There are three links to photographs on this page, house, link, and myself, all in the last three paragraphs. They were linked to avoid excessive load time.
We had arranged to take an apartment
at 36 East 70th Street in New
York. The building was owned by the Warburg
banking family. It was across the street from the
mansion of the ex-governor of the state and a block
from the Frick Museum. We settled in to enjoy the
amenities of the city in this small but comfortable apartment
that we furnished with nice things. I worked at the
Conorada offices in Rockefeller Center, a brisk twenty-minute
walk. There I returned to evaluating prospective tracts.
After about a year of looking at farmouts I had just finished
a review of the offshore of the Trucial Coast when I was
summarily discharged with the warning that if I attempted
to find out why I would be blacklisted. I was crushed,
but Georgia comforted me while I looked for and found work in
only three weeks. My new employer was Chris Dohm, then President
of the American International Oil Company (subsidiary of Standard
Oil Company [Indiana]) who asked the Vice-President, Exploration,
William E Humphrey, to consider hiring me. The new office
was at 46th and Madison. In a year I had surpassed my former
salary and gained the respect and confidence of Dr Humphrey.
With little use for the Jaguar, after two years I sold it to
Dick King, an employee, for $600. In addition to preparing evaluations,
visiting the research laboratory
in Tulsa, and making trips to universities
to look at promising candidates for employment
I wrote and published in the Bulletin of the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists a classification
of marine carbonate rocks based on my studies for
ARAMCO. My scheme was not accepted by the majority
of specialists but was used by company geologists in the
field. At night I worked on plans for our house in Spain
and made cardboard models of the rooms, all of which went
to the contractor. On vacations we visited the site. Construction
lagged, but as retirement was still far off I raised no
objections. This pleasant interlude ended when one day in
the Fall of 1966, I believe, the anouncement was made
that the office was moving to Chicago. By that time Mr.
Dohm had left the company and set up a small organization
of his own that proved eminently successful in acquiring rights
in the Gulf of Suez near tracts that found oil in quantity. In
an attempt to avoid moving, I asked him to lunch where he told
me that I was too expensive for his small organization. I hadn't
the courage to say that I would accept a much smaller stipend
in return for stock options. Tolleson had, and profited greatly. Living in Chicago was less pleasant
than in New York, although our
first apartment at 1200 Lakeshore Drive
was large and convenient to the temporary office space
on Michigan Avenue. I began work, for three months
commuting by air on alternate weekends to New York while
looking for housing. At 2 AM one night, about a year after
coming to Chicago, Georgia complained of a malaise and
fell to the floor, unable to call out. Her left side was
paralyzed. The ride in the ambulance to the hospital was
a horrible experience. At irregular intervals for twelve
hours thereafter the paralysis stopped and she could
talk. After an initial period of uncertainty, the cause
of her illness, clots in the carotid artery caused by an excess
of platelets in her blood, was diagnosed and controlled,
but would kill her twenty years later. The official diagnosis
of the hospital was: transient ischemic anaemia. The treatment?
intravenous heparin later replaced by pills of coumadin.
(dicoumarol) The details of our life in Chicago
are of no interest. They included
two changes of apartments and the difficulties
caused by the assimilation of my company-owned
geologic library into that of AMOCO, (the new name
of Standard of Indiana) along with the long walk
to the entrance of the Carrara marble tower on the
lake front I had some new associates on the 43rd
floor, including Dr. Colin Campbell who filled a gap in
my understanding of world geology through his knowledge
of South America, Rodney Collomb, and Chet Baker who came
back after a year's absence. He hadn't wanted to come to
Chicago any more than I. Routine was interrupted by trips
abroad ? to Libya twice, to the Netherlands and Germany
where I met 'Mike' Kozari and his Peruvian wife, to Italy to
evaluate a farmout in the Adriatic, and of course vacations
in Spain. In addition to the normal evaluation
of farmouts and areas considered
of interest, I wrote two papers for Humphrey.
One, given to the Society of Gas Engineers in London,
was titled,"Why Look for Oil and Gas in the North
Sea?" The other was an evaluation of the prospects of
the countries of Asia on the Pacific rim, presented at
the World Petroleum Congress in Tokyo. It is one of my less
cogent efforts. In the Spring of 1976 Humphrey retired.
As soon as he left sniping at me and my ability became bothersome,
so on 1 February 1977 I too retired. The house in Spain
had been ready for occupancy for almost a year. As I had vacation
accumulated, Georgia and I went to Madrid to receive our
effects shipped late in November by air from New York by
the Seven Santini Brothers. But because the Madrid agent was
lax my vacation ended well before the goods were released from
Customs. His agency was later put out of business by the Santinis
whom he represented only indirectly. So Georgia was left in
a hotel in Madrid where she harried the agency without success
until the return of the owner from a convention in Florida. But
before I could return to Spain the goods were delivered and Georgia
spent her days in the empty house unpacking and having furniture
placed in acordance with our long-cherished plans. We lived in that
house
until October 1989 with a two-year interruption
when we occupied an apartment on the Rue des Anglais in Pau, southwestern
France. The apartment was over the
office of a veterinary and the complaints
of dogs on week-ends were sometimes maddening. A
tax problem came up so we returned to our home, 'Casa Hesperis'
although Georgia was suffering from arthritis and
could no longer keep house. We managed with the aid of
a kindly woman who came nearly every day to clean and cook,
Pepé. Her husband, Domingo, did yard work for us and ran
errands. We at last decided that we could no longer live isolated
in the mountains far from medical help. We sold the house
for eighteen million pesetas in cash, but most of it I entrusted
for investment to a banker in whom we had confidence, Francisco
Selas Cespedes. We had recovered a little more than a third
of the total before he defaulted and disappeared. I gave our
large library to the English church in Madrid and abandoned
quantities of movies and the Bolex camera I had used to take them
as well as my Leica that had served me well since 1939. The day
before we were to drive to France in our Peugot 604 the vision
in half of my right eye went black. I said nothing about it to
Georgia until we arrived in Pau where Dr. Piot, using silicone,
pushed the retina back in place. Of course Uhel, the Irish setter,
came with us, and as he was already twelve, adapted rather well
to life in a tiny apartment in the Hotel Continental. On 28 January
1992 at 1030 AM just after breakfast in the room, she said,"J'étouffe."
Her head fell forward on the low table and in seconds she
was gone. Three weeks before we had spent the day in a hospital
where she had transfusions to lessen the number of platelets
in the blood. With the aid of Dr.de Guilhem we had been fighting
them since our arrival in Pau. After burying her ashes on the
property of a long-time friend in Provence I went to England, invited by
Dr.da Costa. There, to occupy my thoughts I began to write about the first
King of Saudi Arabia whom I met in 1939. In four years I completed a book,
but only after the climate of northern England sent me back to California
where ice does not coat the sidewalks. Now the computer offers other distraction,
but it does not dull the poignancy of memories of our life together. In
this link
are a few of my photos of her. I exhaust the meager remainder
of my ten megabytes with pictures
of
myself
Their presence stems from the fact that I am
frugal by nature and prefer to use all of
the space allotted me. I am not narcissistic,
in spite of evidence to the contrary provided by the
existence of these pages . Several friends and relatives
have suggested that my memoirs would be of general
interest. In abbreviated form they are here. I hope you
found them worth your time. I don't plan
any changes.
