Published: November 20, 2008 12:01 am            

’41 buzz: Enid was to get a flying field

The Hotel Youngblood Coffee Shop was abuzz on a bright summer morning in 1941. All the buzzing was about the news it seemed a certainty Enid would get an Army Air Corps flying field.

A group of local “movers and shakers” had been working diligently for months to make it possible. We weren’t in World War II yet, but it appeared inevitable we would be, and six months later, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we were.

The group of local men who had been working to land the base for Enid included Martin Garber, Mayor Charles Walker, Bruce Wallace, Lee Cromwell, Ray E. Williams, George Athey, W.L. Stephenson and Joe Champlin.

The proposed location of the air base was described as “ideal.” It would be adjacent to the Rock Island railroad tracks and just west of U.S. 81 on the south side of Enid. The farms and land selected for the base belonged to Earnest Baker, Lee Kisner, Francis Richards and Bill Kisner.

None of the four were anxious to sell their land but agreed to the terms of the sale when they were assured it would become a military base.

By August, work was under way on what eventually would be named Vance Air Force Base. In September, construction crews were laying water lines to the site and concrete had been poured for runways and aircraft parking ramps.

The first troops to be stationed at Enid Army Basic Flying School arrived in November 1941 in a 100-truck convoy from Randolph Field in San Antonio. There were 825 troops, and 142 of them made the trip in private cars.

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April 1941: It was a time when the nation was just beginning to slowly emerge from the cold, grey days of the Great Depression.

The war in Europe already was under way, and it seemed almost certain the U.S. eventually would enter the fighting on the side of Britain and France. Oilmen, possibly anticipating an increased demand for motor fuel, had begun poking their drills into the earth here and there around northwest Oklahoma.

Sometimes they were successful, and the oil and natural gas that spewed from the earth lifted a lot of farmers out of poverty and bought them a place on Easy Street, right next door to some of their equally lucky neighbors.

Everyone wanted an oil well — or two — “down on the south 80,” and it didn’t take some farmers very long to learn the ways and the lingo, and sometimes the chicanery, of the oil patch.

It was the fear of being duped that drove off one farmer who lived west of Enid in 1941. An oil company was drilling a well on his place. It was contracted to go to 3,000 feet.

As the farmer explained, “It was a mystery to me why they did not put a true log out. At about 2,700 feet they had gas that forced water over the tubing for two or three days, and about a week later I went by the well and saw the driller looking at the bailer. There was oil all over the platform and cellar.

“Any report?” I asked.

“No report,” he answered.

“You had oil last night,” I said. “Yes,” he answered, “we find pockets, but I don’t look for any well unless it is drilled to 4,000 feet.”

“I went to Oklahoma City for the log, but it showed nothing.

“I met the driller, and said, that log is not true.

“He answered, You saw the oil and gas we had.

“I thought the company at Tulsa might have a true log, so I went to their office and asked for it. The man looked it up and said it was the same as the Oklahoma City log.” He added, “I don’t know why we can’t get a well. We came pretty near drilling another well, but we had so much grief and trouble with the farmer that we quit.”

Ouch!

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April 1941: Flash!! Sleepy snakes postpone hunt. The annual Okeene rattlesnake hunt was delayed because of a late spring and the fact the hibernating snakes would not be out of their dens until the next month.



Brown is a former managing editor of the Enid Morning News.