A Most Interesting Professor - Dr. Lawrence McNamee

"Ah, Mr. Norris, I see you've decided to take the final." Oops!

I had noticed that my roomie at East Texas State College, Noel Reed, had forgotten a pamphlet that he needed for the final exam in German I. He would need to translate one of the articles in it, so I rushed up to campus to take it to him. As I turned to leave the classroom, having delivered the pamphlet, I was face-to-face with Dr. Lawrence McNamee. "So, Mr. Norris! You decided to take the final?" 

Well, I had nothing else scheduled for the next hour and a half, since I had been taking the course - and doing well enough - until the spring Chorale tour. 

I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled, "Why not?" I had been helping Noel prepare for the test, so I knew the material. Well, I took the final and pulled a B in the course! Of course, that was far from enough to keep me from going from Dean's List to Academic Probation in one semester - my infamous Spring of 1963. Oh, well.

This was not my first course under Dr. McNamee. As a Physics Major, I had previously taken an English Literature course, basically a Shakespeare course, that he taught as part of the General Studies Required Course Program. The man was a mesmerizing teacher. So, when he was tasked to put together a German language curriculum, I was an enthusiastic enrollee. 

Along the way, I had heard a bit about his service as a translator at the Nuremburg War Trials and his earlier undercover work on the Continent during World War II. I was actually under the impression that he was a Brit and had served in MI-5 or MI-6, rather than a Pittsburg-born baseball player (He once had a tryout with the Pirates.) and boxer who served in the OSS. He even made a few passing remarks in class about how his flawless German and his reddish-blond hair made it easy for him to pass as a German.

I returned to East Texas State (then) University for the Spring Semester of 1965, now as a Business Major. I soon met up with Dr. McNamee on campus. and we chatted for a bit. He remarked that that German class had really gone very poorly. He remembered my background and ended up hiring me as a tutor for his daughter in 7th Grade Math.

Flash forward 15 to 20 years. I'm browsing through the Dallas Morning News one Sunday morning, and I happened to notice a letter to a column from Archie Moore. The Archie Moore? Yes, the former light-heavyweight Champ and American Goodwill Ambassador was asking a question. "In my travels all over the world, I have rarely found myself in a situation where no one spoke English. Worldwide, how many people speak English?", or words to that effect. And then what really grabbed me? The Columnist was Dr. Lawrence McNamee! Sadly, I have never been back to (now) TAMU-Commerce.

Dr. McNamee passed away on July 17, 2006, at age 89. RIP, sir.

A&M-C's renowned Prof McNamee dies - North Texas e-News (ntxe-news.com)

Pulling in the Derrick (If Blood is Yellow, I'm Bleeding to Death!)

 

This tale is based on my dad’s accounting of a fairly significant event in his life - an accident which contributed to the demise of using the old steel derricks left over from the pre-portable drilling rig era that were still standing around in older oil fields for workovers.  Ironically, perhaps, my dad’s occasional work in the oil fields began even before those steel derricks were built, when he worked as a wooden rig builder in the east Texas oil fields.

Dad went to work for the Texas Company, later renamed Texaco Inc., in 1944 after having worked as a derrick man on drilling rigs in west Texas for a while. With the Texas Company, he worked as a derrick man for a workover pulling gang based out of Hamlin TX.

The gang pusher's name was Newt Cotton (Cotten? We called him Uncle Newt.) The other guys on the crew were Virgil Dockins and Beady Mason. The gang became an extended family, going on fishing trips together down on the Concho and Colorado Rivers, attending sporting events together, and getting together at each other's homes. In the summer of 1952, they also had a work-study student (or apprentice, I'm not sure of his formal status) named Johnny Moran who was a Cajun studying petroleum engineering at LSU. My older sister, Pat, 13 at the time, was totally crushing on Jonny Moran.

My oldest sister, Gwen, had gotten married earlier that year to Ed Baker, a South Carolinian who was an Air Force cook stationed at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. He had subsequently been transferred to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. On the day before we were to leave on vacation to visit them, the gang was assigned to do a pump replacement on a well out of Rotan, Texas.

In that day, there were many of the old steel derricks still standing in the oil fields. It was common to use them for workover jobs, as it saved considerable time, since you had to unscrew fewer joints of pipe, compared to when using the shorter derrick of the workover rig. On this particular well, my dad had previously observed that the derrick seemed to be getting very weak. In the morning meeting, he recommended that they not use the existing derrick for that job, but that they use the workover pulling unit’s derrick, instead. Alternatively, could they put off the job until the next day after he was on vacation. My dad was the Safety Coordinator for the Department, and he felt his recommendation should carry a lot of weight. However, the boss, either Mr. Richie or Mr. Rose, overrode his recommendation. My dad reacted angrily, telling everyone in the meeting, “If I get killed today, you are all my witnesses, and I want my wife to own a big part of this company as a result of this decision.”

So they went out and strung up their pulling unit on the old derrick. The pulling unit is a big truck with a big old Waukesha engine that drives a huge windlass with enough cable to reach down to the bottom of the hole.

If you’ve ever driven around in oil fields, you’ve seen pump jacks – teeter totters atop elevated fulcrums with one end connected to a motor and counterweights and the other with a “horsehead” bobbing up and down with a rod going down into the ground connected to it. The pump sits at the bottom of the hole and is connected to the horsehead by a string of rods. To bring the pump to the surface for replacement, you do a “rod job”. With the pulling unit in position, the derrick man carries a light line up and runs it through the pulley at the top of the derrick, so that it can be used to haul the main cable up and around the pulley and back to the ground. The string of rods is secured to the pulling unit and then the rods are disconnected from the horsehead. The derrick man is then positioned in the crow's nest midway up the derrick. The cable is then connected to the rods, and then the string of rods is pulled up the hole. After the top of the string of rods arrives at the crow's nest, the rods are clamped down at a point below a convenient joint and the floor gang unscrews that section of rods. They are then swung to a side platform and stacked by the floor man and the derrick man. The cable is then attached back to the top of the string of rods still in the hole. The process is repeated until the pump arrives at the surface. The pump is then replaced, and the process is reversed to put it back down into the hole.

In this case, this pump was firmly stuck. When Uncle Newt applied pressure to get it unstuck, my dad observed the derrick start deforming really badly. He described it as going from a square to a flattened diamond. He waved for Uncle Newt to stop, grabbed some rags, and bailed out of the derrick on the dead man. After he was on the ground, Uncle Newt, still thinking the derrick was safe, applied pressure to the pump one more time. The derrick began falling and laid down directly across the top of the gang truck, as everyone scrambled for their lives!

After the dust settled, and everyone started reassembling, Johnny Moran was unaccounted for. They finally located him where he had dived – under the gang truck. They helped him to extricate himself. When they asked if he was hurt, he said, "If blood is yellow, I’m bleeding to death!”

Amazingly, no one was hurt. But Uncle Newt was totally abashed, and he cried for a long time about almost killing his best friend.

The next day we were off for Houston.

I’m not sure if an old derrick was ever again used on a workover job in the oil field, but the practice didn’t persist for very much longer, for sure.