Oklahoma Voices: Larry Nichols

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Transcript:

Wendy: Today is October 26th, 2010 and my name is Wendy Gabrielson and I am at the Devon Energy Corporation with Larry Nichols for the Oklahoma voices program and Larry, Could you please tell me your full name and birthday?

Larry: John Larry Nichols July 6. 1942

Wendy: Larry where were you born?

Larry: Right here in Oklahoma City?

Wendy: What was it like growing up here in Oklahoma City.

Larry: You know entirely different than it is now the time when you could leave your bicycle out in the front yard and stay there and you drive around on dirt roads and go to a local movie theater for a dime or a quarter or whatever it was and watch the Saturday morning matinee the Saturday morning cartoons, you know, it was a long time ago. The world has changed.

Wendy: Yes it has. well tell me what were your parent’s names?

Larry: John Nichols from Ardmore Oklahoma and Mary Ann Nichols from McAlester, Oklahoma. Mary Davis Nichols from McAlester Oklahoma.

Wendy: And what were your parents like?

Larry: My mother is still living. She's 94. My father died two years ago at the age of 92 and they were both a loving couple, great people except when they disciplined me for all the things that high school kids do. Now, don't go there. Don't go there. No, I was a model child more or less.

Wendy: How about your grandparents? Can you tell me a little bit about John Tut Nichols and his wife?

Larry: My Father's Side John Tut Nichols and his wife Mary Ann Nichols born in Dallas, Texas in the 1880s and moved up to Ardmore when they saw the two railroads coming together there and at that time Ardmore and Dallas were about the same size and he thought Ardmore had lots of potential and he they live there my father grew up there. My mother's parents, he was a doctor in McAllister and they were killed at an early age when my mother was still in college in a car accident. So I never knew them.

Wendy: Were you close to your fathers parents ?

Larry: Oh, yeah, my grandparents, very close to them. They did a lot of babysitting duties and they spoiled me like all great great grandparents were supposed to.

Wendy: Well, tell me a little bit about the story about how your family came to Oklahoma then, was that... how did they actually get here? Was that John Tut? Who first moved here

Larry: Yeah, he moved here actually a little before statehood because he was a cotton broker and he saw opportunities to that business in Ardmore with the railroads there and my other grandfather that I never knew moved. He was a doctor so he came to fill a niche in McAllister and Southeastern, Oklahoma.

Wendy: And what about your siblings?

Larry: I have a sister Betty who's two years younger than I am and a brother Kent who's about six or seven years younger than I am.

Wendy: What was your relationship like growing up with them?

Larry: Well, obviously I knew my sister better because we are closer in the same age and not six or seven years apart. I'd gone away to college by the time my brother got up, but we've always been close and see each other regularly, do things together, vacation things like that together

Wendy: Is there a member of your family or a relative that has had special meaning to you or a particular influence on your life?

Larry: Well other than my parents, of course, my grandparents were just loving grandparents and that was always nice and I had an uncle out in California. Dr. James E Davis Goldberg who we called Uncle Doc who being the youngest of sort of that generation was always a special person.

Wendy: I understand you went to Casady, I didn't and what was what was school life like at Casady for you?

Larry: I started at Nichols Hills grade school, public school and then went on to Casady in the seventh grade. That was a small, you know school. There were 40 in our graduating class half boys and half girls. So very small and intimate with lots of attention from lots of teachers.

Wendy: Do you have a nickname?

Larry: No. Never did. I mean Larry is my name. So no.

Wendy: When you were growing up at home, did you have a job or responsibilities with the family where there are things that you had to do outside of school work?

Larry: Mowing the grass was something that I did and of course even as a seventh or eighth grader, I was in charge of mowing and trimming and the grass and that took a good deal of time in those days. Later I got other jobs. My last job in high school was working for a construction crew digging ditches 10 hours a day for a dollar an hour. Not the most glorious job I've ever had but interesting.

Wendy: Physical

Larry: Very. Yeah being in the bottom of a red clay ditch when it's a hundred degrees outside is hot.

Wendy: Wow, and how long did you have that job?

Larry: One summer, all summer

Wendy: Well, what about when you were at Casady was there a teacher or anyone who stands out that that influenced you?

Larry: They were mostly really good and helpful, Margaret Tuck was by far the most demanding and didn't let me coast by with an A and made me work harder than I really needed to get an A and was quite strict in pulling out the best in what she thought someone had to offer and I admired her immensely.

Wendy: Well thinking back then to your childhood. Are there any stories that you have that you might want to share?

Larry: Stories. Well, I don't know in high school. I mean I did the, you know, the normal things that the kids did in that era sneaking a beer here or there and staying out late, but no real, real unusual stories pop into mind

Wendy: Okay. I understand that you traveled extensively growing up. So do you think that has impacted the man that you are today?

Larry: It undoubtedly has in some way or another at least it did early on, every summer my father would load all of us into a car and we would drive somewhere. We'd go to Cape Cod or we'd go to lakes up in Michigan and Minnesota and that area. Most often we would go out to California. Dad had worked during the Depression as a chauffeur driving some people around down in Los Angeles and really acquired a love for that part of the world and always wanted to buy a house somewhere out there and we’d go out and spend a month or two on a beach in California. And that was very fun. Started in Long Beach owhen Los Angeles was a teeny tiny place and gradually moved down the coast to Newport Beach and finally Laguna Beach sort of fleeing the onset of civilization.

Wendy: So at that time in your life, did you at that point, do you think, have any aspirations to be in the energy industry?

Larry: No that really never occurred to me very much. I started out in college with pursuing an economics degree and then one summer got a job with a Geology Professor from SMU working out in West Texas and he was the sort of Renaissance Man and that was great fun, you know being outside all day hiking around in the countryside. I had earlier gone to Camp Seely up in Colorado, which has always given me a love for hiking and being outdoors and to be able to have gainful employment and pursue a degree and be outside at the same time strike me as a great deal. So I went into geology and then when I graduated in 1964, it really was impossible to get a job as a geologist unless you had a PhD. and I got a little bored with it. So I migrated then over and went to law school at the University of Michigan and pursued that.

Wendy: So after law school then February 20th, 1970 you joined your father and established the Devon Corporation here in Oklahoma City. How did that come about?

Larry: Well, actually there was a gap there after law school. I went to Washington DC and from the summer 67, summer 68 worked for chief justice Earl Warren and Justice Tom Clark technically Justice Tom Clark because the Supreme Court, each retired Justice had a law Court they could hire but they were assigned to the Chief Justice. So I only met Justice Clark once or twice and worked for Chief Justice Earl Warren for a year. And then after that, I went to the Department of Justice as a special assistant to the Assistant Attorney General at the tail end of the Johnson Administration in the beginning of the Nixon Administration. In the Nixon Administration, my boss was Bill Rehnquist, William H. Rehnquist, who when I left the Department of Justice, and was on a honeymoon. I learned that he had also left and had been nominated to the Supreme Court. So I worked for both a liberal and a conservative Supreme Court Justice.

Wendy: Excellent. So what after that then when you did join to establish Devon Corporation how did that come about? And what was it like working with your father.

Larry: My father had been in the exploration production business most of his career and had sold most of that and it was running a variety of businesses, a little TV station in Beaumont, Texas, radio stations in Hawaii, and Oil Service Supply business in Libya, a disparate group, but in the process of running the Oil well supply business in Libya he realized that a lot of Europeans had a desire to invest in the United States and a desire not to invest in the more risky part of our business mainly drilling exploratory wells, but they wanted to buy producing properties and so he saw the opportunity to create a new business and wanted me to, come join him. I originally told him no because I was interviewing law firms in Washington DC which is what I fully intended to do but he persisted and I finally said well, what are you willing to pay? What's my salary and he quoted a number and I said but Dad I make a lot more than that here in Washington and I quoted the number of, whatever it was I’ve forgotten and he said as only a father could, you're not worth that! I said, well that may be but I'm going to take this and so we finally worked it out. And I said okay two years. I'll help you start it and we'll work together for two years and then we'll see, and there was my father myself a part-time receptionist that we shared with another company a secretary and two bookkeepers and we started out, you know with that small little band and hope of people and spent most of 1971 raising about a million dollars to buy from European investors, to buy one field, or an interest in one field in, Texas. Then the second year we started working on the second project and I got to thinking well, yeah, we can buy this larger entity and each year, there was always another Horizon out there and I've never looked backed.

Wendy: Well, your mother is quoted as saying that John was the accelerator and Larry was the brake. Do you think that's an accurate assessment? And do you think that played a part in your business relationship?

Larry: Oh it did my father was an optimist and had a vision that I as a young person couldn't really see all the time. So we made a good relationship with it since I had a law and geology background and he had an accounting background and a financial background our respective skills complemented each other quite a bit. So we had, it was a great relationship.

Wendy: Which can be rare in families.

Larry: It is, it's it's awfully hard for… It was easy and I respect but if you look at other father-son relationships, a lot of time son is brought into an existing business where there were lots of other people there that have already been toiling away and work their way up the organization chart and here comes you know, young brash naive kid who is suddenly moved in above them and that caused a tremendous amount of conflict. In our case, literally dad started and I started a brand-new business. When I joined we owned zero oil and gas wells we had no assets and there was no one else to get offended because there wasn't anybody else. So for that reason it was a lot easier than a lot of father-son or daughter mother daughter's father, whatever, sibling type relations. There was no business. This was it we were starting from scratch.

Wendy: So what things then as you started did you learn from your father?

Larry: How to be an entrepreneur, you know how to organize things, how to have a vision and just an understanding of how the industry works which is what I originally thought was that I would come back, spend a couple of years getting practical business experience, and then go back to Washington and practice law. At that part of your life you've been four years in college, three years in law school, one year in the law court, three years in the department Justice life is sort of a series of short term commitments. Long-term it’s scary for someone in their 20s or 30s, but it worked quite well.

Wendy: So where did the name Devon come from?

Larry: We were in London raising money and had batted around a few ideas for names of the company. We did not want to call it Nichols because that tends to get ego and personality involved and we were looking at a map of England and looking at the various counties in England Suri and Devonshire and when we got to Devon, I said well at least that's there's a tangential relationship between Devonshire in our business because the devonian age one of the geologic ages was named after rock that are exposed in the county of Devonshire in England, which is where the devonian age comes from. Very esoteric reason, but for lack of any... you know when they all sound more or less the same and it was short and we thought everyone could pronounce it. Which they can’t, you know, they say Doovan, particularly the French people from South Louisiana sometimes divide it into two words, but it's just Devon.

Wendy: What would you say are the principles that Devon was founded on and do you think that it's changed over time or that the company's mission has changed over time?

Larry: Oh, the basic principles haven't changed. I would hope. Integrity, doing what you say you're going to do. All those Boy Scout motto type things, treating others the way you would like to treat yourself. I think most businesses do that. But there are, as there are in all professions whether it's businesses or politicians or teachers or firemen or whatever, there are bad apples everywhere. So Integrity is a key part of it and being entrepreneurial, you know, looking for opportunities where other people don't see them, which you have to be when you're starting a new business. And we've tried to maintain by really not necessarily doing what everyone else is doing and trying to think long-term about how what we're doing today is going to affect the long term and whether or not we're working on the right things today that are going to positively affect the long-term or just sort of getting trapped by an agenda that's set by a lot of other people.

Wendy: So looking back then what do you see as some of the highlights of your company's 40-year history, thus far?

Larry: We have had a lot of highlights because there have been many times particularly in the early days where you know, if you didn't do something new and exciting in a given year you wouldn't survive until the end of the year. We did a lot of acquisitions, created a lot of partnerships, had an awful lot of fun doing that with a small group of very talented people, grew a little larger and clearly going public in 1988 was a milestone. At that time on a good day we were about 75 million dollar value company, which of the four hundred publicly-traded trading companies that existed at the time we were about in the middle, or more closer to the bottom of somewhere between 50% and 75%, a little below the average or the mid-sized company and then growing that and our vision at that time was that for a variety of reasons, that the financing that the oil and gas industry had historically used had gone away. Banks which provided a major source of financing until the crash of Penn Square and all the other banking industry and the mid-80s that source of financing had gone away. The tax reform Act of 1986 changed a lot of the tax structure partnerships that brought a tremendous amount of capital and created an awful lot of jobs in the oil and gas industry in our part of the world have gone away and thinking there had to be a consolidation of those 400 publicly traded companies and since we'd actually done acquisitions, having enough of optimism or ego or whatever to think we could pull it off and grow a little bit indeed we did. Many times in the 1990s, really through 2005, we bought companies that were the same size as us, a couple times one and a couple that were slightly larger than us and survived, as a surviving company. So there are a lot of transactions there, one time several of the board members, the leading board members came out and said, well you really got your heart on this particular deal. We were buying the oil and gas part of Pens Energy and they said, you know, you really, really don't have a chance of doing this but we will back you but don't get too disappointed if you and your team don't get it done. And of course we got it done. So that was, it was great fun.

Wendy: Exciting times, so what are some Innovations than that You feel your company's brought to energy exploration.

Larry: One of the things that we saw or thought we saw in 1988 was that the major oil companies had essentially left the United States and Canada to pursue all the international opportunities, and we thought there would be a lot of places in the United States where new and emerging technologies would find new oil and gas reserves that people had overlooked. In the San Juan Basin an area out in Northwestern New Mexico there was an area that had been fully developed in the 1950s and we and two other companies, Burlington and Amoco, developed the idea and the technology to get a significant amount of gas out of the coal beds in shallow formations and we thought here right in the middle of a field that the majors are all over this field we're discovering huge new gas reserves. And so we have continually looked for new areas where new technology can go into old areas. The biggest one is figuring out how to get gas out of shale, one of the formations. We bought a company in 2002 that was beginning to do that, Mitchell Energy. We took their technology combined it with horizontal drilling and figured out a way to get gas out of economically out of shale formations in the barnett shale we were the first company to do that and now it is a huge revolution around the world that has created, for this country in particular, a lot of gas reserves that Devon and a lot of other companies are exploiting for the betterment of the whole country.

Wendy: So thinking about the economic situations that we've had, has Devon been affected, or how has Devon been affected by the recent economic, you might say meltdown or crisis.

Larry: Yeah, I mean the products that we sell natural gas in particular if there's not any industrial demand for natural gas, which there's not dramatically reduced because of this recession because the adverse policy is that Washington has been pursuing that are driving jobs outside the United States. It's affected everybody. There's no one in this country that's not affected one way or another by that. This will come to an end because we have always kept a strong balance sheet. It has not had much impact on us in terms of any real financial risk. We run the business fairly conservatively and have kept low overhead cost. So we're you know, we're affected but it's not it's painful but not drastic.

Wendy: So do you see it as a challenge? And where do you draw your strength to get through challenges like these?

Larry: It is a challenge and what we have historically done is run our business in such a way that we can prosper as well as in bad times as in good to maintain a long-term view so that we're not just looking at today's economics, but we're we're planning for the future and looking through this trough. Probably the most visible example, that is the large building we're building in Downtown which will be the largest building in the state. Not that we had that for some egotistical reason. We just have that many people and there's no place to put them. We're now scattered in six different buildings in downtown, highly inefficient, and we want to be able to get everybody in one building for all the efficiencies in communication that we can't do now. So rather than looking at the economy now and the employment needs that we have today, we have worked right through this recession and have planned for the future of and in many ways taking advantage of the recession because the building cost that we have to build a building that size are a lot less than they would be in a typical time and the time of building. It's a lot less because there are lots of people around the country that are available whether it's glass manufacturers that are sitting idle that are delighted to be able to get their workforce back to work by building glass, all kinds of local carpenters and electricians and what have you are delighted to have the job. So it's a it's our own little Oklahoma stimulus program that is done because we have the financial resources to do that if we want to and we try and have the vision of not being so captured by the the negative mood that the country is in right now, but to realize that all cycles are cycles and they go up and they go down and we won't stay in this down economy forever.

Wendy: Well, would you say that consolidation was your main motivation for the tower or what are some other things that went into it?

Larry: No not really consolidation. We really did all the consolidation between 1988 and 2005. By 2005 we had assembled all the technical expertise that we needed. We were in all the geographic areas that we wanted to be in we had the right balance between oil and natural gas so that if you look at our portfolio, our portfolio both of people as well as our portfolio of assets, it was pretty much what we wanted and so the need to go fill some glaring gap, and there used to be lots of gaps, the need to go fill some glaring gap was not there and it was more as we thought it would be it became more a task of just executing what we already have and developing and expanding on what we have. So the growth is just by looking at our business, the assets that we've assembled and how we plan to grow those in the future and look at the historic growth rates. We have in our various divisions and doing a very detailed study of how we think they're going to grow. In the future.

Wendy: So how did the whole idea of the tower and everything come about, what can you tell me a little bit about how…

Larry: Sure you know first it was painful, we started out in this building that we're now in with originally, I guess in 1982 with a floor and a half which was more than we needed and we could expand for another floor and a half and I thought well, that's more than we'll ever need. And the years go by and we then bought this building and I thought that was taken care of by the time you get scattered around downtown and a variety of buildings there's no building big enough to handle us even if we took over the entire building. So we really didn't have a choice except to go build something. I have always been an absolute firm believer in downtowns. You go around the country and it's hard to find, I think it's impossible to find any city that is growing that does not have a vibrant downtown and so we never considered anything other than downtown. We have hired a variety of two different firms to come in and look at downtown and tell us where we might build, recognizing that we had somewhat, you know blinded views of what downtown might look like and they both came up with the same location and we then hired architects and I originally assumed we'd build a couple of smaller buildings, but they they pointed out that it is cheaper to actually build one tall building rather than two buildings of the same size is cheaper to build one tall one and in terms of employee communication. It's a lot easier for people to communicate if they're in one building. It's just human nature than go down to the ground for walk across the street somewhere and go to another building. People communicate more and have greater interrelations with each other if they're in one building. So we figured out the number of square feet we needed and the number of people we needed and told the architects to go figure out the right size.

Wendy: And they figured out a very large size.

Larry: It turned out to be a lot of math, well, yeah, I mean once you know what the steps were first we determined that the employee headcount we wanted to target for we then had worked with another firm in planning our office space both here and in Houston and in Calgary that had a good understanding of how Devon worked and how our different workforces had worked and came up with the ideal floor size for our type of involvement. It's interesting. If you look at how that's evolved over time and you see it here in Oklahoma City when they built the first National Building in the original Liberty Tower they were very tiny little buildings up at the top 5,000 square feet you then look at the next generation of buildings, Leadership and the Kerr-McGee building and the First Oklahoma tower, those were all bigger floor plans, buildings that are getting built now or even larger floor plans. Lots of architectural reasons for that and so they came up with the ideal floor plate for Devon and then it's just a matter of math to get to the number of stories.

Wendy: And what is the floor plate for Devon?

Larry: Devon's got 28,000 square feet.

Wendy: Well, it looks big.

Larry: Yeah. Well a lot of people think that.

Wendy: How do you think the new building will impact downtown?

Larry: Well hopefully positively. One of the concepts we had in that is that we didn't want to just build an isolated building we wanted the building that was integrated into the community as much as we could and so it's going to have a glass rotunda that is wide open to the public with some restaurant space that is open to the public a park that's open to the public and that will provide a corridor through to the Myriad Gardens. We also worked with the city by realizing we're going to pay a lot of taxes to the city and county over time and let's work with the city to create a legal structure that will allow all of those taxes to be sent spent on improving downtown, one of the things that we realized as the outside experts came in and looked at our building and they looked at the downtown community was that parts of downtown were getting a little rundown and seedy, the streets were not properly designed a lot of the streets that were built in the 1970s were designed to get people in and out of town as fast as possible, one of the of the landscape planners or city planners said in any city on some streets you can look at it and see that the cars won and on other streets you look at that street and say that the pedestrians won, in a proper city there ought to be a balance there, but he said when I look at Oklahoma City the cars won on every single street and so the city agreed with that and was delighted to have the money to fix it and to fix the Myriad Gardens and to build up and redo some of the other downtown city parks that literally were built right during the Depression. They were WPA projects and have not been touched since then, so it's fun not only to be building our building but to be building on an expedited basis the entire downtown community.

Wendy: It’s a very exciting project.

Larry: For the city it is I mean, you talk to city planners and no one knows of a city that has been able to look at all of their streets and sidewalks at one time and have the money to go fix it all at one time with one central plan with one scheme for the landscaping and the benches it typically ends up being a hodgepodge. And ours is going to be a unique city which in turn I hope and expect will attract other businesses here. Particularly since it's all paid for. You see the problems that California and Michigan and other states are having with their huge debt to have a city like Oklahoma City that is going to have a brand new downtown. It’s all paid for. There's no debt involved. That's rather unusual.

Wendy: That is quite phenomenal. I think it's an exciting time to be here and seeing it all happen.

Larry: We will undoubtedly make some mistakes and someone in the next generation will fix those. Yes, just as we're fixing the ones that were made in the past.

Wendy: So thinking about Devon more as a company and not just the building, Devon always ranks consistently high in the top companies to work for lists and lots of people even that I know would love to work for Devon why are happy employees a priority for you?

Larry: Happy employees are good employees and who wants to work with a whole bunch of grumpy people, you know, it's a lot more fun to work with happy people and that's always been, you know a characteristic of Devon. We try real hard to have people that are fun to work with. You don't have to be grumpy and irritable. Life's too short to dread coming to work. Everyone in my view is entitled to look forward to coming to work and you know people that don't have that attitude that don't deal with each other honestly that engage in backbiting that engage in I'm going to try and advance myself by pulling you down. We try and ferret those people out and suggest they go somewhere else. To maintain that and exceedingly proud that Devon has been highly ranked in that Fortune 100. It wasn't something that we started out to do. We just did what seemed right. And I think one of the ways we achieve that is by trying to delegate down as much authority and responsibility so people know what they're supposed to do and then given the freedom and responsibility to go do it to further their own skill sets and their own career.

Wendy: It would be easy thinking of the success of Devon and yourself to relocate to one of the other cities, maybe Houston or other places. Why did you choose to stay here in Oklahoma City?

Larry: Well, we of course started here. And this is home, which is probably the simplest answer. Although I must say if you looked at Oklahoma City in how it was in that 1989, 90, 91 after the bust that we had this was a pretty broken down beat up city and I give tremendous credit to Ron Norick in the MAPS program, historic wisdom, historic vision to go do what he did because if Oklahoma City had stayed where it was in that early period in the early 1990s, we would not have been able to attract people here from other parts of the world and we would have been forced to move to Houston and you can just see the evolution, the attractiveness of Oklahoma City change over time when 10 or 15 years ago it was really hard work you know, the 1995 to 2000 time frame. It was really hard work to persuade someone to move to Oklahoma City because the city, not just the downtown but the entire city was pretty beat up. The Great Depression we had in the mid-80s on banks on real estate on oil and gas had taken its toll not only on jobs, but I think on people's psyche. So, you know, the way they felt, their attitude, we're a pretty beat up group of people. That was a tough time. But with the progress of MAPS, that evolution has been dramatic where today with all the success we've had with the series of MAPS the success the Devon and others have had in a variety of industries and building this up. It's no problem at all to get someone to seriously look at Oklahoma City and you can see that reflected not only me selfishly talking about Devon, but getting Boeing to move over a variety of high paid people from Los Angeles here, you just see that ratified and time and time again, and I think what Devon is doing both the building that we're building and the center that we're building will be a, you know, a stake in the ground that this is a company that's put a lot of money into this is a great place to be and the spin off money for improving downtown. What other what Clay Bennett has done and bringing the Thunder basketball team here that you go down a long list of people, the river, which who would of ever dreamt that we'd have a river that would have a rowing events on it, where people from either coast would come and praise Oklahoma City as a great place to do world-class rowing events. Ten years ago we did not have a river, just incredible, incredible success we've had in that that momentum just builds on itself.

Wendy: And now the new Devon Tower at the river.

Larry: That with the boathouse, with OCU that we’re delighted to team up with OCU and build that boathouse. Randall is in a very creative job and the architecture for that as he always does. So that's fun too.

Wendy: Well, we've mentioned a lot of things that Devon is doing in the city. Do you have any other future ideas or things that you'd like to see happen here in the city? Maybe not even just downtown but as a whole.

Larry: The next step, I mean we first got to have to get our building built. We're only on the 18th floor today. So we got a long way to go, two years of work to get that done which is where my focus is going to be, but in terms of the city we have Devon will create a lot of vacant space in class A building space around town and you can characterize that in one or two ways. If you're a pessimist you can say that 800 or whatever, it is a thousand square feet is going to be a great depressant on real estate values and land values in downtown for a long time to come, or you can say it is a great opportunity for the city to attract businesses from suburban Oklahoma City, from elsewhere in Oklahoma, from anywhere around the country because if you wanted to move into Oklahoma City today there is no class A space of any size that's available. You might find a little, you know, five-person office somewhere, but if you wanted to move downtown today, there is no class A space available of any scale and scope and you can see through the chamber as they talk to people who are now officed in Ohio or Michigan or California or wherever that are looking for a more pleasant place to work they come here and ask what's available in the answer is really nothing but we could build you a building. Well that takes a long time and you know, they'll say I don't have that time. I'll go look at other cities to see what's available. So we don't have any inventory to sell to someone when Devon vacates that space and as we vacate and of course, we as a landowner and the other landowners will have had four year notice that this is coming down the pike and that's plenty of time for us all to go work on recruiting other companies to relocate downtown. And with the momentum we've created with the momentum in Bricktown with redoing all the streets and sidewalks and the various MAPS programs that rebuilt the Cox Convention Center or most of it and built the Ford Center, you know, there's a lot of momentum there. Of course I fall into the latter camp. I think the city will be successful that Devon and other landowners in the city will be successful in attracting other businesses here which will create more employment and opportunity for everybody.

Wendy: Exactly. So then on a little more personal note. Are you married, I know you're married. But why don't you tell me a little bit about your wife and your children and your family.

Larry: I am married to my wife Polly who also is from McAlester, Oklahoma, in fact her mother and my mother were in each other's wedding back in small-town McAlester. We did not know that for about until we've been dating for about a year. That didn't come out. I guess they didn't want us to know how closely associated they were. But with the closeness of that they were delighted when we got married, two children, son and daughter, my son Tyler and my daughter Sally both happen to live in Richmond, Virginia for different reasons. No one went to school there, no relatives there. They just have ended up there I have three grandchildren and two girls and one boy and another one on the way.

Wendy: Excellent, so Larry when you are not busy running Devon what do you do for fun? You have any recreation or hobbies that you…

Larry: I love to travel. I love to go hiking. We've had a plan the last several years to find the highest mountain in some state and go climb it, which we skipped last year, but I'm going to do 2 next year. So I'll make up for that but I know enjoy the outdoors and enjoy going hiking. I love to travel. Seeing different sites.

Wendy: How has your life been different than you might have imagined it to be? Obviously you didn't...

Larry: Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I really imagined it a whole lot. I think as a youngster I was sort of very short-term focused on what I was going to do for the next couple of years. You know the thought of being married and you know moving back to Oklahoma City were sort of novel ideas that are for a while, sort of take each year as it comes. I certainly did not imagine that Devon would ever be this big and successful that we would have started from a tiny little small as you can get and end up with a company that is one of the largest independent in the country, independent oil on gas producers in the country, larger and many ways than other better known companies. Today, We're larger than Phillips Petroleum was when they merged with Conoco. We have more oil and gas reserves than Texaco did when it merged with Chevron. So we've created a very narrowly focused but big successful business with close to 5,000 employees. I never ever dreamed that it's sort of, you know, each year you look at a stretch goal for what you might accomplish next year consistent with the plan. The plan, the direction we had in mind we clearly had a very well thought out focus and direction that we intended to head but we never dreamed to get this big and successful.

Wendy: So what lessons has your work life taught you?

Larry: I guess part of it would be what I just said, is having you know, thinking out what you're good at, what business you're good at and looking strategically at what assets you have and you don't have both in terms of people and in terms of harder assets, and if your goal is to take advantage of opportunities in North America, where don't you have the assets of people and then how am I going to go get them? And just do that one year at a time. You know you sometimes hear young people saying well, I want to accomplish this by the time I'm 30, good luck. That happens to some people but it doesn't happen in the real world very often, you know, you may be a movie star or someone that can do that. But in the real world, it is having a very long term vision of what you want to do and sticking to it. I mean if you look at our business plan of what we're doing today of figuring out how to discover and produce oil and gas reserves, it was exactly the same in 1971 when we only owned five wells. That hasn’t changed one iota. Where we do it and how we do it, in what technology we do that evolves, but the basic business plan narrowly defined in terms of what business were in sticking to that and not getting into somebody else's business, paying close attention to people and treating them correctly and creating an environment in which you'd like to work and assuming they like to work in the same kind of environment. One of the things that I really have, I used to think when I was in my 30s that all companies had the same culture but as over the years, over the decades as we've bought different companies I've learned that different companies really do have different cultures and it really does matter and I sometimes hear a young person in college who describes a variety of companies that he's interested in whether it's a small tiny 10-person company, whether it's a company like Devon, whether it's a major integrated company,or a variety of independent’s that have significantly different cultures not necessarily good or bad. You know, it's sort of different strokes for different folks, but not really understanding the different cultures that those companies have and therefore not really understanding how they would like to work and thinking through whether or not their own skill sets and what they would like to do fit that culture. Some people fit in a 10-person company and should always stay there and some people would never be comfortable there.

Wendy: So Larry, how would you like to be remembered?

Larry: Oh my goodness. I've given that no thought. I guess in a favorable way, but that sounds like death and I haven't thought about that.

Wendy: Well,

Larry: So I would guess in a favorable way. I will leave it at that.

Wendy: Is there anything that you'd like to talk about that maybe I didn't ask you or that you'd like to add at this point? Whether it be on a personal note with your family or something to do with your business history.

Larry: It’s having a peaceful family relationship both with my parents being blessed by having a father-son relationship in the early days where we got along every day all day long, was certainly a blessing and it took two personalities to do that and having a good family relationship with my wife and children has allowed me to be more focused on getting Devon going and not being diverted by a lot of unproductive work in an unpleasant or difficult family situation. Obviously it's kind of hard to be dealing with some impossible family situation and stay focused during your 8 or 10 or whatever hours at the office. So that's been a blessing.

Wendy: Well, that's all I have. Thank you so much,

Larry: Thank you.