Paul N. "Red" Adair was an oil industry legend long before his death at 89 on Aug. 7 and one of the few people in this business popular enough to be the subject of a joke.
According to the old joke, a Texan dies and of course is winged directly to heaven, where St. Peter himself takes him on a grand tour of his new habitat. But as St. Peter reveals each new wonder in paradise, he's irritated by the Texan's recurring brag that there's something every bit as good or better "back home in Texas."
Unable to take any more, St. Peter grabs the Texan by the collar and drags him over to heaven's edge for a bird's-eye view straight down into the roaring flames of hell below. "Have you got anything like that back in Texas?" St. Peter demands.
"No," says the Texan, "but there's an ol' boy down in Houston who could douse that fire for you."
The punchline didn't even have to name him—everyone knew it was a reference to Adair, who founded Houston-based Red Adair Co. Inc. in 1959 and was credited with battling more than 2,000 oil and natural gas blowouts.
John Wayne no match
It was the same with the 1968 movie, The Hellfighters, in which John Wayne played Chance Buckman, a fictional blowout specialist. Viewers recognized that the real interest in that otherwise formulaic film was the reenactment of Adair's feats of oil field derring-do. Having witnessed real blow- outs, it was apparent to this writer that the 6 ft, 4-in. tall Wayne could never fill the boots of the 5 ft, 7-in. Adair, who was a real hero, brave enough to charge hell with a water bucket.
Adair was so closely identified with wild-well control that many of his admirers didn't realize that he learned that business from Myron Kinley, the original pioneer in using explosives to snuff out well fires. Two other famous well-control specialists, Asgar "Boots" Hansen and Edward "Coots" Matthews, also got their start with Kinley and later worked for Adair at his firm.
Digging out the story
A meeting with Adair, Hansen, and Matthews in 1977—when the latter two broke with Adair to form their own well control firm, Boots & Coots Inc.—was a choice opportunity for a reporter.
Having grown up in the oil patch and known the fame of all three men meant that the breakup of that team personally seemed a bigger news item than the split-up of the Beatles.
The problem was that none of the three wanted to talk about it at first, since the split-up was not on what could be described as a friendly basis. It took weeks of talking to get Hansen and Matthews to sit down for interviews. But once their stories were in hand, Adair then was ready to tell his side. Of course, there were discrepancies in their stories, and attempting to iron out the differences between "they said, he said" raised tempers on both sides. "You're stirring up trouble!" Hansen charged. But he eventually was placated by a general review of what would be covered. When the story finally appeared in a major Houston daily newspaper, Hansen and Matthews ordered a few hundred extra copies to send out to friends and business associates.
Adair was not so happy. "Friends tell me I should sue you for libel," he said in a telephone call. However, Adair's primary complaints were items of a personal nature that were not even included in the business news report. He admitted he had not read the story, but he waved off an offer to meet and go over the report word by word for any alleged misinformation or libelous statement.
Adair didn't sue, but he refused to talk to this writer again for about a year—not until after tracking him down in a hospital where he was being treated for injuries suffered while snuffing out a well fire in Mexico. Maybe he took the call because I was the only reporter to call him, or maybe it was his partial hearing loss after years of standing next to blowouts and triggering explosives—whatever the reason, he called me "Jim" during our telephone conversation.
Or maybe it was just Adair's way of settling an old grudge without seeming to back down. Although I used my correct name in subsequent interviews, he always called me "Jim."
