Arkansas Geography & Economics – Object #6

“BN: My dad worked for Lion Oil COmpany…he went to work for them in ‘22…he was in charge of the boil hazards and the treater plant, the sulphur plant they had down there which they used to make their gasoline and what have you; but, he was in chair of their, uh, boilers, primarily, supervised over them….
I worked at the refinery back when I was sixteen years old. Back there was during the second war…
DP: Did your parents live in El Dorado before the oil boom?
BN: No, uh, they didn’t. My dad came from Mississippi and my mother from Louisiana; and, they married in I guess about 1920 and moved to El Dorado in 1922.
DP: OK. Um, was there any place for them to live?
BN: No, they, uh, they had some real stories to tell about where they lived at the time. They lived in tents and one-room places. Just, uh–there wasn’t many places at all to live then…
Dad told me that it was really wild back in those days, uh, you had to be careful. You’d go someplace and you’d get stuck up. Somebody’d rob you just, you know, oh, at the drop of a hat, and it was just, you know, it was real rough at those times…
DP: What do you remember from growing up that you think would be really different from what other people would know from being in the oil field?
BN: Well, ‘course back then, I think everybody thought oil would last forever. ‘Course it’s gotta be like a — just like it was there, well back then you had the — three or four — had the Root Refinery and Lion Refinery and, uh, Bixaco Refinery. You had three or four refineries right down there in El Dorado, you see..and those things were going full blast…people worked hard. I know my dad told me he worked nine years with the refinery without ever having a day off. That was seven days a week, you know. And, uh, more than eight hours a day, and, uh, I don’t know, seems like people were closer then than they are now, because you didn’t have all those distractions. Didn’t have t.v. and things like that, see…
‘Course everyone went to the movies on Saturday, Saturday morning especially because you had a double feature and a comedy and a serial; and, those serials would last about fifteen weeks. You didn’t want to miss an episode at all of that, you know…
Back in those days, too, baseball was a big thing then. They had a ___league teams down there; and, of course, we had our knothole gang and all the kids got, I think, fifty cents for a ticket for a year, and we got to see all the baseball games for fifty cents for a year…
All the companies, all of your oil companies then, had baseball teams and they had some kind of leagues around there, the industrial leagues more or less; and, this was just old rawbone stuff. I’m talking about, it wasn’t fancy like it is today, and they played baseball. It was a big thing back then…”