FROM ELECTRA, TEXAS TO POTOMAC, MARYLAND

The photograph above is one that Vickie Sullivan snapped of my long-time friend, Jan Grogan, shown reading material for her new manuscript , which is set in Oklahoma, her birthplace. Jan’s last book, All of My Life With You, is a memoir of her adventures with her husband, Gene, who served at the helm of worldwide oil operations of a major U.S. oil company. Their long journey began in Electra, Texas where “at every turn on this sun-scorched plain, oil well pump jacks peck at the earth like Jurassic birds.”* I and my husband, a petroleum engineer with Texaco, happened to live across the street from the Grogans at the same time Gene launched his successful career in the oil patch.

During our recent visit with Jan in her elegant townhouse in Potomac, Maryland (a residence quite unlike the cracker box the Grogans occupied in Electra), we talked about her new manuscript and her inchoate interest in literature and writing, which began with conversations during morning breaks she and I enjoyed in Electra. “The only problem was that we’d be having an inspiring conversation about literature, and you’d get up and say you had to leave,” Jan said. “You timed our visits from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. exactly. And you seem to have retained that same sense of urgency about time. A one night visit and you’re already leaving!”

She was spot on because I’m OCD about time. In the case of Electra, Texas, the occasions for significant happenings were scant, so I had to think hard to remember why I compartmentalized my social life into hour-long visits. I‘d had only one article published in the Morning Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my poetry was still in a box of the bedroom closet, so I wasn’t exactly a literary lion who had to hurry back to my desk to write for a deadline. However, I was revising an article I’d sent to Phoebe Adams at the Atlantic Monthly because she’d written a personal letter of encouragement about its merit after she decided that my prose about defrosting an old refrigerator was a little “contrived.” Thinking back on this rejection, I doubt if Phoebe had ever defrosted an aged refrigerator in a $60 rental located in a small Texas town…but, still, the personal letter had encouraged me. And I was trying to get writing done before the birth of the firstborn daughter I was carrying when Jan and I met. 

Jan moved to Wichita Falls within six months after our meeting when her husband entered the fast track of Cities Service Company, leaving me and my husband to a diminished social life in this West Texas town that had survived the demise of an oil boom involving the Clayco gusher in 1911. I lived on a street named after W.T. Waggoner, one of the oil magnates, whose ranch covered a half million acres in this West Texas area. Water was scarce at the time of the big boom, but W.T. Waggoner’s claim to fame had occurred when he lobbied railroad professionals to build a railroad station at the site then called Beaver Switch and later named Electra after Waggoner’s daughter. Waggoner had actually been dismayed when he drilled for water in his sprawling ranch territory and the sites yielded crude oil that polluted his water wells. He sold part of his land to a developer named Solomon Williams, and in 1911 the Clayco gusher brought in abundant oil, causing the burgeoning of the entire north Texas oil industry.

Years later, Jasper Smith III of Vivian, Louisiana worked in the oil fields of Electra and wrote about this experience as a roustabout in Dinner with Mobutu: A Chronicle of My Life and Times, and I discovered that Suzi Thornton, one of my Fortnightly Literary Club sisters in my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana, is the sister of this chronicler. By the time Jasper had become an oil field worker in Electra, the town had mushroomed to a population of nearly 5000, and when we lived there in 1959 it had only diminished about four percent. At the time of the boom, citizens had numbered 640, and 10 years later the population had increased to 4700. Today, there are approximately 2700 citizens.

Citizens of Electra say that the town is a place of pump jacks unequaled in number in the world, and its fortunes go up and down like these jacks. Today, the W.T. Waggoner Refinery has become a place of scrap metal, but 14 oil companies still operate in the area. One of the oldest wells drilled in 1911 still pumps oil. From my spare knowledge of oil patch production, I’d say that 80 percent of area wells still producing constitutes a phenomenal record.

In this dry, dusty part of the U.S., Stephanie, my first daughter, was born, and Jan Grogan, my neighbor in Electra, Texas became a lifetime friend who now claims that I sparked her initial interest in the writing craft while we sojourned on the hot plains of the “Pump Jack Capital of Texas.”

*Bernadette Pruitt, Special Contributor to the Dallas Morning News

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

A MEMOIR

I once lived in a dusty, sparsely populated town in West Texas called Electra, a place that had been an oil boom town. Electra, named for a wealthy rancher's daughter, was located at the edge of a ranch originally owned by Daniel Waggoner, expanded to include a half million acres. As my friend, Janis Rice Grogan, says in All of My Life With You, "bars and churches vied for first place as centers of social life" there. My husband and I had moved to this barren place described as "having only a barbed wire fence between it and the North Pole," for his assignment as an engineer with Texaco, and Jan lived across the street from me — my closest friend among a handful in this small town. In her memoir, Jan speaks of the loneliness of this west Texas town and of the hour daily she and I spent together, discussing books. Both of us were not writing much then, but I think that our literary hour every morning probably helped spark a lifelong interest in book writing — for both of us.

While the major part of my writing has been in the realm of poetry, Jan has been working on this narration about her life with Gene Grogan, a petroleum engineer with Cities Service, beginning in Oklahoma and Texas and expanding to cover five continents. For almost sixty years, Jan and I have enjoyed a wonderful friendship, and I've been privy to many chapters of her memoir along the way. In All of My Life With You, Jan relates that the Grogan family moved nineteen times during the duration of her marriage to Gene — from the U.S. to Muscat, with assignments in New York, London, Bogota, Argentina, Nairobi, Aberdeen, and other oilfield sites. She also records Gene's rise in the oil industry from a field petroleum engineer with Cities Service to President of Occidental Oman Oil Company.

With three children in tow, Jan follows her husband to both exotic and dangerous foreign posts, sometimes enduring life in places like Comodoro Rivadavia in southern Argentina where four trees struggled for life in a city of 100,000, and "the wind always blew from the land toward the sea and a few times a year it could reach 150 miles an hour. Normal rainfall was ten inches but in 1963 over forty inches fell, turning the unpaved roads into quagmires..." When Jan left this country to wait for the arrival of her third child in the United States, she relates that she knelt down at the bottom of the airplane's steps and kissed the ground, vowing never to leave the U.S. again. However, she would renege on that vow for almost forty more years, following Gene around the world and to journey's end in Washington, D.C. where she now lives.

This memoir is not just the chronicle of an American woman's odyssey around the world, it's a love story about a successful marriage that prompted me to say at one time, "Gene is the perfect husband," because he was perhaps the most devoted, caring husband I observed during the times I visited the couple. It's also a book about the couple's faith that sustained them during dangerous encounters abroad. Gene was in charge of Occidental's North Sea operation in 1988 when Occidental's oil platform in the North Sea blew up, an incident dubbed the worst oil field accident in the history of the petroleum industry. One hundred sixty-seven men died in that explosion and its aftermath. In a poignant account of the accident, Jan records the visit of the famous oil-well firefighter Red Adair who extinguished the fire still blazing on the remains of Piper Alpha oil platform.

Jan, Diane, Gene, London 1973

All of My Life With You is a fascinating armchair tour of the world told by a courageous woman of faith who followed her husband on a journey that she says exemplifies Robert Frost's "Road Not Taken." Jan writes in a highly accessible style, exposing the reader to the Grogan's diverse religious encounters, as well as political situations. This is an engaging family saga filled with stories about people of differing backgrounds and cultures that inevitably impacted the Grogan family's tolerance and respect for diversity. It's also a tribute to Gene Grogan, "the perfect husband" whom Jan describes as possessing all the attributes of the Eagle Scout that he was: trustworthy, loyal, friendly, brave, reverent, etc. and, she adds, "also intelligent, exuberant and sensitive." During the last years of Gene's life, he suffered from Alzheimers, and his children observed that the disease robbed him of language and memory but his witty and playful personality remained intact.

The elegant eulogy Gene's son Patrick preached at Gene's funeral in December 2013 at St. Alban's in Washington, D.C. is included in All of My Life With You. Also, the moving "Epilogue" featuring part of the service of Compline from a New Zealand Prayer Book, creates a meet conclusion to this eloquent narrative. Family pictures are an added bonus.

Jan Rice Grogan was awarded a Medical Technology degree from the University of Oklahoma and earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

For armchair travelers and memoir readers, this is a must read.

TASTE I SAY, YOU’RE TIMELESS

Yesterday’s mail yielded a book of poetry by Chuck Taylor, a Texas-based writer who has operated Slough Press 43 years. Taylor’s latest, Taste I Say, You’re Timeless, contains characters whose names he says “come off a matchbox, like ‘Strike Anywhere.’”  The poems reflect an artistic sensibility that values personal freedom and explores alternative ways of living. They're reminiscent of “beatniks,” those cultural radicals who typified a vibrant counter culture during the 1950’s and 60’s in this country.

Taylor describes his book as a collection of “Prose Poem Anti-Poems,” and I enjoyed his relaxed style that Michel Delville refers to as “a downright illegitimate mode of literary expression.” His opening poem entitled “Where” asks the questions: “Where will the sentence take us?” followed by “Does this sentence start out from an unknown shore…can it row against the currents in search of undiscovered atolls…would the fear of being lost at sea keep us from going…? His metaphysical questions are even stronger: “How often in a day must we be happy to have a happy day? 4.6 hours? Must we bathe in the sweet tea of happy-like sunlight, or can you work in a dim corner by a subway shining shoes day after day so to be in rumbling noise of happiness…?

The poet provides his own answers in a series of prose poems “comical and a bit cynical,” Taylor writes in a letter accompanying the gift book he sent to me. I particularly liked the character “Strike Anywhere” featured in the poem “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” whose lonely feet are referred to as “apples in the dust wisely well traveled. I need to learn to bend and fold up in many pockets. Go with the luck of the soul’s water and the solid moment.” “Strike Anywhere” is the perfect personification of Walt Whitman or the wandering vagabonds of beatnik fame – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, to name a few.

The strange names in Taste I Say will cause readers to imagine all types of cultural radicals: “Strike Anywhere,” “This Side Up,” “Tobacco Free,” and “And Other” (a tall, carrot-topped Buddhist). Taylor underlines his explorations into alternative ways of living with characters who’re definitely not mainstream but who say it all and who, having “said it and said it, it all lies in the grass waiting for rain.” He takes these contemporary characters on delightful misadventures in existential landscapes until they find the ideal shore to push off from.

Consider this piece of alternative literature entitled “Manage” expressed by a non-materialist: “Down in the bargain basement so long, ‘Keep Away From Children’ [another invention of a comic name] did not know the air was musty, did not know the absence of wind or sunlight, down in the bargain basement for the testimony of the tribe of clearance – woeful shoes, party blouses already lonesome for dance, murderous belts and bolts of cloth so sad you can almost hear the tearing. Down in the bargain basement, hands behind her back, throat clearing, feet in tired heels, doing her dim shining duty.”

Enlightenment comes after two or three readings of the poems, and they’re worth the effort. Taylor’s clever combinations of words remind me of the poets Charles Simic and Charles Bukowski intermixed and chanting ardent “beat” poetry. Comic yet wise messages are passed on from an expert in the fields of Beat Literature and Creative Writing. Taylor has taught at Texas A&M, UT at Tyler, El Paso, and Austin, and Angelo State University and has won the Austin Book Award and Utah Fine Arts Poetry Contest. He also did extensive work in Poets in the Schools Programs.

Taylor does magic tricks for children’s parties, “studies socially-sanctioned investments, took care of his invalid mother, and now spends too much time on Facebook.” His letters are written on the reverse, blank side of college course hand-outs and are as amusing as his prose poem anti-poems.

These prose poems aren’t just cynical excoriations; they contain philosophical and metaphysical nuggets — noteworthy, timeless sentences...in the author's words, "new machines from the river of words…”

Taste I Say, You’re Timeless: Prose Poem Anti-Poems was published through Weasel Press in Manvel, Texas.

GRACKLES AT LUNCH

Waiting for crumbs to drop

A few weeks ago while we sat on the patio at Rembrandt’s Café in Chattanooga, Tennessee eating a late lunch, two grackles joined us – bold birds that settled on tables and ate from plates holding half-eaten rolls and other baked goods like blueberry muffins and crème-filled pastries.

Now, I’m in a minority of people who like ravens, blackbirds, crows, and grackles because most people regard them as public nuisances. I got my first glimpse of grackles in Texas en route to Mexico when I awakened one morning to the sound of loud screeching noises that some bird enthusiasts describe as “rusty hinges squeaking.” I ran outside and sighted a gaggle of these iridescent birds a friend identified as boat tail grackles. When we passed into interior Mexico, I searched for them, finding wonderful specimens on the grounds of a small motel in Victoria, Mexico. To me, the sound of grackles squeaking was a comforting noise like friendly voices in unknown territory.

For seven years, I got my “satisfied” sighting grackles in Austin, Texas where I traveled to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest – they paraded on the grounds of the Holiday Inn Express in large numbers, and most guests complained about their harsh cries. While there, I read several newspaper articles denouncing boat tail grackles as public nuisances. Later, I learned that these grackles nest in southwestern Louisiana, but I’ve never sighted one around my home in bayou country.

The birds I welcomed to my table the other day were common grackles who were trying to steal food from other birds, and I learned that they often snatch food from the beak of another bird, rushing forward to grab a morsel, quickly pecking it into digestible pieces. Research reveals that “anting” is a curious practice of the common grackle in which the bird rubs captured insects on its feathers to apply the liquid from the squashed bug (formic acid). To attract a mate? To polish the iridescent sheen of their coat?

Most outdoor diners who dislike grackles don’t know that large groups of them are known as “plagues,” a term with which they’d promptly agree. Farmers also have low regard for grackles because the birds are fond of grain and flock in large numbers to gather significant quantities of this crop.

Still, I threw my roll to a large grackle as I left the café, and he squeaked his appreciation for my charitable act. And as if I don’t have enough crow, blackbird, and raven poems, I went home to write “Grackles at Lunch:”

GRACKLES AT LUNCH

Grackle above flag

pause, dip their dark bills

into hard rolls left on our plates,

rolling yellow button eyes

at our wastefulness,

but we feed the poor,

an old injunction,

although those at other tables

ignore these commissions,

call the foragers thieves,

not beggars –

bad raps for sociable creatures

who remind me of Iran’s khalag birds,

strutting waiters in black aprons

clearing tables of nahn crumbs,

leaving behind empty Tuborg bottles

and wadded paper napkins,

imitating the notes of nightingales

and casting shadows like hawk-nosed Shahs

on a blue mosaic –

the fallen kingdoms of Persia.