by Bruce Wells | Feb 4, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
The Ranger who tamed oil and gas boom towns during the Great Depression. “Crime may expect no quarter.”
During much of the 1920s, a Texas Ranger became known for strictly enforcing the law in oilfield communities. By 1930, the discovery year of the largest oilfield in the lower 48 states, he was known as “El Lobo Solo” — the lone wolf — the Ranger who brought law and order to East Texas boom towns.
Manuel Trazazas Gonzaullas was born in 1891 in Cádiz, Spain, to a Spanish father and Canadian mother who were naturalized U.S. citizens. At age 15 he witnessed the murder of his only two brothers and the wounding of his parents when bandits raided their home. Fourteen years later, Gonzaullas joined the Texas Rangers.
“Give Texas more Rangers of the caliber of ‘Lone Wolf’ Gonzaullas, and the crime wave we are going through will not be of long duration,” reported the Dallas Morning News in 1934.
“He was a soft-spoken man and his trigger finger was slightly bent,” independent producer Watson W. Wise characterized him during a 1985 interview in Tyler, Texas. “He always told me it was geared to that .45 of his.” (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 30, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
Col. William F. Cody searched for Wyoming black gold.
Col. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s legacy extends beyond his famous Wild West show. A Wyoming town named Cody preserves his Big Horn Basin heritage, but less known is his adventure into the oil business.
“Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World” once made W.F. Cody the most recognized man in the world. His fanciful Indian attacks on wagon trains, the marksmanship by Annie Oakley, and other attractions drew audiences in America and Europe. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 27, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
Preserving a family’s oilfield production prototype and THUMS Islands memorabilia.
Rodney Shively hopes to preserve the oilfield legacies of his grandfather and great-grandfather. After researching details of a May 5, 1953, patent they were awarded from the U.S. Patent Office (no. 2,637,528), he is looking for a permanent home for his family’s prototype oilfield production device.
Shively, who worked as a research scientist in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries for nearly 40 years, has been investigating his grandfathers’ careers in the petroleum industry. Other family artifacts include memorabilia from THUMS, a late-1960s consortium of petroleum companies that constructed five oilfield production islands off Long Beach, California.
“Nearly a decade ago I inherited a few mid-twentieth-century oil technology artifacts from my grandfathers,” Shively explains. The most unique is the prototype of the patented self-adjusting carrier bar for oilfield pump jacks designed by his grandparents.
Shively hopes a U.S. petroleum museum, technology museum, or historical organization will be interested in preserving the prototype “Carrier Rod for Polish Rods” described in the July 1949 patent application.
The oilfield production technology patent was awarded to Rodney Shively’s great-grandfather and grandfather on May 5, 1953.
More Shively family oilfield items encompass a 1960s promotional tray depicting the THUMS production facility at Long Beach, “landscaped and lighted oil island.” Other family items also relate to the trailblazing offshore islands. Five petroleum companies — Texaco, Humble, Union, Mobil, and Shell — built four artificial islands that remain among the most innovative, artfully camouflaged facilities worldwide. (see THUMS — California’s Hidden Oil Islands).
Self-Adjusting Carrier Bar
An object of our invention is to provide a novel carrier bar in which the polish rod can align itself to compensate for misalignment of the carrier bar and also to compensate for the small arch of travel in which the carrier bar moves. — Mace A. Cox and James L. Shively
Shively hopes his 28-pound, self-adjusting carrier bar for pumping unit sucker rods will be of interest to museum curators. His grandfather and great-grandfather received their 1953 patent for an innovative design, possibly the first prototype universal joint carrier bar.
“As a little boy in the 1960s and 1970s, when I visited my grandfather’s home, this item was always on display,” Shively explains. “My father inherited it and the other items when my grandfather passed a quarter century ago. They then passed to me when my father passed a decade back. I have no further family to pass this collection of oilfield artifacts on to.”
Shively wants to preserve the prototype — along with other oilfield items — and is willing to donate the collection to a museum. “These items represent mid-twentieth-century oilfield inventiveness, ingenuity, and work,” he says. “It is my hope that these items will be reminders to future generations of the era’s petroleum technology.”
Patented in 1953, the prototype universal joint carrier bar was designed to reduce linear and rotational stress between the rod and jack head, reducing breakage. Photos courtesy Rodney Shively.
Years ago, his grandfather explained to him that carrier bars had been an early part of oilfield production technology, but earlier designs were prone to stress breakage. Broken carrier bars meant wells would spend downtime for repair — and oil not being pumped.
“This new carrier bar was designed to reduce the movement linear and rotational stress between the siphon rod and jack head, reducing breakage and downtime,” Shively reports. “In viewing the image of the prototype carrier bar backside, at the lower end along the center vertical ridge, there is a visible ‘C & S’ as part of the unit. These letters stand for the last names of inventors Mace A. Cox and James L. Shively, my grandfathers.”
Shively adds that the improved carrier bar had a small part in providing a more reliable supply of crude oil following World War II. “The post-war decades were a time when the U.S. interstate expanded and suburban sprawl was beginning,” he notes. “Shipping and air travel also began expansion in these decades with a more reliable supply of crude oil.”
THUMS Memorabilia
Shively in December 2025 reached out to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) for help finding a museum home for his family’s oilfield artifacts. He hopes directors or docents will contact him for more details about the carrier bar prototype — or any of his family’s petroleum history artifacts.
From the Shively family collection: a late-1960s “knickknack tray” with Disney-inspired disguised derricks of the THUMS Oil Islands off Long Beach, California.
“A late-1960s knickknack tray promoting the THUMS Oil Islands off the coast of Long Beach, California. On the bottom side there is a number P67, the assumption is this might be a reference to the year of production and/or manufacture, 1967.”
Worker overalls with the THUMS Long Beach logo for the four offshore production islands, which produce oil from California’s Wilmington field, the fourth-largest oilfield in the United States in 2017.
Employee badge of the Long Beach Oil Development Company, where Rodney Shively’s grandfather worked in 1946. He thinks the “66” may refer to the company being located near the end of Route 66.
Long Beach Oil Company Overalls — As part of his job with the city of Long Beach, managing oil derrick operations on THUMS, my grandfather routinely needed to visit the THUMS Oil Island facilities. On those visits, he would need to wear these overalls over his business suit.
Long Beach Oil Company Badge — The Long Beach Oil Development Company badge is old and was included in my grandfather’s items, indicating some relationship or personal prominence,” he observes. The badge has a screw pin on the back for attaching to a hard hat or clothing.
“Though my grandfather’s relationship to this company was unknown originally, I had heard stories he worked in the oilfields in the late 1940s and 1950s. Serendipitously, an old document was discovered showing my grandfather worked for the Long Beach Oil Development Company in 1946,” Shively reports. “The badge center number may be 66 as a logo homage to Route 66 and the petroleum needs for cars and trucks,”
A web search revealed the Long Beach Oil Development Company was filed as a business entity in Carson City, Nevada, on January 10, 1939.
Today living in Washington, Rodney Shively hopes the AOGHS American Oil Families website article will help promote his effort to preserve his grandparents’ petroleum legacies. He would be happy to discuss these items and their possible addition to a museum’s collection — or preservation by a state or county historical society or similar organizations. To learn more, email him at Rshively01@outlook.com.
“Are you aware of any need at an oil industry technology history museum to expand collections with items such as these listed?” he concludes. “When I pass, I believe all these items should be left to be displayed for everyone, not lost to history.”
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an annual AOGHS supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Preserving Shively Family Oil Artifacts.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/shivley-family-oil-artifacts. Last Updated: February 5, 2026. Original Published Date: February 5, 2026.
by Bruce Wells | Jan 25, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
Offshore technologies advanced after Howard Hughes and CIA raised a lost Soviet submarine in 1970s.
Launched in 1972, the Glomar Explorer left behind two remarkable offshore exploration histories: a clandestine submarine recovery vessel and the world’s most advanced deep-water drill ship. The CIA’s former “ocean mining” ship ended a pioneering offshore petroleum career in 2015 at a Chinese scrapyard.
Considered a pioneer of modern drill ships, the Glomar Explorer was decades ahead of its time, working at extreme depths for the U.S. offshore petroleum industry. Relaunched in 1998 as an offshore technological phenomenon, the original Glomar Explorer had been constructed as a top-secret project of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hughes Glomar Explorer, a custom-built “magnesium mining vessel” for the CIA that in 1974 recovered part of a Soviet submarine off Hawaii. Photo courtesy American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
CIA Project Azorian began soon after the U.S.S.R. ballistic missile submarine K-129 mysteriously sank somewhere in the deep Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii on March 8, 1968. The wreckage of the lost sub could never be found — or so it seemed.
Unknown to the Soviets, sophisticated U.S. Navy sonar technology would locate the K-129 on the seabed at a depth of 16,500 feet. But a salvage operation more than three miles deep was impossible with any known technology (see ROV – Swimming Socket Wrench).
The K-129 sinking presented the CIA with such an espionage opportunity that the agency convinced President Richard Nixon to approve a secret operation to attempt raising the vessel from the ocean floor.
Secretive billionaire Howard Hughes Jr. of Hughes Tool Company joined the mission, code-named Project Azorian (mistakenly called Project Jennifer in news media accounts).
The recovery effort would involve years of deception: deep ocean mining would be the cover story for construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer.
Hughes “Ocean Mining”
Scientists and venture capitalists had long seen potential in ocean mining, but when Hughes appeared to take on the challenge, the world took notice. The well-publicized plan described harvesting magnesium nodules from record depths with a custom-built ship that would push engineering technology to new limits, typical of Hughes’ style. The story spread.
But from concept to launch, the Hughes Glomar Explorer had one purpose: Raise the sunken Soviet Golf-II class submarine from 1968 — and any ballistic missiles. Construction began in 1972 by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in a Delaware River facility south of Philadelphia. Hughes’ $350 million (about $261 billion in 2024) high-tech ship was ostensibly built to mine the sea floor.
On August 8, 1974, the “magnesium mining vessel” secretly raised part of the 2,000-ton K-129 through a hidden well opening in the hull and a “claw” of mechanically articulated fingers that used seawater as a hydraulic fluid. News about Project Azorian leaked within six months.
Seymour Hersh of the Los Angeles Times revealed the clandestine project on February 7, 1974. An investigative reporter, he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre.
On February 7, 1974, the Los Angeles Times broke the story: “CIA Salvage Ship Brought Up Part Of Soviet Sub Lost In 1968, Failed To Raise Atom Missiles.”
The L.A. Times article by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh ended the high-tech vessel’s spying career. The government transferred the Hughes Glomar Explorer to the Navy in 1976 for an extensive $2 million preparation for storage in dry dock. With its CIA days over, the vessel spent almost two decades mothballed at Suisun Bay, California.
Pioneer Drill Ship
London-based Global Marine had converted the CIA vessel for commercial use. The company hired Electronic Power Design of Houston, Texas, to work on the advanced electrical system. After almost 20 years in storage, the condition of equipment inside the ship surprised Electronic Power Design CEO John Janik.
“Everything was just as the CIA had left it,” Janik explained, “down to the bowls on the counter and the knives hanging in the kitchen. Even though all the systems were intact, this was by no means an ordinary ship.”
Janik noted in 2015 for The Maritime Executive that his company’s retrofit was “a tough job because the ship’s wiring was unlike anything we had ever seen before,” although preservation had been helped by nitrogen pumped into the ship’s interior for two decades.
Conversion work later included a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard adding a derrick, drilling equipment, and 11 positioning thrusters capable of a combined 35,200 horsepower. Completed in 1998 as the world’s largest drillship, Glomar Explorer began a long-term lease from the U.S. Navy to Global Marine Drilling for $1 million per year.
The advanced drilling ship spent the next 17 years working in deep-water sites around the globe, including Africa’s Nigerian delta, the Black Sea, offshore Angola, Indonesia, Malta, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Following a series of corporate mergers, Glomar Explorer became part of the largest offshore drilling contractor, the Swiss company Transocean Ltd. When it entered that company’s fleet, the ship was renamed GSF Explorer and in 2013 was re-flagged from Houston to the South Pacific’s Port Vila in Vanuatu.
The former top-secret CIA vessel Glomar Explorer began a record-setting career in 1998 as a technologically advanced deep-water drill ship. Photo courtesy American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
When GSF Explorer arrived at the Chinese shipbreaker’s yard in 2015, many offshore industry trade publications took notice of the ship’s demise after years of exceptional deep drilling service. The ship was “decades ahead of its time and the pioneer of all modern drill ships,” declared the Electronic Power Design CEO in The Maritime Executive article.
“It broke all the records for working at unimaginable depths and should be remembered as a technological phenomenon,” Janik concluded.
Soon after the former Glomar Explorer was sold for scrap, Tom Speight of the engineering firm O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun, reflected in a company post, “This is a shame, not only because of the ship’s nearly unbelievable history, but also because in 2006 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated this technologically remarkable ship a historic mechanical engineering landmark.”
The ASME award ceremony, which took place on July 20, 2006, in Houston, included members of the original engineering team and ship’s crew among the attendees. Past President Keith Thayer noted the important contributions the ship made to the development of mechanical engineering and innovations in offshore drilling technology.
The historic ship’s name will forever be linked to the ship’s CIA clandestine service during the Cold War. For many veteran journalists, the agency’s chronic response to inquiries, “We can neither confirm nor deny,” is still known as the “Glomar response.”
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Recommended Reading: The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub (2012); Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 (2012). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Secret Offshore History of Drill Ship Glomar Explorer.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/secret-offshore-history-of-the-glomar-explorer. Last Updated: January 25, 2026. Original Published Date: February 8, 2020.
by Bruce Wells | Jan 15, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
Standard Oil curbed the excitement of unruly speculators trading oil and pipeline certificates.
In a sign of the growing power of John D. Rockefeller at the end of the 19th century, Standard Oil Company brought a decisive end to Pennsylvania’s highly speculative — and often confusing — trading markets at oil exchanges.
On January 23, 1895, the Standard Oil Company’s purchasing agency in Oil City, Pennsylvania, notified independent oil producers it would only buy their oil at a price “as high as the markets of the world will justify” and not necessarily “the price bid on the oil exchange for certificate oil.” The action would bring an end to the “paper oil” markets of brokers and buyers.
(more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 10, 2026 | Petroleum History Almanac
The North Texas church proclaimed richest in America.
In the fall of 1917 near Ranger, Texas, the cotton-farming town of Merriman was inhabited by “ranchers, farmers, and businessmen struggling to survive an economic slump brought on by severe drought and boll weevil-ravaged cotton fields.”
Everything changed in Eastland County when a wildcat well drilled by Texas & Pacific Coal Company struck oil at Ranger, four miles from Merriman. The J.H. McCleskey No. 1 well produced 1,600 barrels of oil a day.
The 1917 headline-making McCleskey No. 1 cable-tool well — called “Roaring Ranger” — brought an oil boom to Eastland County, Texas, about 100 miles west of Dallas.
The rush to acquire leases that followed the oilfield discovery became legendary among drilling booms, even for Texas, home to the legendary 1901 gusher at Spindletop.
WWI Wave of Oil
As drilling continued, the yield of the Ranger oilfield led to peak production reaching more than 14 million barrels in 1919. Production from the “Roaring Ranger” well and its giant North Texas oilfield helped win World War I, with a British War Cabinet member declaring, “The Allied cause floated to victory upon a wave of oil.”
Texas & Pacific Coal Company had taken a great risk by leasing acreage around Ranger, but the risk paid off when lease values soared. The exploration company added “oil” to its name, becoming the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company.
“So as we could not worship God on the former acre of ground, we decided to lease it and honor God with the product,” explained Merriman Baptist Church Deacon J.T. Falls. Photo courtesy Robert Vann, “Lone Star Bonanza, the Ranger Oil Boom of 1917-1923.”
The price of the oil company stock jumped from $30 a share to $1,250 a share as a host of landmen “scanned the landscape to discover any fractions in these holdings. A little school and church, before too small to be seen, now looked like a skyscraper.”
Warren Wagner, driller of the McCleskey discovery well, leased the local school lot and in August 1918 completed a well producing 2,500 barrels of oil a day. Leasing at Merriman Baptist Church proved to be a challenge.
In February, Deacon J.T. Falls complained that drilling new wells “ran us out, as all of the land around our acre was leased, producing wells being brought in so near the house we were compelled to abandon the church because of the gas fumes and noisy machinery.”
Falls added that, “As we could not worship God on the former acre of ground, we decided to lease it and honor God with the product.”
Deacon J.T. Falls (second from left) was not amused when the Associated Press reported in 1919 that his church had refused a million dollars for the lease of the cemetery.
A Texas Historical Commission marker erected in 1999 described when the well on the church’s lease began producing oil, earning the congregation a royalty of between $300 and $400 a day. Merriman Baptist Church “kept a small amount for operating expenses and gave the rest to various Baptist organizations and charities.”
However, drilling in the church graveyard was a different matter. As oil production continued to soar in North Texas, the congregants of Merriman Baptist Church initially resisted one drilling site. As a January 18, 1919, article in the New York Times noted in its headline, “CHURCH MADE RICH BY OIL; Refuses $1,000,000 for Right to Develop Wells in Graveyard.”
Respecting the Dead
At Merriman’s church cemetery, a less seen historical marker erected in 1993 explains the drilling boom’s fierce competition to find property without a well already on it: “Oil speculators reportedly offered members of the Merriman Baptist Church a large sum of money to lease the cemetery grounds for drilling.”
Near Ranger in Eastland County, Texas Historical Commission markers were erected in 1993 (left) and 1999 explaining how members of the Merriman Baptist Church shared their wealth from petroleum royalties. Photos courtesy the Historical Marker Database.
When local newspapers reported the church had refused an offer of $1 million, the Associated Press picked it up, and newspapers from New York to San Francisco ran the story. Literary Digest even featured “the Texas Mammon of Righteousness” with a photograph of “The Congregation That Refuses A Million.”
Deacon J.T. Falls was not amused. “A great many clippings have been sent to us from many secular papers to the effect that we as a church have refused a million dollars for the lease of the cemetery. We do not know how such a statement started,” the deacon opined.
“The cemetery does not belong to the church. It was here long before the church was. We could not lease it if we would, and we would not if we could,” the cleric added.
“If any person’s or company’s heart has become so congealed as to want to drill for oil in this cemetery, they could not — for the dead could not sign a lease, and no living person has any right to do so,” Falls proclaimed.
The church deacon concluded with an ominous admonition to potential drillers, “Those that have friends buried here have the right and the will to protect the graves, and any person attempting to trespass will assume a great risk.”
A 1918 article noted a “Merriman school house” oil well drilled to 3,200 feet in record time for North Central Texas.
Roaring Ranger’s oil production dropped precipitously because of dwindling reservoir pressures brought on by unconstrained drilling. Many exploration and production companies failed (including fraudulent ones like Hog Creek Carruth Oil Company).
In the decades since the McCleskey No. 1 well, advancements in horizontal drilling technology have presented more legal challenges to mineral rights of the interred, according to Zack Callarman of Texas Wesleyan School of Law.
In 2014, Callarman wrote an award-winning analysis of laws concerning drilling to extract oil and natural gas underneath cemeteries. “Seven Thousand Feet Under: Does Drilling Disturb the Dead? Or Does Drilling Underneath the Dead Disturb the Living?” was published in the Real Estate Law Journal.
Despite yet another North Texas oilfield discovery at Desdemona, by 1920 the Eastland County drilling boom was over. The faithful still gather at Merriman Baptist Church every Sunday.
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Recommended Reading: Early Texas Oil: A Photographic History, 1866-1936
(2000);Texas Oil and Gas, Postcard History (2013);Wildcatters: Texas Independent Oilmen
(1984). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Oil Riches of Merriman Baptist Church.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/oil-riches-of-merriman-baptist-church. Last Updated: January 11, 2026. Original Published Date: January 18, 2019.
