CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : THE GROWTH YEARS : ROUGHING IT : Bits and Leases: Ray Thompson remembers the oil boom of the ‘20s. ‘We had to be quick--everyone wanted to get to that oil first.’

Ray Thompson came to Huntington Beach in 1926 to find work as a roughneck. The second big Southern California oil boom, which had started in 1920, was in full swing. The pace was fast and furious, and the work was dangerous. “We had to be quick--everyone wanted to get to that oil first.”

Thompson was not unfamiliar with dangerous work. He’d left the coal mines of southern Illinois a few years earlier, and he’d seen too many of his relatives and friends die in those mines. Times were tough and California the place to go. He was 25 years old then. Now 87, Thompson looks from his Huntington Beach house, high on a bluff, to a field that once was filled with towering, clanking oil rigs and that today is packed with tidy, quiet trailer homes.

The great oil strikes in Huntington Beach during the 1920s were not the first in Orange County. Drillers hit oil as early as 1882 in the Brea Canyon area. Ten years later, the Chandler Oil Mining Co. put down several wells near Carbon Canyon, and the tiny settlement of Petrolia sprang up around them. The town, which was renamed Olinda in 1897, had vanished by the early 1940s. But when the Santa Fe railroad branched north from Santa Ana, the Olinda oil fields became some of the busiest in California. By 1909, the Santa Fe Railway Co.’s 54 wells had produced more than 1 million barrels of oil in the Olinda fields, according to a 1910 Orange County Tribune article.

By the time Ray Thompson came to Huntington Beach, oil had become the main engine driving Southern California’s growth, attracting laborers from all over the country. Thompson, like many newcomers, didn’t know the first thing about working an oil rig. Says Thompson today: “When I asked for my first oil job, the contractor looked at me and asked, ‘Are you a roughneck?’ So I said, ‘Sure I am,’ which, of course, I wasn’t at the time.”

After working for $7 a day on a couple of wells that came up dry, Thompson landed work with Standard Oil Co., the biggest driller in town. He moved up from roughneck, the person who does the dirtiest work, like digging ditches and maintaining the pumps, to derrick man. “I went through some pretty lean times, so it was good news to sign up with Standard.”

The first impression Thompson had of working for the big oil company was the food: “The kitchen was always open. The head cook was a gal named Gertie--and she could really cook. With all the different shifts, there were eight meals a day, and I darn well ate at every one of them.”

Thompson was good at his job because he was strong--built like a weightlifter, and not too tall, according to his younger cousin, Raymond Stricklin, who calls Thompson “Uncle Ray.” For hours at a stretch, Thompson changed the huge drill bits and sent new lengths of pipe down the well. “Uncle Ray could get in and out of the hole and climb up the rig as fast as any derrick man,” says Stricklin, who spent much of his youth hanging around the oil rigs.

Stricklin’s father, Oscar, had moved the family to Southern California in 1919. Oscar Stricklin, who died in 1974, came from the same southern Illinois mining town as his cousin Ray. Oscar had lost both his father and a brother in the mines by the time he was 16. The oldest of six surviving children, Oscar got a job on the Standard Oil construction crew. He helped build the Huntington Beach Camp, a complex of bunkhouses, a large cook house, offices and the company recreation hall. He proved so quick at building the old wooden derricks that by 1925 the company had put him in charge of all its rig construction in Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and at the Murphy Coyote wells in La Habra Hills.

At the crest of the drilling boom, Oscar Stricklin had 400 workers under his supervision. A crew of about 20 could put up an 85-foot-tall rig in about five days, according to Thompson. Then it would take several months of drilling before a well would “spud in.” Rigs were built as close as 50 feet, and rig crews liked to wager on who could build a rig the fastest. “We were always in a race with the next rig over,” recalls Thompson.

The well that changed everything was Bolsa Chica No. 1, which blew in Huntington Beach on Aug. 3, 1920, tapping the county’s richest oil field. “When the Bolsa gusher came in, it was like a carnival came to town, or like a big fire. Everyone came to watch. The gusher went clear to the top of the derrick. It took them a week to cap it off,” says Raymond Stricklin, who was 6 years old at the time and remembers the day vividly. The well stood at what today is a bit west of Golden West Street and Garfield Avenue.

According to an account written in 1976 by retired Huntington Beach Fire Chief Delbert (Bud) Higgins, the gusher poured more than 2,000 barrels a day onto surrounding corn fields, while 500 men with mules and scrapers worked feverishly to build a dike.

In 1925, Oscar Stricklin was charged with building the seawall that stands today from Golden West Street, then called 23rd Street, to 11th Street. The wall was needed to allow drilling between the ocean and the old red car trolley line that ran along the beach.

When his boss asked how long it would take to build the first 500 feet of wall, Stricklin responded: “If you leave me alone, I can build that wall in 30 days,” according to memoirs he kept of the affair. To that, his boss answered: “You can’t build that in 30 days. If you build that in 30 days, I’ll give you a new Stetson hat.” Stricklin got the hat. He picked out 200 of his best men and had the wall completed in 28 days. His cousin Thompson was among the workers. “The thing about that job,” he recalls, “is that we dug the wall out by hand using shovels. We worked around the clock on three shifts.”

At the height of the boom, there were 62 different companies drilling for oil in Huntington Beach, according to Barbara Milkovich, a California State University, Long Beach graduate student who is writing her master’s thesis on the town’s history. The biggest companies were Standard Oil and Union Oil. Hollywood investors also were pouring money into the town. The owners of the Pantages movie houses, for instance, formed the Pantages Oil Co. and operated a number of successful wells, according to Milkovich.

Since the biggest pools of oil were sitting right under the downtown area, local landowners made a fortune cutting deals with the rig companies. The rig companies, by some accounts, would then raise capital by dividing 50-foot lots among as many as 1,000 investors. And since everyone was drilling for the same finite pool of oil, “when oil is found on a subdivided town-lot area, each owner sees a quick chance to pull out for life,” wrote Albert Atwood in a 1923 Saturday Evening Post article on the Southern California oil boom. “Unless he is an idiot, however, he knows he must pull mighty fast to get ahead of his neighbors.”

And that, in a nutshell, explains the frenzied pace of those boom days. Local people would often take their first oil check and buy a fancy new car, book a trip to Europe or try to start their own oil companies without any prior business experience. “Some of the landowners have gone so batty with their new money they ought to be put in an insane asylum,” said one Los Angeles banker quoted by Atwood. “These men who are plugging in all they make into new oil ventures or new companies of their own will disappear like grasshoppers,” said another banker. “They think they are financiers when they are merely lucky. They get a little taste of wealth and go dippy. Their heads are so swelled they can’t walk under the trolley wires, but they will be left high and dry when the boom is over.”

With wells going up on every available spot, Huntington Beach was transformed in a few months from a quiet seaside town best known for its hunting clubs, ocean-front pavilion and annual Methodist retreat into a bustling boom town. According to a 1921 article in the Orange County Review: “Seventeen months ago Huntington Beach was a sleepy little town of 2,400 souls. Today there are 8,500 permanent residences and a floating population of perhaps 4,000.”

Much of that floating population no doubt lived in a huge tent camp that sprang up on the old Methodist campground to house the influx of new workers, according to Ray Stricklin.

Stricklin remembers the day he got home from school to find that Standard Oil had decided to move his family’s house, along with about 500 other houses and buildings located on oil company land, to make room for a large oil field.

Fires and blowouts were common. Stricklin recalls rushing out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to watch his dad, Oscar, climb a burning rig. While firefighters kept the flames off by spraying him with a high-powered hose, Oscar cut a guy wire and attached a line so firemen could pull down the burning mess in a safe direction. It was a tricky maneuver because the rigs were so close and any one falling onto another could set off a chain reaction. “That was always the dread of those days,” says Thompson. “There could be a lot of injuries . . . the town had no real hospital, so Standard Oil had its own first-aid team.”

Blowouts were no less devastating. Consider Atwood’s description of a blowout at Signal Hill in Long Beach: “Recently a man and his wife at Signal Hill sued an oil company for damages on the grounds that an oil well put down by the company 200 feet from the house suddenly broke loose, covered the house with mud, oil and rocks, ruined the trees in the yard, bespattered and half-wrecked the family automobile, and left the lawn covered with an eight-inch coat of oil, mud and rocks. It was further alleged that oil and rocks rained through the windows, damaging the furniture and forcing the lady to flee precipitately from a sickbed.”

Those not living right on top of oil could always invest their money in oil stocks, and many did. Retired Fire Chief Higgins, now deceased, mentioned in his 1976 article the endless procession of “sucker buses” to Huntington Beach in the 1920s. Honest, as well as plenty of dishonest, promoters would lease or buy a tiny parcel of land, build a derrick and set up a nice tent, according to Higgins. Then they’d haul a load of prospective investors down from Los Angeles in buses and feed them a big dinner of fried chicken before peddling their oil stock.

Smooth-talking promoters flocked to Southern California from Oklahoma and Texas, where they already had perfected their trade. “Not only was he (the outside promoter) on the run farther east, with the authorities in hot pursuit, but he found in Southern California a surer supply of oil to talk about and a far larger supply of would-be investors right on the spot to whom he could sell such portions of the expected oil as he might be able to get and capitalize,” wrote Atwood.

According to “one officer of a big oil company” whom Atwood quoted: “I will not say anything about these men being crooks; perhaps they are not. But I am willing to assert that the whole bunch of fellows with vivid imaginations in oil have come from Texas and Oklahoma.”

A newspaper investigation at the time, nonetheless, found that scams in the California oil fields were common. From 1918 to 1922, 241 of 263 oil promotions offered in and around Los Angeles proved worthless. Twelve wells paid dividends for a short time before running dry, while the 10 remaining wells were worth a few dollars a share in the open market.

While some out-of-town investors no doubt got bilked, others found themselves invested in Huntington Beach oil wells totally by accident. Back in 1914, two enterprising salesmen came up with the idea of giving away 360 small, individual parcels of Huntington Beach land to anyone willing to shell out $125 for a set of the Encyclopedia Americana. The salesmen acquired the lots, which measured 100 feet by 25 feet, for less than $5, according to a 1956 article in the Huntington Beach News. The plots of land were pitched as choice seaside property, but anyone who had taken the trouble to look at a map drawn by the salesmen would have seen that they were actually about 2 1/2 miles inland.

And anyone who had tried to find one of the lots would have quickly realized that the network of roads drawn on the map was completely bogus. In fact, the lots were situated on inaccessible, scruffy cliffs that were unsuitable for building houses--or anything else for that matter. People complained of getting fleeced.

Those lots turned out to be sitting on top of a huge pool of oil discovered in 1921. But in 1920, many of the lot owners couldn’t be bothered either with making payments on the encyclopedias or paying taxes on the land. A group of six Huntington Beach men who had a hunch that oil would be found formed a syndicate, and each chipped in $100 to buy a total of 33 lots. When the bet paid off and the oil started to flow, syndicate members pulled in thousands of dollars in royalties, and their $100 shares sold for $10,000.

Says Tom Talbert, one of the investors, in his memoirs, “My Sixty Years in California”: “The most amazing part of the whole procedure . . . was that there had never been a furrow plowed or a grade made for a street.” Since no one seemed to own the land where the streets were supposed to be, lawyers duked it out over who had the right to royalties from rigs situated where the streets should have been. A group in Chicago that had sold the lots to Talbert’s group claimed it should get the royalties.

“Royalties from the streets in our 33 lots had accumulated to the tidy sum of $51,000. By that time, there were five different sets of lawyers mixed up in the deal,” according to Talbert. His group finally won that battle.

Prior to the oil strikes, Huntington Beach boosters had hopes of turning their village into a resort town for socially correct Angelenos. The city’s virtues were promoted through magazine advertisements such as the one recalled in Leo Friis’ book, “Orange County Through Four Centuries.” The ad read: “There are no saloons or drinking in Huntington Beach and the moral order is of the highest order.” But by the mid-1920s, things had changed. In addition to the “Good Clean Dancing Every Night Except Monday” at the dance hall by the pier, “gambling, bootlegging, prostitution and con games were rampant,” according to Bud Higgins.

Ray Thompson, sitting in a rocking chair on his sun porch, recalls it this way: “We worked hard, but we liked to have a good time, too. I did a lot of catting around--used to get in around 7:30 in the morning. In a half hour, I had to be back at the rig. But if I overslept, Gertie the cook would always make sure to wake me up. Those were some wild times, all right.”