Chapter 36 Phillips 66 Credit Union

Around Christmas time used to bake assorted German Christmas cookies pack them in the little tin cookie cans from Pier One Imports and take them to the tellers at the Phillips 66 credit union. 

 

There was a tall attractive gal who worked there.  She eventually made it to head teller if I recall.  I can't remember exactly how we met outside of the Credit Union, probably at Happy Hour at Patrick's or the DI or maybe a party. I cannot remember, but I bet she could.  Women remember that kind of thing. 

 

She lived in Ramona with her parents I believe.  She was a single mom.  I don't remember much about how we started off, but I think she came home from the DI with me one weekend night.  It turned into a thing that happened every now and then.   Not always at my place but always on her terms.  She's leave early so as to be home when her child woke up.  She'd leave notes in the mailbox at my house asking if I was going to be free and if I was, then we’d meet up.  I guess we defined the term FB..fuck buddies before there was a term for it.

I remember one weekend she was house-sitting, so I met her where she was staying.  We watched TV had some wine and had sex.  Nice simple, no strings attached.

I guess she was lonely and just wanted company and sex.   Those terms are usually agreeable to a guy, they were with me.   I don't ever recall the subject of a relationship ever coming up, we just had the occasional night together enjoying each other and that was it.  I guess she had enough in her life raising a child on her own.   I recall she finally did get married again and moved out of the area.  Before I left for Houston she had been promoted to Head Teller.  She was an all-around nice young woman.

There was one fringe benefit, she would call me if an incoming check of mine was not going to clear and hold it for me till I could transfer some money to cover it.

 

I never once met the kid, so she was on the ball there.   Why?    Years later when I was dating I recall going on a date with a blond gal, another single mom and she dragged me back to her house after a date to meet her son.  If she was trying to fill the void left by the absence of the kid’s father, she was doing it all wrong.  I tried talking to the kid, and he said, “Don’t waste your time trying to be nice to me.  I know you won’t be around in a week.”  The kid was older than his years and had been irrevocably scarred by his mom’s frequent dalliances and inability to stay in a lasting relationship.  That was enough to kill any desire I might have had for GI Jane (she had just finished a stint in the army).  As much as I wanted to, I could not have bonked her there knowing her son would probably be listening to the headboard pound the wall.  I had kids of my own at that time and I didn’t want to think about them being in the same position.

This brings me to Miss Brown.  Miss Brown was a sweetie that I met at the YMCA gym.  I used to watch her pump out set after set of squats.  She had a bum on her that you could have bounced a baseball off of and thighs that would have made Mr. T cringe.  She had short blond hair and a cute face. 

 

This was just another demonstration of how small Bartlesville was and is.

 

Turns out her mother was a loan officer at the credit union.  I had gone in to open a signature loan line of credit and her mother is the loan officer I spoke with.  I don't think her mother ever knew about me.  As it turned out Ms Brown and my friendship was short lived.

 

We ran around for a short while but it was doomed because she had made up her mind to move to Tulsa.  At the time I couldn't blame her.  I wanted to leave too but was saddled with a house.  There was little opportunity for her in Bartlesville.  I went to visit a time or two in Tulsa, after she moved into her new apartment.  I seem to recall even going furniture shopping with her to the big what’s it’s name warehouse furniture place.  We went out for lunch and spent a bit of time together.  I would have liked to get to know her better, but it was not to be.  I am kind of surprised I didn’t’ run into her when I bounced at Incahoot’s but she struck me as more the country and western cowgirl, so she probably frequented Wild West or some other place on the east side.  Regardless she was a sweetheart.

Chapter 35 Crime, Canoe Trip Rules and Dale C.

We had one gal on our volley ball team report she was raped.  I never read about it in the papers.  Crime was something the powers-that-be in Bartlesville back then didn't like to publicize.  They'd rather have people victimized than let them be forewarned.  Heaven forbid that people should think crime existed in B'ville.  Two friends had their homes cleaned out by a gang of thieves.  They lived in the country just outside of town.  One off of South 75 one up in the Osage hills just over Nike Hill.  The gang would approach from the prairie side of the house and just load up trucks or whatever was handy and take everything they could.  They usually had all day to do it.

A friend and ring leader of our group of horny young people was a guy named Dale C.  His family was from over in Arkansas or at least that is where his mother was living.  He worked in the Catalyst Lab and organized canoe trips over on the Buffalo River.  We would drive over and camp on his mother's living room floor in Harrison the first night and hit the river the next day.  Imagine 20 people sleeping on your living room floor!  His mother would even get up the next morning and make ups breakfast.

Some of us would pair off with a partner on the trip, either female or male.  I had my own canoe so took a date along.  In my experience, if a gal got an invitation to go on a canoe trip and camp it was pretty well understood that there would be sex.  It is like inviting someone to go on a trip knowing ahead of time you were sharing the same room and the same king size bed.

I took a co-worker by the name of Kathy R. a very bright and sexy lab technician in the Geology Branch.  She was pixyish, short hair an impish smile and game for anything.  A months later after the canoe trip, we did a stint of field work in Paris, Texas.  We went to a restaurant in Paris, and I got some bad imitation crab, or maybe it was real crab they had driven up very slowly from the coast.  In the event I had severe Hershey squirts and was dehydrated to beat hell.  I was afraid to drink water for fear of leaving a trail of diarrhea across N. Texas.  We had to walk about 7 miles in the heat climbing fences and carrying shovels and samples.  I became weak as a kitten, but she soldiered on and carried all the equipment for me.  She was a real trooper.  I made it up to her later.

One of the other team members, who was pretty clueless, must have heard noises in the wee hours of the night and inquired at breakfast about what had been going on.   He must have been Mormon. No, even they know about that stuff, they have huge families.  I mean really, what did he expect me to say? "Oh, that was just Kathy and I boxing the compass last night on my bed..."   Cathy and I had a FB (that does not stand for face book), relationship for some time and personally I don't think it was his or anyone else's business.  Kathy left R&D to go back to school I think.  She was pretty lonely in B'ville, living in some apartments near down town; it was this square apartment complex, with a center courtyard, more like a motel.  Anyway, I don't know what happened to her we fell out of touch.

On the canoe trip we had some excitement, turned over at least once, camped at the first 12 mile takeout below Lost River and it started to rain.  We had a fun cozy night together.  I really liked that.  Didn't get too wet, not from the rain anyway.

The next day the river had risen to flood proportions and the rest of the group bugged out.  Left their rental canoes and booked.  I on the other hand had to get down stream to my truck, which I had already had shuttled to the takeout point.  It was the most exciting canoe trip of my life. 

 

I sent Cathy on in a car to the takeout point and another guy volunteered to be my second in the canoe.  We covered the 6 miles in a couple of hours.  You could not see the shore, the water was up in the trees so you had to stay in mid channel to avoid reall trouble..  We dumped once just upstream of a strainer, a flooded stand of trees.  I was able to get to shore with the canoe before we wrapped it.  Not having wet suits we were border line hypothermic.  The hot coffee we had helped.  We finally started following a guy in a solo canoe who knew what he was doing and had no further problems.  There were standing waves a good 4 feet high in some places and water would come over the bow and drench the bowman and fill the bottom of the canoe.  We were glad to make it to the take out point but were very exhilarated as well.

 

I went on more than a few canoe trips and took dates along, a single mom here, a single gal there, and we always had fun.  I tended to do the luxury canoe trip.  Cooler with food, beer, wine, it was rigged properly with no fear of loosing anything from the canoe in an upset.  Dinner might be cajun blackened fish or shrimp etouffe.  Dessert might be strawberries and cream.  Drinks, beer, wine and even champagne.

I even found a blind date; no she could actually see, for a friend from Houston.  He came up and we paired him up with her.  She was an acquaintance of my future Ex # 2 and the "Canoe Trip" rules applied and she was ready and eager to go.  Another friend and his girlfriend came along.  On the way over from OK to the river we were having a few drinks and on one stop, both Future Ex #2 and the date got out and had to throw up form the alcohol.  My buddy, he was the one who married the Indonesian gal, looked at me with a serious face, the cracked a smile and gave me two thumbs up.  He was like that.  He knew he was in like Flynn.

 

We three couples shared a cabin the first night at Lost Valley on the Buffalo.  My god she was a screamer.  My girlfriend and I lay awake half the night listening to them by the fire place.  The other couple had taken the loft and we settled in on a pull out bed by the bathroom. The couple in the loft, well the female half was so disturbed by it all; she spent the night, according to her boyfriend, with her pillow over her head. 

It was pretty humorous at breakfast the next night.  This same later on the river saw fit to pitch his tent next to mine, when I took great pains to camp away from him and the carnal soprano companion.  The next morning I got up to fix coffee and almost walked into a used condom hung from a tree branch in front of my tent door.  Those kooky crazy guys.  He was the same one who detested a pink tie I owned.  So on an occasion of me staying at his apartment, with said tie and my camera being present he waited till I was gone on an errand.  He enlisted the help of a friend, dropped trouser, tied my tie to his penis and documented it on film in my camera.

I got quite a laugh when I got the pictures back.  He though I would be appalled.  Not so, I still have the tie and the picture.  To be honest I don't' think I ever got it cleaned.  It is silk and you know how delicate silk is..

Dale hooked up with a troublesome gal from Dallas who played the jealousy card on him a lot.  She would drink want the attention of other guys, then have to deal with the consequences.  It jerked him around a lot.  He finally married her, which was not the solution, obviously.  She didn't stop or change and I lost contact with them before they flamed out.  Too bad.  She was a very attractive gal which was probably why he tried to hang on to her.  I think she had some problems though.  From a guy who married a bi-polar woman (Future Ex #3) I now know the symptoms by heart and run the other direction. 

I am sure the alcohol and drugs going around that part of the group probably didn't make things any better.

Update.  With Facebook allowing people to connect, I reconnected with Dale just in time to experience his death.  It was just a few years back.  Dale was always a trend setter.  It seems he had cancer, and just about knew the time of his expiration.  So he got on Facebook and posted a good bye to all his friends and then cashed in his chips.  It was kind of eerie, but nice in a way.  Everyone got to hear what he had to say about his life and the end of it and then if you were lucky, you had time to respond.

 

I lost another good friend and classmate to his excessive drinking and tobacco.  Sadly he did not heed nature’s and his bodies warning signs until it was too late and had a massive cardiac event that left him brain dead.  Facebook seems to have turned out to quasi memorials to people, which is fine.  We all posted pictures and memories of the guy and new and old friends got to see him in different periods of his life that they might not have known about.

Chapter 33 Unbalanced and Suicidal: a Tale of Stalking

There was a gal, Her name was Vicky G.  Her mother lived over on Adam's Blvd where it ran by Pennington Hills.  She was a fixture at the DI and most parties, but she was a bit strange.  She was a local girl, not hard to look at but a bit clingy.  I guess she was one of those unfortunates that nobody liked in school, but everyone knew.  The kind of girl that has "Use Me" written on her forehead, and a lot of guys did just that.  She was the proverbial outsider, who was desperate to fit in.

My friend, the one who dated the Brown Bomber became someone on which she became fixated.   He never admitted to asking her out or even having relations with her.  She apparently worked in the same group at Phillips that he did.  She probably delivered mail or worked in the copy center.  As best I can figure,  he may have spoken to her or flirted.  He had boyish good looks and all the girls like him.  But if ever there was a a walking talking Dorian Grey, it was him.  We ran around for years together, In Bartlesville, Houston, Dallas, Florida and even Bangkok Thailand.  He finally moved to Jakarta, and eventually got married.   He has lived over there for damn near twenty years now.  I believe he has two or three sons.  He and I had a falling out and have not spoken since sometime after 9/11 because I was a little out spoken about the Muslims.  that might have hurt his feelings since his wife and father are members of the Nation of Islam.  She also was a beneficiary of a clitorectomy, more the foreskin removal than the whole little bugger, but I cannot be certain, she wasn’t specific when we talked about it in Tampa Bay on a golf trip. 

Just an aside, she hit the gold mine gravy train.  You white girls just do not know how to do it apparently.  He and his girlfriend and now wife, used to fight like cats and dogs.  She ran off on the trip to Tampa Bay and he didn’t give a shit till I reminded him she was here on his sponsorship and if anything happened to her, like she ended up dead in a ditch somewhere, the cops would come looking for him.  Well long story short, they are married with kids.  They live in Singapore, he sends her to Europe periodically with her friends, most likely so he can get rid of her and pursue his lifelong passion for Asian prostitutes.

The other Asian gal I mentioned in an earlier chapter, also hit the gold mine.  The beneficiary of the right draw on the blind date, ended up marrying the guy, traveling from Pakistan to Egypt and finally back to Houston.  First thing old Debbie did was buy a new Jaguar and a new home in an upscale neighborhood in Cinco Ranch west of Houston.  I live not too far from there.

Back to the original plot line…

I was friends with my friend’s Indonesian wife on Facebook for a while and saw her travels but heard not a word from him.  So I am not sure what bug he got up his ass.  Life’s too short to care.  He is and probably will always be an expatriate.  I just wonder if his boys are going to visit the Karma on him that he did on his parents.

Okay back to Vicky G.  I knew her and she knew me by name, but I never hit on her, thankfully.  She never seemed to be around at closing time if I felt like a roll in the hay.  Could be that someone else already had snapped her up.  Whatever the case she never fixated on me, but she did on him for whatever reason.  I have to say that I did look for her on more than one occasion but never found her on those nights.  I dodged a bullet.

She started to stalk my engineer friend,  sending him weird notes at work, calling him at home and the office.  If he was out of town, she called his boss to find out where he was. Even his boss was starting to get pissed.

My buddy finally filed a harassment complaint.  She stopped for a while but ultimately lost her job at Phillips over it.  The final chapter was her confronting the CEO of Phillips Bill Douche or maybe it was the one after him, in the parking lot over by the Phillips Building.  She didn't attack him or anything just confronted him in an attempt to get her job back.  That must have been the last straw for the poor Vicky because she gassed herself that Christmas in her mother's garage by leaving the car running.

 

For years afterwards we would send my buddy a Christmas card signed Vicky, as if she was still watching over him.  Kind of a sad last tribute to a sweet but troubled girl.

A side story to this involved a former hunting buddy of mine.  He still works for Phillips unless he retired.  He was last working in the Environmental Division.  He is the one who married the China Doll that worked in Production Research.  Anyway, he was just beginning to date the China Doll.  She, being a good southern Baptist was not giving away the milk for free until the cow was bought and paid for.  He came to me one day lamenting how horny he was and that he just could not convince her to let loose the old Abe penny she kept between her knees.  He knew about Miss Stalker and our mutual friend.  He asked me if there were any women I could fix him up with so he could get laid.  I had done this for a few guys, single unattached women not being a scarce commodity in Bartlesville at the time.

His intent was not for me to fix him up with her, I assure you.  But I saw a great opportunity for a practical joke.  Our whole relationship was based on joking one another.  Tit for tat.  I was a friend when he came to Bartlesville and he was going through a divorce where the gal pretty much cleaned him out.  He played doormat, letting her have every damn thing she wanted in an effort to please her.  Thing was is she was the one who was fucking around on him in the Philippines while he was off shore.  I know where his head was…at least now, because I’ve been there.  Not at the time though, but he didn’t even get an attorney and had to pay alimony and sell just about everything he had.  I bought some of his furniture and still have some nice rattan night stands.  We duck hunted together for years, drank, partied and were pretty tight.  Then came China Doll.

Well seeing the opportunity for a great joke at his expense, I had one of the young women in our section call him up and say she was Miss Vicky G. the Stalker and that I had told her he was interested in meeting her.  It was all real innocent like, no sexual references, just the lingering threat that he would now become the stalking target of Vicky.

He went ballistic.  Not with anger, but with fear!  He called his mommy, I mean his girlfriend.  He was terrified, either that Vicky would start to stalk him, or that it would get back to China Doll.  Unbeknownst to me, his girl friend China Doll knew Miss Stalker, either from church or school or Stalkers Anonymous or something. 

Well, fuck me!  She calls her up and confronts her.  Well, now haven’t I stepped into a nice tub of  shit!

Well, China Doll calls her friend Vicky and finds out that  the call wasn’t from her after all.   I can see the light bulb come on over his head to this day.  He connects the dots and they lead back to me. 

So he comes down and laughs and swears to get even, right?.  No, not on your life.  Most men would, if they still had a pair swinging between their legs they would.  But if yours are kept in a jar next to your girlfriend’s make-up, you have her call your friend and read him the riot act on your behalf. 

 

To be fair she did it without his approval, and the chagrin on his face and humiliation he felt was painful to see.  I hung up on her after telling her that she should let him take care of his own business, after all we traded practical jokes all the time.  Up till then anyway.

That was pretty much the end of our relationship, because she forbade him to go out drinking, which meant no time with me, and he had to take his future brother-in-law hunting with him, which meant I wouldn't be going because the kid could not find his ass with both hands.  I am surprised Scott could stand to hunt with him either.  My friend was pretty serious about his ducks and was mightly embarrasses when his future brother in law showed up wearing disco clothes to hunt ducks in.  Scott was a hunting purist and taught me pretty much all I know about hunting waterfowl.  Well not all of it, I just said that because I just used his name…whoops.  But I guess once he was family, he had to make allowances.  His parents, his mom and step dad had died, and he was alone.  So wanting to belong to a family and getting regular poon overrode any loyalty with his male friends.  Believe me I understand that.  I have been around long enough that some people can't live without family.  Besides, I was not going to bend over and spread’em for him no matter how close we had been or how many early mornings we spent in the woods together.

I feel I helped him through the divorce and then the shit done to him by the gal who ran one of the diet meal rip-off plans.  She ran around on him too.  I believe she drove a red Ford Bronco at the time, or maybe that was his.

I have very fond memories of our duck hunting and fishing on Copan together.  I only hope that eventually he got possession of his equipment back, but I doubt it.  They wouldn't go well with the tutu he probably has to wear around the house what with the short hem and all.

Chapter 34 Safety or Damage Control?

I have to preface this by saying that everything I wrote when I wrote this was true to my knowledge.  I have not been affiliated with PPCO since before they merged with Conoco.  I have worked for Conoco on the Environmental side working on property they acquired in Charleston. S.C. with attorneys at their offices in Houston.  But I have no knowledge of their business practices since the 1990's. 

It's a roman candle, no it's a bomb, no it's an exploding polyethylene plant!

I had left Phillips about the time the Plant in Pasadena, Texas exploded killing umteen people including the female engineer who had reported the unsafe practices to the company.  But I get ahead of myself.

 I saw a letter to the editor in the Tulsa World that got me a bit riled.  It was probably a PPCo retiree who was defending his former employer company.   He said something to the affect of "Why are you and the OSHA picking on Phillips, if anyone knows how to operate a plant safely it should be Phillips.  Apparently OSHA and the courts thought differently.

 

 I wrote back to the Tulsa World that PPCo's practices at the time were all damage control.  They scrambled like hell after the fact.  As an Associate Geologist, I also acted as the Geology Branch safety officer for a year.  It was a revolving position that meant you hosted the monthly safety meeting in the Research Forum, which also doubled as nap time for most of the older guys who knew everything already.

I was trained as a DuPont Safety Auditor and ran audits in the Production and Chemical branches.  It amazed me to see what people did after being told not to do it.  Like balancing gas cylinders in swivel chairs etc.  My point is the middle line managers did not take things seriously, so it had a trickle down effect. The word seemed to be "do what you have to do to get the job done but don't get caught."

 

You could tell that no body cared about safety, because the company could not be bothered to hire someone full time to act as a safety officer, or give them sufficient authority to enforce the rules.  Instead, they made kids like me one year out of school safety officers.

 Well I said all this in the letter rebutting the other letter.  I also said that it was interesting that Health and Safety was NOT represented at the corporate level by a VP or anyone else until AFTER the Pasadena disaster.  Then all of a sudden it rated a VP and a female one at that. 

 

Not bashing females...I love females, but Oil Companies didn't seem too.  If you recall, if a company wanted to look good they found somewhere to hire women and put them.  Usually it was in the useless HR department.  They would put a male VP over them just to make sure things didn't get too out of hand.  I took HR classes at and OSU campus in Tulsa and it was a joke.  My point being what better way to make a good impression than by opening up a Health and Safety Department and then put a woman in charge of it to make people feel like you really meant business.

 

They quickly staffed the new organization with whatever engineers were available.  It didn't matter if they had ever had a course in industrial hygiene, environmental anything, or industrial safety.  Just being an engineer was enough.  They do oversight anyway, and let the consultants do the work.  My "junkless" friend ended up in that new organization overseeing pipeline safety.  (His little story will come next).

Now I also mentioned a few things in passing in the letter that surprised a few people.  My letter made it up all the way to the CEO I am told.  I mentioned a little known event involving the loss of a whole tank of Benzene at the refinery in Borger.

Benzene you see is a carcinogen and one of the four primary constituents tested for when dealing with gasoline spills.  It is an additive along with Toluene, Ethylene and Xylene.  They collectively form the acronym BTEX.  Well someone screwed up at Borger and left a tap open and a whole tank drained on the ground.  I knew someone involved in the sampling of the site.  Not wanting to draw attention and win the wrath of the then Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.  PPCo kept mum and sampled it themselves sending some of my former workmates out to do the job.  Turns out they contaminated the watershed of an adjacent ranch.  So their solution was to buy the ranch.  This served to do what they wanted.  In Texas a problem does not exist unless it is reported and comes to the attention of the State Regulators.

Phillips now owned the contaminated property so they were not going to report themselves.  So nothing ever happened.

 

In fairness, the stuff probably evaporated and went to that big "landfill in the sky" as we used to say in the environmental industry.  The hot Texas summers would have baked he ground and wicked it up and into the atmosphere.  Hopefully this happened before it got down to any shallow aquifers, but likely any shallow water would have been alkalai and not fit for consumption by man or beast.  But then there is the possibility that it went into the aquifer or creek and into the nice big recreational lake there around Borger.  I have no knowledge of the gradient out there or where the spill occurred so I am just speculating.  Since this happened in the late 1980's unless there are a lot of people with three heads walking round, I doubt it hurt anyone in the long run.

 

It was to demonstrate the mindset of the company.  Anyhow...

I didn't go into any details in the letter I just mentioned it as an example of how PPCo put a band aid on things after the fact.

My Ex #3 owned a pub in Katy which is near the site of the Great Southwest Equestrian Center.  That is a horse arena to most people.  I got to know the owner and did catering for him on weekends through the pub.  Yes, I can cook.  I did one event for 1200, German food for an Oktoberfest.

Anyway, turns out he was an engineer too.  He had been married to the engineer who reported the dangerous conditions at the Pasadena plant prior to the explosion.  Well, who should PPCo try to pin the blame on?  Yep.  The poor dead female engineer.  Seems she was smart and had copies of all the safety reports to her bosses at home.  So it was easy for her husband's attorney to prove they were lying through their teeth.  Not surprising really. 

 

Well, my new friend and owner fought back and won a defamation and wrongful death suit and a boat load of money.  Seems he got about $12 million.  More than enough to buy the Equestrian Center and all its property while it was in bankruptcy.  He probably paid $50 of the dollar or less for the very large property directly in the path of the western expansion of suburban west Houston.

He has gone on to keep the center in operation while selling off surrounding property.  At last look there were at least 2 apartment complexes, a super church, condos and commercial property all in the front 1/4 mile of the property along Mason Road.

Seems he turned those $12 million dollars that PPCo stock holders generously gave him into a tidy profit.