Chapter 45 Old Haunts

June 2017 I paid a visit to Bartlesville with my wife on the occasion of my daughter's wedding. She was to be wed in Catoosa Oklahoma on Sunday so we drove up to B'ville and tooled around on Saturday.

I must say the place looked like a ghost town, but in hindsight not much more than it did on weekends in the 1980's.  We drove downtown and all through the adjacent residential areas visiting my old haunts including my old house on Cherokee. I knocked on the door and asked the present owners if I could take a look around and they invited me in.

The three intervening owners had made a few changes to the home and alterations to my remodeling.
The stained wood tongue and groove wood ceiling I put in in the kitchen had been painted over by the previous female owner, as well as the hard wood kitchen cabinet doors and base cabinet drawers.

She had the good sense to refinish the hard wood kitchen floor pulling up the vinyl flooring I had put down, when I ran out of time to refinish it when I did the breakfast room and hallway. The had closed in the archway between the living room and the "music room" or TV room. They put in two French doors. It made the living room seem a lot smaller. The vestibule door by the front door had been removed, kind of defeating the purpose of the vestibule in bad weather, and the thick oak arched top front door had been replaced with a cheap rectangular job. I thought it really destroyed the look of front of the house since it always reminded me of a gingerbread house, with a steep pitched roof and brick porch and such. The door was a real eye catcher. The guy who bought it from Phillips National Bank made that change. I can't recall if the old casement windows were still there, though I think they were. It still had the old asbestos siding shingles in place.

The privacy fence I put up around the back yard in 1982 was still there except for the double gate I put up to contain my Doberman, Panzer in the back yard. I guess I can build a privacy fence to last.

The old garage apartment that one of my old flames lived in that I could see from my kitchen is still there but vacant and you can't get to the front door for all the debris piled in front. That is a shame it was a nice one bedroom apartment and the scene of a lot of good times.

Patrick's is long gone, Disco International is nothing but a ghost of the past. We drove up to Lake Bar-dew and found the access road padlocked and closed despite the cat-woman who purchased it saying the public would still have access to it. I reckon it is now a private hunting preserve for the adjacent land owners who use it without the owner's knowledge. It had good hunting. I took more than a few deer and a lot of quail. This visit I was hoping to capture some fossils from the dam spillway, which is a cut through Pennsylvanian age black/gray shale which is filled with fossils.

My son takes my grandsons to "The Mound" north of the research center and digs fossils to this day.

We went up to Nike Hill to visit the candle factory and it is a former shadow of its past glory too. Much smaller with fewer hand painted candles for sale.

I found out the Fronkier ranch of the infamous Forth of July party in the Osage had been sold due to lack of funds. My former direct report living here in Houston, last name Mundy told me about that. That is a shame. The Indian land should stay in Indian hands. Too much was lost under the Dawes Act allotment.

We drove out to R&D and it is much reduced. The old PPCo Softball fields are now padlocked and overgrown an indication of how the demographics have changed.

To show how small the world is, I was sitting in the sauna at my gym, when this drop dead young blonde came in. I've spoken to her on occasion before. We got to talking about things and she said she had just broken up with her boyfriend. One thing led to another, and she mentions he is from Bartlesville and that his father worked for Phillips. The last name was Johns. He is Mormon and comes from a large family. I wracked my brain...the name sounded familiar. I thought I might have shared a cubicle with her boyfriend's father in the 1980's for nearly a year.

We compared notes and I gave her some insight as to why her relationship failed. The guy apparently expected her to toe the Mormon female line and she wanted a career and wanted to continue to work out at the gym, two things he apparently could not abide. Too bad. She would have been a real catch. She is the image of Nordic perfection.

I contacted one of my old coworkers and mentor who is also Mormon and I did in fact, NOT know anyone in that family. My cubicle mate' first name was John, not his last. But the fact that the blonde and I were both connected to Bartlesville and had made the connection in such a random way was a real hoot.

I spoke to her about the book I am finishing up, that touches on relationships between men and women. In it I try to give young men some insight into the history of the Feminist movement from the 1970s to present. How Feminists have controlled the dialog for over fifty years and have endeavored with great success to define men for our society. A small number of militant lesbian feminists have purported to speak for the majority and it is obvious from the failure of the ERA and the 2016 election that they are completely out of touch with the majority of women in the US.  They resort to shaming, name calling and bullying just like a bunch of Junior High school girls. Hillary and Michelle O. took to social media to lambaste and name call the majority of women who did not vote for Hillary. So it is okay for them to do the same thing that liberals are horrified about when it takes place in social media and results in a teen girl or boy committing suicide. Bullying by name calling and shaming is okay for liberals to do, as we see in the Me Too! movement where they resort to lynching any male regardless of color by accusation alone. There is no need for investigation, trial and conviction, he is guilty just by reason that he has testicles.  They do not care about collateral damage like the female agent who killed herself when caught in the middle of the social media charges and counter charges between Rose McGowan and her alleged 'rapist."

That McGowan would levy harassment charges against anyone is laughable. How does she think she got her first role? Based on her talent?  Hardly. Her talent resides below her chin.

Seriously any woman who would dress like this in public is simply a trolling whore. She isn't trolling to get laid, but she certainly is making it known there is little she wouldn't do to get noticed, get notoriety, or to land a role. This outfit established what kind of woman she is, not she's just quibbling over the price. She is a has been which is demonstrated by her cutting her hair short which gives her instant credibility with the Lesbian Feminists, after all we remember Sinead O'Connor right?

It is pretty clear that Rose's assets have take a drop, and so did the number of calls she was getting. That is all part of a Hollywood star getting older. So now with her documentary and all she is trying to be taken seriously. Way to late for that.

Ah but I digress. The wife and I went to Sunset Lake after stopping at Murphy's for an artery clogging Hot Hamburger. She had heard about it, so I felt I needed to treat her to one. It was a nice lunch.

We stopped at the new (to us) refurbished locomotive and B'ville Train Station. We had driven through Johnstone Park to see if the gays were still hanging out in the men's room. I thought maybe we'd see George Michaels or Eddie Murphy, but no, it was pretty deserted. I noticed the locomotive was gone, alas so were the legion of stray cats that it housed.  The I discovered it had been moved to the tracks west of down town, a fitting site.  I often wondered about the last hours of all those stray cats and whether they made it to the top of the locomotive cab before the flood waters of 1987 closed over them when the entire park was under 25-30 feet of water.

We drove around both sides of town, visiting my old residences, and saw nary one familiar face. The place had really turned into a retirement community, which is not all bad. In fact, I am looking to move from Houston to be closer to my daughter and son and grandsons. I have even considered Bartlesville and the surrounding environs. I guess as they say, time will tell.

Chapter 44 The Palau Connection...

Last chapter was written a long time ago. I had left off saying that my former employer had turned down an offer to scam the Canadian Government of funds by setting up a sham company, an office front really, in order to get funds from the Canadian Government for bringing in technology into Canada. Of course the intent was to foster new companies and jobs, but there are always people who can game the system to line their own pockets.

I was on my honeymoon in the Cayman Islands when I was approached by two men trolling the bars looking for businesses to invest in such a scheme. I took the info back to my employers and partners and gave them the facts and they turned it down.

Ah...imagine my surprise when about five years later that they had changed their minds.  By then our association had parted ways under rancorous circumstances. I was employed in Houston, was living with a woman who had just opened an upscale bar in West Houston and we were building the business up. I was working for Schlumberger full time and about 20 hours a weekend at the bar.

I was sitting at the bar when I happened to hear two patrons talking about a prospectus they had received from a company and yada, yada, yada, it was a geo-microbial technology survey in Palau, a place I had done something similar five years earlier. I butted into their conversation and after dropping a few pertinent phrases and facts had their complete attention.

They were indeed discussing an offer from my previous employer to carry out surveys for petroleum in the very same area I had done five years earlier and had written a scathing cover letter to accompany my final report detailing how the project from start to finish had been one big scam designed to fleece any company who was stupid enough to think there was oil there.

My former employer is based in Ochelata, Ok. and it appeared as though they did open a Canadian subsidiary to bilk the Canuke government out of money. The oil company the men represented shall remain nameless. The two guys were nice enough to let me see the reports which they had out in their car. I showed them the reference to my original work in the bibliography of one of the project reports they were citing. It seems they had done another survey there on a volcanic atoll and they were pointing to the methane they detected as an indicator of possible gas and or oil. This was patently horseshit since the gas was thermogenic not biogenic. Long story short I filled them in on all the nefarious practices that the company carried out with respect to the data that they presented to their clients. Many were non-scientific such as manipulating the data and then passing it off as "raw" data to the clients. Then manipulating it again to process it. They also used shoddy practices in so far as they did not throw out obviously spurious data points that were detected by the laboratory methods put in place specifically to detect such anomalous data points.  This was primarily due to Doofus, the son and president, not knowing elementary statistics or laboratory methods. So he included spurious data points that completely threw off the final processed data.

At one time I tried to introduce some new methods by developing a data drop curve. We were sampling live organisms that we removed from their habitat. It is expected that they would begin to die once so removed, and that any delay from sampling to arrival at the lab to be processed would result in changes in the expected norm. I wanted to generate a decline curve for days since sampling, which would have been a simple thing. The father and originator of the technique torpedoed my efforts by deliberately not continuing my work along my established calendar, when I had been sent out into the field, so all the work done up till then on the same samples had to be thrown out.

I left the company shortly there after to go to law school and could not longer travel.

Well my two new friends were more than interested in hearing my comments about the business practices and lack of scruples of the company. They were impressed by my knowledge of the techniques being offered until I told them that I had done a lot of the developmental work while at Phillips over a six year period in research and development. I was also the chief geologist of the company while I worked for them, doing sales, project management, implementation, data analysis and client reporting and relations.  I knew the stuff cold and told the two men that I felt my former employer was misrepresenting what the technique could do and told them so.

I also let them know what they should ask and what the correct answers were and what they would be told instead.  They both agreed it was not something they were going to recommend to their bosses that they get involved with.

In 2018 I do not know how the company is doing, I do know that the father has died, and possibly the mother, both of whom were the brains of the family. I wanted to lay the involvement with the Canadian con-men at the feet of Doofus  but his father Donald did not die until 2012. and his mother just a few years ago. So it may be that they all made the decision, or that Donald had essentially retired and left Doofus to make all the business decisions. In any event, it was fraud plain and simple.

I felt like I did a service by warning off my two new friends.  Today, the whole issue has been put to bed since all of Palau and its national waters have been declared a Marine and Shark Sanctuary and oil exploration as well as commercial fishing are strictly prohibited. Not too long ago, a couple of Vietnamese fishing trawlers were seized and then burnt by the Palauan Marine Patrol, which has the backing of the US Navy, since there is a defense treaty between the US and the new Republic of Palau.