Description:
Barth Bracken talks about his life.
Transcript:
Pam Bracken: Today is September 23rd, 2007. I’m Pam Bracken and I’m interviewing my dad, Barth Bracken, at the downtown Oklahoma City library for the Oklahoma Voices Project. Dad, one of your granddaughters and my daughter, Nell, loves rocks. Do you think she comes by that naturally? [laughter] Why did you study geology at OU?
Barth Bracken: Well, I didn’t really get into geology until after I took Geology I. I didn’t really have a major. At OU you had what you call University College and you had certain requirements so you just took University College that first year and I took Geology I which was physical geology and I got real interested in and just kept going after my freshman year.
PB: What do you think was exciting to you about rocks? What do you think was, what made you think that was gonna be the most interesting thing you could study?
BB: Well, there’s a lot more to geology, physical geology, because there’s glaciation and there’s erosion and there’s wind and there’s oceans. You know, it’s just not the rocks. The rocks are the hardest part, you know, learning rocks and characteristics and mineralization – those are the most difficult part. Because I was always interested in the petroleum aspect because I had worked in the oil fields when I was in high school in Okmulgee and did a lot of, you know, kind of familiar with what was going on.
PB: So, they were actually doing drilling around Okmulgee?
BB: Yeah, oh yeah.
PB: Oh. What particular oil field would that have been?
BB: Well this was down south of Okmulgee in a little town called Schulter and there were a lot of coal mines down there. So they had to, if they were gonna set a well up over a coal mine they had to be sure there wasn’t a mine and in this particular one that I worked on they had a mine shaft and they’d have to drill down through the mine shaft and get down there and close it all up and then cement the surface pipe that come out of it, and so we had to drill through there and it was an interesting deal because there was a mine mule there. The mine mule basically stayed inside all the time and he ate like Vienna sausages, potted meat, potato chips. I don’t know if he ever ate any hay or grain but he was in there all the time.
PB: What year would this have been in high school?
BB: This is probably 1949, ’48, ‘49.
PB: Wow, see I’d never heard about that. I didn’t know that you’d had something else that kind of motivated you towards that.
BB: Well Okmulgee was a big oil town and mother, Nell Bracken, worked for an oil man who played the mineral game and he was in mainly in the Glenpool, up south of Tulsa and had a lot of mineral interest in oil revenues all over the state, so you know, I just knew about that from mom.
PB: Well did you get the job partly through that?
BB: I got it from Bill Pine who was a friend of my dad’s and Bill was—his dad was Senator Pine and it was Pine, I don’t know whether it was an exploration company or oil company I don’t know remember but it was Pine, Bill Pine.
PB: How interesting because by the time you headed off to college then you weren’t sure you wanted to do the oil business but that was--
BB: No, I had no idea what I really wanted to do, I just took geology and so, as a science, you know.
PB: Like the required courses or whatever.
BB: Yeah, you had to take the courses.
PB: But I know you also did ROTC because that’s something that we always heard stories as a kid that you had to go and do things while you were still a student. So, when did you get involved with the ROTC, was that high school or college?
BB: No, that’s college.
PB: That was college.
BB: Yeah and you get all four years you go to officer’s training and I got to be a major I think and then I got to be a distinguished military student which gave me the chance to be a regular Army officer but I didn’t think that was gonna be my career so I didn’t.
PB: Oh, how interesting but is that also a waiver of part of your college tuition or did it pay part of your college tuition?
BB: It paid part of it yeah, it paid, oh, 15 or 20 dollars a month I think.
PB: But did you do that maybe because you thought that the military was a good idea or was Pop Pop, having had military service…?
BB: Well everybody got in a program because the Korean War was going on at that time.
PB: Ohhh, right.
BB: So you got into, if you wanted to stay in school normally you got into ROTC.
PB: Okay, well could you have been drafted for Korea though? Were you--
BB: I was exempt because I was in college and in ROTC.
PB: Okay, so that would have made it be where you didn’t have to necessarily go to Korea. Well, when did you find out that after college that you were gonna be going with the military to France? How did that come about? Because all I know is that, well dad went to France after college.
BB: Well I went to my senior year, I went to a camp in Aberdeen, Maryland which was the ordnance corps.
PB: Would that have been 1950? Wasn’t that your senior year?
BB: No that would be 1953, well that would be my junior year I guess. And so, I picked the ordnance corps just before I left and that’s basically, they have all the ordnance, all the guns, tanks, all the mechanical stuff. I was always pretty mechanically inclined to work on cars and motorcycles and things so I took that and then after I got commissioned in 1954 then I went to Aberdeen, Maryland as I was in the ordnance corps and did my basic training there and a couple of guys that were in my fraternity were ahead of me one year and they said, well if you do such-and-such you could either go to Germany or France so I just put Germany and France down and I got France.
PB: Okay, so you had choices? BB: Yeah.
PB: Well why do you think you put France over Germany? Was there any--
BB: I’m not sure that I did, I think I put--
PB: Either/or.
BB: Yeah, I just put as a, and then I don’t remember what the last one was, you could go to Japan and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to Europe, you know, since our family’s, basically mom’s family, German. So that’s how I got in there.
PB: What did you think about France when you first got there? I mean, had you traveled before you went to France? You hadn’t taken lots of trips with pop-pop or grammy or anything?
BB: No. Well after World War II we had a lot of Army bases in both Germany and France and it was out in a national park, national forest I guess really, outside of Nancy and I lived in town because they didn’t have any officer’s quarters, bachelor’s quarters on campus, on base I should say, and so we lived in town and it was the coldest winter in 100 years or something so it was a rather bleak existence. I remember hot water was something you had very little of and I bought a gas stove, a propane gas stove and took it to our room, in fact there was another lieutenant that stayed in one of the rooms of this lady’s house.
PB: So you just were subletting kind of or leasing just a room?
BB: Just a rent.
PB: Did she make meals for you or you had to do the preparation in the room?
BB: No. Well, we basically ate at the base.
PB: Oh you did, that was a perk of being military.
BB: In the evening we always ate in town at the restaurant that didn’t have a name, it just said, “Restaurant.”
PB: Oh.
BB: No name restaurant.
PB: No name restaurant.
BB: [laughter]
PB: Did you know any French at all, did they give you some training with the Army that you would learn a little bit of French?
BB: No.
PB: Could you say, “some wine, please?” Did you just kind of wing it?
BB: [laughter] Well you just have to pick it up and I was in charge of maybe 150-200 French civilians and a lot of Algerians that worked in supply and what they did, they just put all this stuff down in this forest: guns, tanks, you know.
PB: All the stuff from what had been from the German, French.
BB: All from the 7th Army, that was all American stuff.
PB: American stuff, okay.
BB: Yeah. 7th Army. We were supplies, supporting the 7th Army who was, of course, stationed in Germany for protection, you know, against the Russians.
PB: Oh yeah. Oh.
BB: That was part of the Cold War era and we discovered, you know, we’d go out and there’d be vines covering everything. We’d go out and there’d be a tank sitting there or a jeep or a bunch of grain alcohol which some of the guys got into.
PB: Oh, your guys did?
BB: Yeah some of them. We had mainly sergeants that ran everything and I was in charge of the sergeants.
PB: What was your rank? I know that you were an officer.
BB: I was a 2nd lieutenant and then about 1956 I was promoted to 1st lieutenant.
PB: 1st lieutenant, okay.
BB: When I was discharged, I was a 1st lieutenant.
PB: Did you have a unit number and regiment number, was that part of the way your organization--?
BB: No, we weren’t that. We were, I don’t really remember exactly what our outfit was called. [laughter]
PB: But did you enjoy what you did there?
BB: Oh yeah, yeah. I had a driver in a 1950 Army deal that he’d take me to the Officer’s Club for lunch and any place I wanted to go, they drove me all around.
PB: And did you mingle with the natives so to speak? I mean when you were living in Nancy did you get to know people or did you kind of stay with your military…American?
BB: Yeah, I stayed with the other officers and mainly the officers and their wives a lot of them were married. My boss was a major and he and his wife kind of took me under their wing and I ate a lot with them and then there was a Captain Sweeney who was a good friend and then there was a Lieutenant Norcross and Lieutenant Nalier. We all ran out and went to Paris and did a lot of things there.
PB: Okay, now that Norcross name rings some bells. What was his first name?
BB: John.
PB: John Norcross. Was he from New England by any chance?
BB: Yeah.
PB: Okay, I have a vague memory that Pierrette, my mom, was dating John Norcross, is that right?
BB: Yeah.
PB: Okay what do you remember about Pierrette. Do you remember a little bit about that story?
BB: She worked in the record keeping area and really John went home and I met your mom, Pierrette, after John or about the same time.
PB: After he’d gone home.
BB: Yeah.
PB: Okay. What do you remember about, what did you think about her when you first met her?
BB: Oh, I liked her of course. Yeah. She was really sharp, spoke good English, you know that’s kind of the key over there. [laughter] You had to have people that could interpret for you.
PB: Well, did you ask her out for a date or did she ask you out for a date?
BB: No, I asked her.
PB: You did?
BB: We could go to the Officer’s Club and all sorts of things.
PB: Did you meet her family, her parents and all of that at some point?
BB: Mm-hmm.
PB: So you felt like, I mean you were dating enough that you would go meet them?
BB: Yeah, her mom and Walter. Yeah, I remember the car wouldn’t start one time and her dad came out and we got it started.
PB: And even though he didn’t ever speak English, he spoke, if I remember right, German, Italian and French and you didn’t – well you may have spoke a little–
BB: Well he spoke a little bit of English, just enough.
PB: Oh, he did a little bit, okay.
BB: Of course, most of those people spoke several languages or understood them.
PB: Well especially because that was eastern France, so they would have had some of that German influence and then my grandfather was born in Germany although he was Italian. But you remember engaging with him a little bit?
BB: Yeah, not much just because of the language barrier.
PB: But he was good with mechanical things, I know that if I remember the story right he had been conscripted by the Germans when they came over – I mean you probably knew that story – when the Germans took over France. He spoke German so they said you’re gonna come work on our motorcycles or something.
BB: Yeah, yeah.
PB: That’s the main part I remember. As you were starting to leave France did you think you had a plan for your life or were you just coming back to the states but you formulated the plan?
BB: Oh yeah, I definitely had a plan. I requested that I could fly home early from Germany because that’s where you left from, either air or ship.
PB: Was it Frankfurt or one of the major--?
BB: Yeah, Bremerhaven I think up on the coast. But anyway, so I asked to come home to where I could start the second semester at OU to get my master’s degree in geology.
PB: Okay, so by then you knew that you were interested enough?
BB: Yeah. Before I went in the Army between the time I graduated in 1954, I went in the Army in February 1955 and I worked for an oil company as a geologist and mainly went out and watched wells that we were drilling in North Texas up around Gainesville and Whitesboro and Sherman and there was a pretty good oil boom there in the early ‘50s.
PB: The early ‘50s. What company was that, what was the name?
BB: That was Concho Petroleum Company.
PB: Okay, I remember hearing that.
BB: At Concho, Paul Karcher was a scientist and he had discovered much of the reflective seismograph and especially on the Gulf Coast and he was a great guy and also my boss was a geologist and he was a great guy, so I had some really good early training and responsibility and Bill Wilson was my boss the chief geologist, he really taught me to how to do mapping, subsurface mapping with logs.
PB: And there were no computers then, now just thinking about…
BB: There weren’t computers and everybody used, what now would be a primitive way of looking for oil and gas and we didn’t have that much seismic either. It was mainly in other parts, deeper parts of the United States, so we were up on shallower depths and we just had to look at the old wells that have been drilled, those dry holes and producers and then come up with ideas about where oil might accumulate and I got a lot of good experience in that short period of time.
PB: Okay, so you were in the Dallas area, then you went to France. So, when you came back you thought, “Well I’ll go ahead and get a master’s degree.” What did you think the advantage of getting a master’s degree?
BB: Well I just didn’t feel like I had enough really training, didn’t get enough courses, didn’t get enough subsurface geology and so I had a project in the Sivelll's Bend field, up on the Red River, it was in Texas and so I did a field study and had my master’s thesis on that oil field.
PB: Which I still have a copy of that master’s thesis. I bring it to my classes sometimes to show my undergraduates that at some point you might write one of these and you had the fold-out map. So, did you take a lot of courses for that master’s level? Do you remember how many courses you had to take?
BB: Yeah, almost all geology courses, advanced geology courses and the worst one I had was magnetics and I got in late, and that’s the only bad grade I ever made in geology. Didn’t make anything but A’s and B’s but in that course I just barely passed.
PB: But is that when you first got back?
BB: Yeah. First semester I was two or three weeks late, so I was way behind. This guy, he spoke with a foreign language, I don’t remember what nationality he was but he said, “I could look at your Mr. Bracken and know you're not dumb. You’re not stupid, I can look in your eyes.”
PB: [laughter] Well you had to at least make a C, I mean a graduate course work in the 50’s was like graduate course work in the 90’s.
BB: I think I did end up with maybe a C but I was barely there. Probably a C-. laughter]
PB: But that was the only course that you ever made a C in your area of study.
BB: Yeah.
PB: Because we used to laugh about the fact that probably before you got interested in your discipline, your study of geology maybe you weren’t the best student of all. I mean, you weren’t an A and B student.
BB: No, no, no, I was finally made a 3-point almost a 4-point my senior year because I was taking all the geology courses and I that came natural to get into that. My senior year was good. The rest of ‘em were just mediocre.
PB: Now how did mom enter the picture there with you guys hooking up because you lived in Norman. When you and mom first got married so she would have come from France but you were a graduate student then. Right?
BB: No. Actually before, yeah I was already in school when I got back and that summer your mom said she was going to California to go to college and I said, “well why don’t you stop by Okmulgee”, so she stopped by Okmulgee and never did leave.
PB: [laughter] So you got married in the fall of 1956?
BB: 1957.
PB: ’57, okay 1957 that would be right.
BB: October of ’57.
PB: So, you were already a graduate student and so you both went to live, I mean obviously mom would have gone to be the wife of a graduate student.
BB: Yeah we lived in a Quonset hut, there was still old Army and Navy, there were two Navy bases and their quarters were these Quonset huts and we lived in a Quonset hut, had a little bit of a scholarship and we got an apartment from a friend who has donated apartments. A guy named Dave Logan, he was a geologist in Okmulgee and he was the father of Paula, my sister’s best friend, so he got me a scholarship and so we had a little bit more money.
PB: You got an upgrade in your housing in other words. Okay. Then you got a job with Lone Star if I remember, right? Lone Star, or was there something in between there?
BB: No, when I got out of school, you couldn’t find jobs.
PB: Okay what year would that have been, that was…
BB: 1957.
PB: 1957, all right.
BB: Finally, I interviewed in Oklahoma City with Lone Star after interviewing a lot of people and going to Tulsa and pounding the pavement trying to find a job, finally got a job with Lone Star in Abilene.
PB: So you interviewed in Oklahoma City with Lone Star but then they sent you to Abilene, Texas. What was the particular job you were doing? You were a petroleum geologist looking for?
BB: Oil and gas.
PB: Oil and gas, okay.
BB: My primary job was of course generating geological places to drill, you know and that was all involved in subsurface geology.
PB: Some of that stuff you learned earlier.
BB: Some of the stuff, and a great deal from my master’s thesis of how to predict where another oil field of similar nature might be.
PB: Did you like living in west Texas? I think Abilene is kind of considered west Texas for us Okies.
BB: Yeah, it’s west central Texas, but yeah.
PB: But you grew up with lots of trees around eastern Oklahoma, around Okmulgee and mom was from eastern France where there were lots of trees. Did you both feel kind of geographical shock? I mean did you feel like, “Whoa, this is dusty and dry.”
BB: Well it was definitely dusty and cold the year you were born.
PB: Well it was some kind of a cold thing going on there.
BB: Yeah I know, we didn’t have any heat, we had to turn on the heater when you were coming.
PB: And I was born in September so that’s rather odd.
BB: Yeah, well late September but it was early for real cold.
PB: So what month did you move to Abilene? Was it before I was born because I was born in Abilene? Do you remember what month? Did you move in summer?
BB: Uh yeah. We went down there because I was still looking for a job in the summer so it was probably, you know, mid-summer or something like that.
PB: So you got lucky, you got close and then you were gonna have this baby, which would be me. Do you remember much about what it was like being a young father with a pregnant wife and what kind of a pregnancy was it? How involved were you having a pregnant wife, or did you just go to work every day?
BB: Well I had to work because in those days you worked Saturday.
PB: Wow.
BB: Yeah you worked at least till noon sometimes longer, so you worked all the time.
PB: Well in your industry or do you think that might have been just a lot of men with a professional job? BB: Just a lot of men, yeah. We worked, almost everybody worked in any job on Saturday, at least Saturday morning.
PB: I just remembered that mom would tell lots of stories about how you’d go and have to work on a well and sometimes there’d be a tornado warning or whatever and mom had no idea about what tornadoes were so I figured that some of that she had to learn, with her feet on the ground like what do you do when there’s a tornado and some lady who had a bakery or something made mom come in maybe with me when I was a baby, I remember that. What do you remember about me when I was a baby? I’ll get personal here, what do you remember?
BB: I remember I was up most of the night carrying you.
PB: Oh great.
BB: And walking around and you’d finally to go to sleep.
PB: Okay [laughter] so I was one of those fussy babies that you’d put in the fussy baby category, or just?
BB: Well yeah. But you know it was fun.
PB: It was fun?
BB: When you're young you don’t require a whole bunch of sleep because I was used to working out in the field a lot too so we were up practically 24 hours a day, you’d take catnaps along the way.
PB: Yeah that’s true, that would make sense. And how old were you when I was born, to do the math real, quick I’m thinking 25? Weren’t you about 25 when I was born, which is really young.
BB: 26.
PB: 26, okay.
BB: Born in ‘32 and you were born in ’58.
PB: Okay, so we can do the math. I think yeah about 26.
BB: In May 1926 and you were born in September.
PB: Okay. Do you remember when we first started being transferred a lot, what you thought about all of those moves because we were in Abilene for how long? Five years?
BB: Yeah until 1960.
PB: And then we moved to Dallas.
BB: No more than that, ’64.
PB: Oh okay, so we had a longer stint in Abilene.
BB: Oh yeah.
PB: Was that just part of, I mean being transferred a lot which is a part of company life, you work for a company and you just took your family.
BB: Well you usually got promoted, you know. If you got promoted along the way, like I worked for the Chief Geologist in Dallas and we reviewed the prospects that were submitted from the district offices and reviewed them and that was a part of my job to recommend or not to recommend.
PB: Okay, so going from Abilene to the Dallas area, that was definitely a promotion so that’s just how you had to go through the company. I kind of remember then we came to Oklahoma City and then that was another promotion?
BB: Yeah. I got promoted to District Geologist in, uh…
PB: Oklahoma City office.
BB: Oklahoma City, mm-hmm.
PB: And then we went to Denver, Colorado after that. So Lone Star was growing, it was a company that was…
BB: They opened an exploration office in Denver and I went up there and opened the office.
PB: Oh, okay. So that’s why we ended up, because I never thought of Colorado as a great oil, I mean I never thought there was that much oil exploration.
BB: Well there’s quite a bit. The whole Rocky Mountains is fairly in its infancy and it’s really busy now, it has been for a number of years.
PB: So you went there to start that office up. I’m interested in the transition that made you move from working for a corporation. Obviously I was always proud of you because I knew that you were important in your work and that was a good thing for you to do but how did you decide to make the move to be your own boss? Can you remember back to what made you decide that?
BB: Oh yeah, it was an economic factor. The lowest paying job for a manager of the company that I knew and I was making like $13,800 as a manager.
PB: And that would have been what year again? I gotta get the years right – 1960, like in Denver you were only making $13,000?
BB: Mm-hmm, $13,800. That would’ve been in 1967.
PB: Well I was thinking well we moved to Denver, yeah we moved back here by late 1968 or ’69, back to Oklahoma City. So, you’re making about $13,000, so it was really an economic decision that made you say I’m gonna go on my own and how did you and Bob Hoover end up?
BB: Well Bob and I were college friends and he was working in Oklahoma City and he came to Denver and he said do you want to team up. I’ve got some people that have money to invest in oil and gas and so he had some contacts with some people in New England and Chicago that provided our early financing.
PB: So it was kind of like brokering, Bob Hoover is like the guy who says I’ve got some people for you, I know my friend Barth is good at finding oil, and were a lot of people doing that at that time? That was about 1970?
BB: Yeah, we started in 1970. Actually, I guess I quit Lone Star in late 1969 but I was not a geologist when we went back to Oklahoma City. I was in the gas supply department looking for places. Lone Star wanted to know where they ran a pipeline through western Oklahoma or to west Texas and so that’s how I got familiar with all of the really good gas fields down in the Texas panhandle.
PB: And that was your first big well, the one I always remember. You and Bob Hoover, so you formed Hoover and Bracken Exploration, Inc. and then you had like a big boom, right? Wasn’t there just one big oil field? One big find or whatever that kind of got catapulted you to other things.
BB: Yes.
PB: And you think there were a lot of smaller corporations at that time or had they been all along, there had been lots of guys doing this?
BB: Oh yeah. Lots and lots of new fields. There were probably more independents, well there were a few major companies. Quite a few in Oklahoma City and quite a few in Amarillo.
PB: And did a lot of business, too.
BB: A lot of deep digging because that was some of the deepest, 20,000 feet and deeper.
PB: And you were doing a lot of the, wasn’t one of the areas that you developed even when you started your own company, it was Bracken…I’m trying to remember when you and Hoover stopped being partners and then you had…
BB: We had two or three entities that ended up as Bracken Exploration Company. It was a small public company.
PB: Public company, I remember that.
BB: In ’82 and ’83, and in ’84 we sold most of the production to Vaco Petroleum.
PB: Okay, I have vague memories of just, that was a lot of business going.
BB: We basically got in the drilling business which was our biggest mistake, we bought drilling rigs and to pay ‘em off we sold some production, some real big production in Texas and we probably one of the few drilling companies although we really weren’t a drilling company. We had a drilling sub-company. It was a big mistake to do that.
PB: But did you do it because there weren’t a lot of other people doing that?
BB: There were other people but we just, you know, rigs were scarce and people just thought that was the thing to do and so we paid off all our debt to First National Bank but like I said I was on the board at the First National later on, very few people that owned drilling rigs. That’s when the bust came in ’84 or ’85 or ‘86.
PB: Oh okay. Yeah, I’ve always been sort of sitting on the fence. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it nor really business savvy enough to know what was going on with all those years, but when you think back on it…thinking how much your lifestyle changed. You know I remember when we were kids, you know, we didn’t go on vacations.
BB: No.
PB: When you sort of think about the trade up, did you enjoy all the things that came with that success? I mean where you're sitting now it might be different, but did you enjoy the way took a different turn there?
BB: Sure. We were able to do a lot more. I never did set out to make money. My goal was always to, I got a kick out of making discoveries. I made a real nice discovery for Lone Star when I was in Abilene and I said, well if I can do that, we can probably do it up here, so we had some great success early.
PB: It’s like job satisfaction.
BB: As a result we got to be, we got more affluent. [laughter]
PB: Yeah, well the financial side of it, but for you that was never, like that was not the most important because I remember very vaguely by the time Wally my younger brother and Sam my adopted stepbrother, by the time they came along, you know, you guys even had a jet and you’d fly places and you know we just drove to Okmulgee. [laugher]
BB: Well we didn’t have a jet.
PB: I thought we had a jet. I thought you had a jet.
BB: No we had a turboprop, a Beechcraft King Air.
PB: Okay, with a pilot and all of that.
BB: Yeah, two pilots.
PB: Oh, two pilots, okay. So, the boys, my younger brothers, 10 years and 11 years younger had a very different view of life and everything. They saw a lot of different things.
BB: They were spoiled. [laughter]
PB: And if they listen to this, we love them anyway. Well part of probably what came with that, too, was that like a lot of people of your generation you went through a divorce in the 70’s and I’ll just make this fast but I was wondering whether or not you could just in a word or two tell about what was that like to be someone divorced in the 70’s? Was there a stigma for a man being divorced in the 70’s?
BB: No. Of course, you know it’s the consequences you find out, that’s why the Bible tells us we should not get divorced but you know it happens more than--.
PB: …it doesn’t happen anymore. Yeah. I mean the fact that two of your four children are divorced, too, we now see it in a different way particularly the two of us children who’ve gone through them. I was just interested in how the extended family reacted to your divorce in the 70’s. Aunt Paula and my grandma, Pop-Pop was gone by then, so.
BB: Well everybody loved your aunt and they saw that things just weren’t going well, more for me than your mom, but they didn’t take sides. They were still good to your mom forever, as we were and we took care of her right up to her death.
PB: Do you remember when going back to church became something important to you, because growing up in Okmulgee you guys were good Presbyterians and Pop-Pop took the money, he was the treasurer in the church.
BB: Oh, yeah. That’s right. A big part of my early life was all related to Sunday school and camps and all of the things that you grow up and then when you go to college you just abandon. I think this is probably what most people do when they go, they abandon it and then even through your early marriage we went to church but we weren’t really.
PB: We didn’t go real regularly, yeah.
BB: Not like we do now but then when Linda and I got married we saw the importance of going to church and as you know we became involved in supporting a lot of ministries, Scope and Eye of The Needle, which was through the Mitchells up in Denver and we were born-again at that time, maybe for the third time.
PB: [Laughter] That “born-again” terminology is really always very, very interesting. How do you think your faith has affected your more mature years? Is there a way that you can see it being a part of your life like you said now in your maturity?
BB: Well it just gives you a sense of, you don’t worry about dying basically. You just know that everything will be fine. It’s just a real comfort factor to know and we get a great deal out of going to church and participating and that’s where our friends really developed. In Oklahoma City it was through First Presbyterian Church our really long-time friends were there and then when we got to Wagoner it took several years because then they had a hard time adapting to a rural environment and a small town but we met a group of people and we traveled, we bought RV’s and we traveled together and we had great times together, we ate together. You know, our whole social life revolved around our Christian walk and their Christian walk so that was how that all developed.
PB: And all of us ending up Methodists is kind of interesting. Well you guys and me both being Methodists is kind of interesting.
BB: Well my mother, Nellie, was a Methodist when she married dad and he was a Presbyterian and we were raised in the Presbyterian church.
PB: Yeah, a Presbyterian, yeah. It was kind of nice coming back full circle because from a little bit of genealogy, you know, we even think that our early Brackens were likely going to the Methodist church in Cincinnati but I gotta follow up on that later. Well I’m gonna end with one quick question and it’s just a simple one. What do you think keeps you plugging every day, dad? I mean you’ve never slowed down. You just, every time I call you're still busy and I feel like I’m tired just talking to you. What do you think keeps you plugging away every day?
BB: Well I’m just interested in a lot of different things as you know. It was not very hard to go from a working geologist and president of an oil company to basically a farmer or rancher and although we’re really not a ranch there were a lot of challenges to a lot of things to do. We did all of the remodeling of the whole ranch and cleaned it up and worked on it. Now we’re into the resort business, so just a lot of challenges to different interests, I guess.
PB: See that might be even what this interview’s helped me see is that you’re someone who likes a challenge and the feeling of success in a job well done.
BB: Yeah, I have a great deal of self-satisfaction and accomplishing things and different things, not just your particular area that you started down in. But I’m still active in the oil business and still interested in what’s going on and even looking around a ranch possible oil and gas play.
PB: Oh I didn’t even know that, so well that’ll be the next chapter. We’ll have to have another interview.
BB: Might be.
PB: Well thank you, Dad.
BB: Okay.