Who’s Number One in the Permian Basin?
For generations Midland and Odessa have been going at it out in West Texas. Now, at last, someone has noticed.
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The problem began long before it was apparent, as most problems do. Like Fort Worth when the late Amon Carter and his ruling pals aged or died, Midland had made few provisions for replacing its natural leaders. As early as 1950—though the fact then was obscured by the runaway boom—its formerly vigorous old-timers began to lose their visions and their grips. Midland at that time refused to join the Upper Colorado River Authority—a mistake Odessa did not make—and fifteen years would pass before the city, after many costly drilling operations discovering dry holes, found water sources sufficient to encourage modern industry. As the old leaders withered, perhaps they became less concerned with the future than in a comfortable present and in hanging onto the past; the prevailing attitude ran well, we got a nice little town here, we don’t need to mess it up with labor troubles and factories and a certain class of people. Midland settled down to building a spiffy Little Theater and a symphony orchestra that played in white ties—each with its own imported full-time professional director—and to counting its money and its blessings; its banks and newspapers hired artists and writers to capture the spirit of Midland on canvas and in books. Everybody played a lot of golf and drank martinis.
Odessa, in the same period, was coming into an aggressive new wealth and spawning a new generation of go-getters determined to keep the good times rolling. A diversified economy was their goal. By the mid-1950s Odessa was on the way to landing a sizeable petrochemical complex and was building a huge county coliseum in which to stage a profitable biannual commercial Oil Show plus everything from rodeos to wrestling to rock band concerts (at a time when Midland was surrendering, because of a lack of facilities and community interest, its traditional World Championship Rodeo); it was dispatching civic squads far and wide to attract government or private funding. The city grew its own modest skyline and constructed a replica of the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespearian Theater; whenever Odessa and Midland vied for four-year colleges or new post offices or district courts or regional offices of state agencies, Odessa somehow seemed to get there first. Today, though Midland held a slight population edge through the early 1940s and the growth battle remained close for another twenty years, Odessa claims more than 83,000 people to Midland’s 58,000 and has clearly become the area trade center.
Not that either city is much of a paradise to a former resident of both, now that he has much roaming on his record. Though fast-food operations offer a variety of delicacies from pizza to barbecue to shrimp to Mexican specialties to chicken broiled, fried, baked, and maybe spanked, it may be safely said that neither Midland nor Odessa offers anything remotely resembling a first-class restaurant; if you asked to see the wine cellar, they’d think you were anticipating a tornado.
Movies reach these Permian Basin precincts only after much aging in the can. There is not a truly decent bookstore in either city. The magazine racks recommend a high percentage of detective stories, mechanical manuals, homemaking hints, and almost as many porn offering as Times Square outlets. Unless you crave country music or studio evangelists or thirteen super-loud and frantic commercials per six minutes, you have small use for your West Texas radio. About all I find to do there—outside of enjoying the company of a precious few old friends—is drink and hope for an improbable romantic adventure while waiting for my flight to be called; it’s either that or a big night in the Christian Science reading room. Sin City has become Dullsville.
However, your tireless researcher, doggedly at work in Odessa’s White Buffalo Saloon, did make the acquaintance of a young topless dancer newly arrived from Philadelphia by way of Los Angeles. “Why’d you stop here?” he demanded—clearly implying that surely she had run out of gas, lost her road map, or might be on the lam with Patty Hearst. “Hunny,” she said, “I read they was having a boom out here. A boom means money. And money means I’m gonna be real happy in my surroundings.”
Yes, it’s true. Even as much as America suffers unaccustomed economic rigors, the sober inheritors of the old Permian Basin are having themselves a first-class oil boom out there—thanks to the energy shortage, rising oil prices, and the tough new attitudes of Arabian sheiks. When Walter Cronkite devoted a couple of minutes to the Odessa boom, the town was overrun by migrants seeking work; local officials say the influx brought unemployment up from 2 to 3.1 per cent. “But, hell,” a barber says, “you can hold two jobs if you’re willin’ to work. All it takes is want-to.” And an independent operator complains, “Gettin’ the hardware’s the problem. Hell, if I had the drillpipe and the rotary rigs I’d be gettin’ good rich. Everybody kinda let their equipment run down in the last few years, not much drilling was going on, and when things opened up it caught us off-base. There’s even a goddamn black market in drilling gear.”
An Odessa policewoman says, “We knew good times had come when crime shot up. The prostitutes and con men and knob-knockers are comin’ back. They seem to smell it. Not that it’s like it was in the early Fifties; the town’s not a wide-open sinkhole—but we’re keepin’ an eye on it.” Midland, too, has known its drilling activity; as in the older time, however, it fails to bustle in concert with Odessa’s tempo. The proprietor of a Midland cafe catering to working men said in mid-March, “It’s slowed down some lately. Maybe because it’s tax time coming up. But once in a while I wake up in a cold sweat fearin’ the boom won’t last.” The current boom, true, has little of the frantic Fifties in it to date; they are not throwing up new steel and stone towers or staying open all night. But oil’s worth digging up again, yessir, and out there in the Permian Basin sands they’re dreaming of it reaching $15 or $20 a barrel and making new millionaires all over again.
Burnett, Norman Childress, and I are quaffing beer in a peeled Andrews Highway joint where the nicks and clicks of shuffleboard discs compete with a jukebox howling its best.
“Midland,” Burnett is saying, “simply has more of the genteel about it. Don’t underestimate for a moment the influence of Midland women on their community. They’ve been a cultural force. A lot of ‘em came out here fresh from the proper schools back East, married to husbands farmed out to protect second- or third-generation family investments or to serve some corporate interest back there. One thing fails to lead to another, so to speak, and soon the Midland Women feel stuck out here. They view their experiences as having suffered some remote outpost—as with the British, say, in India. And like the British, they’ve tried to improve the lot of the natives. Such appreciations of the arts or high fashion or gracious living as may attend these wilds—well, probably they’re traceable to the Midland Women. Odessa has a smattering of such women, but many fewer. This is, and has been, the working man’s town.”
Childress shifts on his barstool in a manner to indicate he has enjoyed about all the good spoken of Midland that he can stand. Except for Navy service and once trying to hack it at Hardin-Simmons before he lost interest, Childress is native-Odessa to the core; this background guarantees that he thinks lowlier of Midland than of Outer Mongolia. “Them sumbitches in Midland,” he charges, “they won’t let go of the past. They still give a prize to the first bale of cotton in Midland every year and if they wanted to be fair about it they’d give a prize to both bales.”
Childress is a Good Ole Boy who sells used cars from his own lot in Odessa—out of a trailer-house office plumped down in a scabby section he delights in wryly calling “the heart of the financial district”—and when he played high school basketball as “Snake” Childress he could be counted on to address the opponent who missed a shot or double-dribbled as “Hot Rock” for the rest of the game. So he is a natural heckler, one quick to use the needle. What he said, however, qualified as apt beer hall social commentary: Midland has had this thing about preserving what already is gone and—until recent years, anyhow—was the damnedest place for staging Pioneer Days and Frontier Days and such that you ever saw. Back when Midland put much energy into its annual week-long rodeo, civic clubbers with lariats roped and dragged to portable sidewalk “jails” any citizen or visitor who failed to “dress Western.” This, to me, always seemed the games of children. More than once I caused hard feelings and was considered a poor community sport by fighting such ersatz cowboys as they attempted to toy with my civil rights. Odessans might gussy-up their Chamber-of-Commerce Chuck Wagon Gang to feed barbecue in the interest of area trade days, but they knew enough not to put their hands on you or otherwise force participation in their play-actings. I deduced that Odessans failed to feel the Midland compulsions that require all loyal sons and daughters to show enthusiasm for its community projects in the name of vague, blowsy mutual Good. It was as if all of Midland comprised an advertising agency whose employees were required to endorse “the product.” Great were the pressures on employees to see that each firm contributed 100 per cent to the United Fund Drive, or joined civic clubs, or conducted themselves with a certain decorum. You could fall from favor, maybe even lose a job, by joking of the oil business or getting a shade sloppy at the office party or too openly promoting “Leftist” candidates. There was a harsh paternalism to the place, one bordering on Group-think. Not that Odessa was entirely innocent; it, too, knew its despotic employers who watched clocks, attitudes, and otherwise meddled in private lives. To this day, I see signs of uneasy employer-employee relations and the notion, somehow, that the worker better not forget who butters the bread.
When I go back, my old Midland friends—with rare exceptions—preach to me: my judgments are excessively harsh, I drink too much, I do not enough appreciate my roots and the country that helped shape me, I should shuck the tinsel glitter and false gods of the East to come on home and recover the old values. I think they actually believe I am somehow deprived by not living there, that my secret soul must yearn for some missing magic indigenous to Midland and available nowhere else.
It is these I often bid goodnight in order to race across the wasteland to Odessa, there to seek out my natural companions—the sweat-hog lawyers and car salesmen and newspaper men. Whatever spirit of adventure and hot fevered hope as live in the Permian Basin exist among these. That, to me, is the essential difference between the sister cities of the flat brown plain, and in lonely country where one has a sense of living on the very edge it is not an inconsiderable one.
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