W.T. “Dub” Riley started out in life to be a cowboy and no doubt would have been if his father hadn’t moved in 1944 to Odessa, where he found himself in the midst of the oil industry and ended up making a success of it.
The 89-year-old Paint Rock native had been living near Brady, where his father Tom worked for the Block House Ranch, with his mother Gladys and six brothers and sisters when they arrived here for his dad to work on the Parker Ranch. “I’ve been around Odessa for so long, I helped dig the Pecos River,” Riley quips.
“When it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, we got a quarter-inch. Odessa’s population was 9,500 in 1944, and by 1950 it was 15,000.”
He’d been attending Odessa High School when he enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 18, and he was expecting to invade Japan with the Third Division when World War II ended in 1945. Riley and his late wife Caroll Sue had three children, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
After the war, he taught marksmanship at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., and was in honor guards for President Harry Truman, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admirals Chester Nimitz, William “Bull” Halsey and Ernest King. “The Marine Corps was a great experience,” Riley said.
He is particularly proud of being part of the first peacetime graduation honor guard at Annapolis in June 1946. Halsey, King and Nimitz were in attendance and were five star admirals — the first and last time the country had five star admirals.
“The discipline was one thing, and I got out to see the world. I realized I had to get more education.”
He’d worked as a roughneck while continuing to do ranch work before the war, and after his return he joined Gulf Oil as a roustabout, laying flow lines and building tank batteries around Goldsmith 20 miles west-northwest of here. “When I first started in the oilfield, I’d never done anything but pick cotton and brand and vaccinate cattle,” Riley said.
“I had been getting $1 a day on the ranches, and when we came out here and I got 75 cents an hour, I didn’t know what I was going to do with all that money. We moved west of town to the Cowden Ranch off Highway 866, and one time we rounded up 100 to 125 cattle at 4 a.m. on the back side of the pasture and drove them down 27th Street past West County Road with the sheriff stopping cars. “We drove them to where Cashway is now on Dixie and put them into pens to be loaded on the train. It took till late at night to get them loaded, then we rode our horses back seven or eight miles to the ranch.”
Attending Odessa College for six years at night to get a degree, Riley advanced with Gulf from pumper, operating oil wells and keeping records, to instrument technician, a buyer of pumping units and tank batteries, often spending $100,000 a day, and finally to regional production foreman with 10 pumpers and more than 150 wells.
He retired from Gulf after 35 years, before its merger with Chevron, and was a partner with Jimmy Floyd of Midland in the RollTex and RollCo ball bearing companies for nine years. He helped his son Ron of Lubbock start Riley Geological Consulting 14 years ago. “Everything is common sense,” he said.
“I used to train engineers all the time. I didn’t have a degree, but I knew how to crack a well or squeeze a casing leak. After two or three years, they would be an engineer.
“I never worried about losing my job. If you show up every day sober and make a good hand, a company will make an effort to keep you on even if they don’t need you. They don’t write it down, but when they have a layoff they’ve got it in the back of their heads, this guy wasn’t a very good hand anyway.”
Riley remembers the Odessa and Goldsmith of the 1940s and ‘50s as busy places with little time to worry about anything except making a living and occasionally getting entertainment. “We had the KRIG and KCRS radio stations in Odessa and Midland, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys played inside at West County Park, which is Floyd Gwin Park now.
“A piano player called Big Daddy Pat played at the Ace of Clubs west of town. It was wide-open gambling at the American Legion, where Medical Center Hospital is. They had poker nights and slot machines. Some big bands played at the VFW between here and Midland, where the aviation companies are.
“We had two or three drive-in movies, including the Broncho where Western National Bank is now. I think it cost 25 cents to get in. We had the Rio Theater at Sixth and Grant, and the Scott family from Iraan built the Scott and Ector theaters on Texas.
“Before I got married, I lived in the Gulf bunkhouse with 40 men a mile east of Goldsmith and paid 60 cents a meal in the boardinghouse next door. Most of the oilfield hands I knew were beer drinkers. We’d go to Jelly Haynes’ Buckhorn Saloon to cash our checks. I contributed a lot to that thing.”
Asked if the men ever fought, Riley chuckled and said, “From time to time, there would be some things.
“Usually in the next day or two, they would be back hugging each other.”
Riley has been lucky with his health, having had a heart attack this year and having needed a bigger stent after the first one proved inadequate. “I got a blood clot on my lung and spent Valentine’s Day in the hospital,” he said, adding that he exercises daily either at a workout center or on his equipment at home.
Goldsmith rancher Bill Wight said Riley “has always been a guy willing to help somebody out who needed some help.
“Dub is real outgoing,” Wight said. “He will always strike up a conversation with a stranger, and he calls me with jokes he’s heard. He is pretty good at seeing the humor in situations when things come up.”
Wight said Riley once did woodwork in his backyard and made picture frames for friends and acquaintances. “He knows a lot of people and when someone would get an award or some kind of plaque, the next thing they knew Dub would show up with a frame for it,” Wight said.
“I’ve always thought he did the best job of retiring of anybody I have known. He also had a metal shop, and he has done a good job of finding things he was interested in doing instead of sitting.”
Former Odessa College Dean of Technical Studies Ken Hurst said Riley “is a real West Texas character who knows a tremendous amount about the oilfield and the Odessa and West Texas areas.
“Dub remembers quite a bit about Goldsmith when it was a booming little town, and he delights in telling people about the history of that area,” said Hurst, who belonged to a recreational vehicle club with the Rileys and traveled with them to Fort Davis, Kerrville, the Gulf Coast and other places.
