That night he went to bed in the trailer thinking the verdict was irreversible. Shortly before dawn, however, he awakened to a powerful earthquake. The drill bit had encountered a 17’ cavern packed with natural gas, and the drilling supervisor was banging on the trailer door shouting that they all needed run for their lives because the well was about to blow sky high. Intending to escape upwind they scrambled one direction only to discover that they instead were running downwind, so they abruptly reversed course. Even so, past experience did not prepare him for this blowout’s magnitude. “I’d had two other blowouts and they were just little pockets, they’d blow and that’d be the end of it.” He still thought he was broke. As this blowout continued, it gradually dawned on him, “Hey, maybe I’m NOT broke. That son-of-a-gun was blowing out through the drill pipe, began flowing about 220 million cubic feet a day—huge! We finally completed the well through the drill pipe.” It was the first major gas well he had drilled west of the Pecos River.
He saw it pay out its $2 million cost in just two months. By comparison, today’s typical wells cost much more and take three-to-four years to pay out. “I was somebody for a little while,” he laughs. Well, it lasted more than a little while, but this is where the Clayton Williams legend may have begun. TV stations and other news media across the area eagerly interviewed this avid storyteller about his dramatic success. It’s not surprising that a risk-taker like Clayton Williams longs for those wildcatter days, feeling choked off by the piles of data and committees that have robbed the business of much of its risk. “Those early days, drilling deep wildcats, had excitement. Generally, you’d know when you had it when you hit a pocket that blew out,” he says, wistfully. “We had so much fun!” The first anyone nearby knew of the well’s success was often the frantic arrival of the famous well fire fighters Boots and Coots. “Now we go down 12,000’, go sideways and frac it (in) 30 different stages and hope to make a well” after spending $12 million or more. The ability to take risks and look for buried treasure, as it were, he credits to the pioneer stock from which he is descended. The previous issue told of his family’s trek across Tennessee and Kentucky, marrying into Daniel Boones’ family before crossing the Sabine into Texas in the 1870s. As exciting as this pioneering experience in the oilfield was, none if it might have come to pass without Clayton’s introduction to a company that would seem to have no connection to the oil business whatsoever. Upon mustering out of the Army in the mid-1950s, Clayton had managed to save about $2,000 of his military pay along with $3,000 in tips he’d collected from waiting tables at a hotel in Mineral Wells, near his post at Ft. Wolters. This seed money, along with a side job selling life insurance in his home town of Ft. Stockton (a job that came about through an NYL representative he met while waiting tables), gave him something to live on while uncovering the buried secrets of the oil and gas business. Selling life insurance gave him some valuable sales experience, which he put to work in the oil business. His recollection of those times is not without his customary ironic twist. “Boy, that’s good training. You talk some old boy into taking his beer money—and instead of spending it on beer, putting it into a life insurance premium so when he dies his wife can live happily ever after with another man—that’s pretty good selling!” Plus, “You’re always selling yourself in one form or another.” He noted that some salesmanship was also involved in wooing the amazing woman who would become his wife. His ranch upbringing also helped him know the lingo of the ranchers who held the mineral rights he needed to lease. He began by calling himself a “lease broker—I just gave the title to myself—I wasn’t one, I’d just gotten out of the Army,” he said, chuckling at his remembered chutzpah. But, unexpectedly, the one break that pushed him into the mainstream was an introduction to a non-oil-related firm. “There was a lawyer in Ft. Stockton who introduced me to the Weaver Company—they made the Weaver Scope gun sight. That was in 1957 or 8. They had income tax so they were trying to drill wells where they could get the tax advantages of investing in the oil business. I just started out helping them and we did well together.” This partnership would last 50 years, giving him the foundation on which he built his greater business. To have become an icon in the oil business, in Texas and certainly in Midland over the decades, two things have kept him going. One of those is having an amazing woman at his side and the other involves strong business relationships. In the next issue, learn how he used that salesmanship to woo Modesta, read about those lasting friendships and see his thoughts on that famous 1988 gubernatorial race.
