by Bryan Mealer
Church was so prominent in the children’s lives that it naturally influenced their play. The iron bedstead in Clem and Cora’s bedroom doubled as Zelda’s organ, while Norma Lou and Evelyn made accordions out of old funny papers. Opal’s little sister Veda, who was nine, insisted on preaching, and her sermons always blazed with hellfire.
Every service needed an altar call, and no altar call was complete without a sinner. This role usually fell to Gloria Jean, the little girl who lived in the rented room with her mother. The two of them didn’t go to church, which made Gloria Jean the obvious candidate. By now, Veda had sent the poor girl to hell and back a hundred times.
Since Zelda took piano lessons, she got to lead the music. Her fingers danced atop the iron rails through standards such as “I’ll Fly Away” and “On the Jericho Road,” with Norma Lou and Evelyn squeezing the paper accordion beside her. After singing, Homer gave a short testimony on how God so loved the world, and then Veda took her place behind the bed, which doubled as the pulpit.
“I’ll start with Scripture,” she said, then cleared her throat. “‘Verily, verily I say unto you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.’” She looked up from her Bible. “What that means is you go straight to hell.”
“Excuse me,” Doris interrupted, raising her hand.
“What is it?” Veda said.
“I’m the visiting missionary from Africa, and I’d like to tell about the marvelous wonders the Lord is doing with the lost and native tribes.”
Well, everyone knew that visiting missionaries held status in the church and were always permitted to speak about their work. And with Veda always hogging the pulpit, being the missionary was the only way to get a word in edgewise.
“Fine,” Veda said. “Sister Doris will tell us about the marvelous wonders the Lord is doing in Africa.”
Doris stepped to the pulpit and told how Africa was a land of lost souls and false gods. “But the Lord is saving them through his love and mercy because he doesn’t want us going to hell.” She smiled, satisfied.
But Veda had no patience for mercy. “The Scripture tells us, ‘Do not be deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.’ He who sows to his own flesh reaps corruption. Think about it.”
Sensing her message hadn’t sunk in, she pounded the mattress. “Give up the flesh! Give up your pride!” She then cast her eyes on Gloria Jean, and the girl’s body went rigid. This was her cue. “There are some of us out here who’ve been seared with the hot iron of sin,” Veda continued, “whose heart has grown calloused toward the Lord. You’ve drifted far from the shore, become a slave to the nightlife, bare-legged and painted like a Jezebel. So let me ask you, if Jesus came back right now, where would you wind up?”
The girl stammered, but Veda cut her short.
“In the fiery furnace!”
The children shrieked. “And what does the Bible tell us about hell? That it’s a place of eternal darkness and flaming winds. A place where worms eat your flesh. Forever!”
The part about the worms always made Gloria Jean cry. She stood up with tears in her eyes and walked to the bedstead, where, once again, she was saved. The other cousins soon followed, for no one is truly free of sin. And seeing them bowed and broken, Veda raised her hands in victory.
“Revival has come!” she proclaimed. “Glory to God! Preach the word and revival will come!”
Of course, Gloria Jean wasn’t the only hell-bound soul in need of saving. The neighborhood outside was full of people who didn’t go to church—or at least, not to their church—and Veda and the cousins saw it as their duty to rid them of the stench of sin. So when the weather was nice, they held open-air revivals in the alley behind the house, near the little grocery. For the unwitting boys and girls whose mothers sent them to the market, the narrow pathway became a trap of righteousness.
In one afternoon, Homer must have dunked twenty kids in a fifty-five-gallon barrel filled with water, proclaiming, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Now go and tell everybody how you’ve changed your life.”
As the children wrestled free and fled down the alley, soaking wet, the cousins applauded them on their good fortune. However, they soon suspected Homer’s zeal for baptizing was less than godly, because once he ran out of sinners, he started dunking cats.
3
The final fall of Josh Cosden … the arrival of Raymond Tollett …
After a hard decade of dust and Depression, the Second World War ushered in an era of phenomenal growth in Big Spring. It began with the federal government opening a small air base for the training of bombardiers, which grew over the years to employ thousands of people who settled down to raise their families. On the other side of town, Joshua S. Cosden’s refinery—mothballed during the Depression—found new life as it began churning out fuel in support of the war. Like the air base, it continued to grow, pioneering products that would change America. The only unfortunate thing was that Josh Cosden himself wasn’t around to see it.
After losing his company back in 1930, around the time John Lewis and his family traveled back to Georgia, Cosden and his wife Nellie retreated to New York and Palm Beach, where his health began to deteriorate. In August, the New York Times reported the oilman recovering in a private hospital on Park Avenue where doctors were treating him for a serious lung infection. Later reports described Cosden in critical condition down in Florida.
But in 1933, like a ghost, he’d appeared on the veranda of the Big Spring refinery, his blond hair now the color of steel, and took back his company in a receiver’s sale. Once again, his wealthy friends gambled on his trademark resilience, this time loaning him half a million dollars to purchase the lion’s share of stock to take ownership. Cosden then set out to refurbish and expand the plant, but within two years, he’d lost control again. After a nasty legal battle with his stockholders, the court barred him from the company.
By the fall of 1940, Cosden lay fighting for his life at Cook Memorial Hospital in Fort Worth, his lungs giving out. At one point, the tycoon looked up at his doctor and tried brokering one last deal: “Make me a well man again and I’ll make a million,” he said. “You’ll get your cut.”
Doctors released him into the care of his longtime butler, William Hudson, who joined him on a Southern Pacific train to Palm Springs, California, where the air was clean and dry.
Some years earlier, after losing his company and perhaps seeing for the first time the limits of his ability, a reflective Cosden sat down with writer C. B. Glasscock for a rare interview. “When a man plays for high stakes every day of his life for years,” he said, “when he races horses, fights economic and political hazards, and lives constantly up to the limits of his energies and his physical, intellectual, and material resources, it burns him up. I have lived that way and I have enjoyed it. But I have learned that I want something else. I want peace and tranquility.”
In Palm Springs, Cosden would try to find that comfort. A quiet desert oasis would allow him to regain his strength, to rally the Wall Street brigades for another western campaign, and perhaps seize the throne once again. At some point during the night, the train entered Big Spring and rumbled past the dim lights of the refinery, where Cosden’s name still hung over the gates. By the time it reached Wilcox, Arizona, shortly after lunch on November 17, Cosden had suffered a fatal heart attack and was dead. He was fifty-nine years old.
* * *
Authorities placed Cosden’s body on a train to El Paso, then notified Nellie in Westchester, New York. Just days earlier, the last of her husband’s holdings had been auctioned off to pay his remaining debts, and from every indication the family was broke. In Westchester, Nellie was working as an interior decorator to stay afloat.
A second call was placed to the refinery headquarters, now located in Big Spring. In a modest office beside the cracking units sat its new president, a thirty-two-ye
ar-old former FBI agent named Raymond Lee Tollett.
Only five months into the job, Tollett boarded the first train to El Paso and claimed Cosden’s body. He left enough money with Hudson to have the remains cremated in San Antonio whenever Nellie arrived, then returned to resurrect what he called “the pile of junk and rust” now in his stewardship.
When Tollett had come aboard that summer, having briefly served as secretary-treasurer, he inherited a company battered by years of Depression, insolvency, and mismanagement. Liabilities exceeded credits and its common stock was worthless. At its lowest point, one of the refinery’s suppliers refused to leave an order of $7.80 without being paid in cash.
Tollett’s first line of business had been to move the headquarters from Fort Worth to Big Spring so he could monitor its everyday affairs. Using money from the sale of an oil property, he built a one-story office building in the shadow of its columns. He then persuaded Hiram J. Halle of Universal Oil, to whom he was already heavily in debt, to extend more credit.
“Give me fifteen months,” he said, then orchestrated a comeback more spectacular than Josh Cosden could have ever dreamed.
Raymond Tollett stood over six feet tall, with a head of slicked brown hair that by his late twenties had already begun to recede. The hairline made him appear older, but so did something in his eyes, which were deep set and dark and with no distinguishable color. He was a gangly man, with long arms and big hands, Lincolnesque. But this awkwardness was offset by his penchant for expensive tailored suits. In fact, the word most people used to describe Tollett was “dignified,” which probably meant more in Big Spring than in New York or Chicago. Yet even in those cities, alongside eastern bankers and businessmen, he stood out as distinguished and cosmopolitan, especially for a Texas oilman.
Tollett’s presidency of the Big Spring refinery came on the heels of an already dizzying life and career, one entirely self-made and scratched from the Red River bottomland where he was raised. As it did for Josh Cosden, Big Spring would provide Tollett a redemptive second act, and over the coming decades, he would be hailed as both a genius who thrust the little town and its “country oil company” into global prominence and a benevolent leader to his rank and file.
In exchange, the town pledged its loyalty and, later, its protection during Tollett’s long black spells with depression and drink. Unlike any resident before or since, “Mr. T.,” as everyone called him, was the undisputed king of our patch of oil and sand, and his influence would have profound impact on my family’s future.
* * *
Tollett was born in Oklahoma in December 1907, around the time John Lewis and his family were fleeing the boll weevil. His parents lived in Temple, just across the Red River from Texas, where his father, Franklin, worked as a tenant farmer. When he was two, the family moved to the other side of the river, near the town of Burkburnett, on a bluff overlooking the water. During heavy rains when the river flooded, teams were forced to cross at the low point just below the family’s four-room shack. Later, Tollett described the thrill of “watching wagons slipping and sliding down the north clay bank, and teams pulling hard and fast across the wet sand, coming to Texas.”
By the time he was ten, two younger brothers had arrived, and his parents often struggled. The family now lived in town, and to help his father, Tollett went to work. Each night after supper, he walked to the rail depot to meet the southbound train, purchased sixty newspapers, and sold them within the hour, “pocketing a net profit of $1.20.”
Burkburnett’s oil boom began late the following year, 1918, just as the one in Ranger ran its course. Twenty thousand people streamed into town, where enormous derricks sprouted from every open space. Whenever it rained, oil and sewage ran through the city’s streets near the Tollett home, mixing with the bottomland mud churned by the wagon teams. Behind the house, Raymond had planted a small orchard of fruit trees. One day he arrived home from school to find rig builders hacking it down with axes. He also discovered his father had sold the family’s cow, calf, and two ponies—all to allow room for a drilling rig that rose fifty feet from his bedroom window. Water pumped from a well on their back porch soon became undrinkable.
The family moved to nearby Wichita Falls, where the madness was just as intense. When Tollett turned eleven, his father asked him to quit school and find a full-time job to help the family. He was big for his age and easily found work delivering telegraphs for Western Union.
His telegraph runs acquainted him with wildcatters and promoters who’d become overnight millionaires, and the fleeting nature of the enterprise meant he also watched a few of them lose it just as fast.
One bitterly cold evening in the winter of 1919, he saw a man downtown whom he recognized as G. Clint Wood, who’d made his fortune in oil fields from Beaumont to Electra. But the word around town was that Wood had suffered a sour turn of luck and was broke. As Tollett watched, a beggar approached Wood and asked him for money, a World War I vet whose thin clothes left him shivering in the weather. Wood reached into his pocket and gave him a few coins. As the man turned to walk away, Wood called to him again, pulled off his expensive overcoat, and draped it over the man’s shoulders. Although G. Clint Wood would go on to reclaim his millions and then some, his selfless gesture that night made a deep and lasting impression on Tollett.
The year he turned fifteen, Tollett took his first job in the oil patch as a roustabout, and at some point struck upon a lucrative side game. There in Wichita Falls, he gathered up cabaret girls and drove them out to the derricks, where crowds of whooping men paid money to watch them dance.
A Sunday school teacher urged him to return to school. In 1925, he graduated as the valedictorian of his class but couldn’t afford a coat. Likewise, after winning an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, Tollett hadn’t the money to buy his mandatory uniforms, and was forced to turn down the opportunity. He took a job as a mule skinner instead. One day on a delivery, he looked up and saw the building for Cline’s Commercial College. Tollett walked inside, applied for a scholarship, and got it. By the next year, he was clerking for local oil companies.
In the early 1930s, Tollett married a local nurse named Leta Marie and the two welcomed a daughter, Kay. Now with a family to support, Tollett began studying accounting through correspondence courses, until one of his bosses urged him to pursue law. With the Depression slowing the oil business, he began borrowing law books from attorneys in town and reading them at home at the kitchen table.
Tollett was blessed with remarkable intelligence and also possessed a photographic memory. His only formal law training was three months of twice-a-week night classes in Dallas, two hours away. When he sat for the Texas bar exam in February 1932, during an era when only 5 percent of candidates passed, he aced it on the first attempt. The following year, he resumed his mail-order accounting lessons and passed the CPA exam.
To earn extra money, Tollett began tutoring people for civil service exams. When one of his students expressed interest in joining the FBI, Tollett took the entrance test on a lark. Several weeks later, he was shocked to learn that he’d passed.
The early 1930s were the bloody heyday of the Depression-era gangster, when the Bureau’s “flying squads” famously pursued its list of public enemies. In 1934 alone, agents would take down Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the Mealers’ erstwhile neighbor in Georgia, Pretty Boy Floyd—all in hails of gunfire.
After a recommendation from a congressman from northern Texas, the Bureau offered him a job as a junior agent in August 1934. After doing accounting work in Jacksonville, New York, and New Orleans, Tollett was given special agent duties just in time to help crack one of the biggest cases in the country.
Alvin “Creepy” Karpis ran with the Barker gang, whose list of crimes included killing a sheriff in Missouri in 1931 before orchestrating two high-profile kidnappings in St. Paul, Minnesota. Police and FBI had managed to capture or kill every member of the gang except Karpis, who remained the l
ast person on the Bureau’s list of public enemies.
In April 1936, agents in New Orleans discovered Karpis hiding in an apartment off Jefferson Davis Parkway, and for two days, Tollett worked surveillance across the street while colleagues prepared the raid. On May 1, around 5 p.m., agents nabbed him as he walked out to his car.
Tollett’s work on the Karpis case, while not glamorous, earned him the top job in New Orleans. But after three months he was demoted after female stenographers in the office claimed he was verbally abusive. The Bureau transferred him to Los Angeles, where he worked briefly on a missing persons case. Disillusioned and unhappy, Tollett soon resigned and took his family back to Texas.
An old friend had arranged an accounting position at the Wrightsman Oil Company in Fort Worth, where he was working when he received a call from Henry Zweifel, who was Josh Cosden’s lawyer. Zweifel had taken over as president of the Big Spring refinery in its last receivership. After two years at the helm of the company, he wanted to return to private practice and was looking for a replacement. Tollett joined as secretary-treasurer in July 1939 and began vetting potential candidates, but within a year, he accepted the job instead.
* * *
After traveling to El Paso to meet Cosden’s body in the symbolic passage of power, Tollett returned to Big Spring to resume his resurrection of the failing refinery. The company’s stock was valued at less than a dollar per share on the market. No suppliers would extend any credit. Worst of all, Tollett thought, was the morale among the workers. Upon his arrival, his first task had been to assure his employees.
All throughout the Depression, workers had kept the plant operating despite having no proper tools or supplies. The equipment was outdated and unsafe, and offices and control rooms had no heat in winter. When Tollett gathered his employees outside a warehouse, many thought they were about to be fired, but instead the tall man in the sharp suit assured them the company would survive. Not only that, it would grow. Go home and tell your wives that your job is safe, he told them. The men walked away amazed, not just by Tollett’s confidence, but by the fact that he’d known every one of their names without ever having met them.