Depending on who you talked to, James Jackson was either a con man, a genius, a degenerate gambler, a reincarnated shaman from ages past, or some combination of all four. “Jim”, as his friends and detractors called him, was a strange man. He was a self-educated thinker who was absolutely convinced that he was possessed of talents that approached the supernatural.
He may have been right: in the history of American enterprise there was no one quite like Jim Jackson. His overall demeanor and presentation to all who interacted with him was that of a self-styled cowboy; he wore ostrich-leather boots, always had a Marlboro cigarette in his mouth, and owned a ten gallon hat in every color in the catalog, and spoke with a drawl so thick that he could easily be mistaken for a man out of time. This man, who came to embody every myth of the western oilman and whose exploits would someday captivate a nation, had not stepped foot in Texas until his twentieth birthday. He never made a dime from oil.
Jim was born in Boston on July 16th, 1945 at the exact instant that the first atomic bomb was detonated two thousand miles away in New Mexico. He was the youngest of four children to Walter and Evelyn Jackson; Evelyn was a classically-trained stage actress who came from old money tied up in real estate in the northeast. Walter was a prolific and brilliant chemist who directed a research group for Bell Telephone Laboratories. During the war, Walter’s team was instrumental in developing the membranes necessary for the gas-diffusion method of enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project. Walter moved his family from Boston to San Jose, California in 1949 to partner with one of his former colleagues in founding a new applied science company. This new venture, Allied Micromaterials Corporation, would become one of the pioneering institutions in the development of semiconductors and later transistors. Contacts Walter had maintained in the defense department led to Allied receiving a contract to manufacture guidance systems for a new range of ICBM missiles, and by the middle of the 1950s, Walter was a very wealthy man.
As a boy, Jim was bright but had no patience for school. On several occasions he was found cutting class to wander along a creek that ran through the family’s estate. The land had been an apricot orchard before being purchased by his father, and a young Jim spent every spare minute he could find playing cowboy in the pastoral grove of trees. His patient mother indulged his fantasies and sent him to dude ranches and paid for horse riding lessons in the hopes it might instill a sense of discipline. By Jim’s sixteenth birthday he was showing signs of restlessness in the rapidly-urbanizing Californian environment, and entered into frequent arguments with his exasperated father. When he told Walter that he had no interest in attending college, and instead mentioned the then-escalating conflict in Vietnam, his father shouted him down. Angry but determined, a seventeen year old Jim walked to an army recruitment station the very next morning. It was of no use, however; through Walter’s many ties to the U.S. defense industry, it was essentially guaranteed that Jim would never see combat. For the young man who yearned to see the world and longed for an adventure to break the monotony of his sheltered upbringing, this was the final straw.
On a spring day in 1962, James Jackson packed a small bag and left home. From San Jose he took a train to Carson City, Nevada with the intent of finding work at one of the horse ranches from his childhood. When he arrived, a new subdivision had taken its place, with any traces of the ranches long gone. For two months he washed dishes in a casino buffet in Reno to pay for accrued gambling debts. From Nevada he hitchhiked to Idaho where he cut onions for 80¢ a day until the winter season forced him to move on. For three years he stumbled from job to job, lumberjacking in Washington state, fitting irrigation pipe in Arizona, welding in Alaska, mining Molybdenum in Colorado, and eventually working as a roughneck in an oilfield outside of Odessa, Texas. These three years had hardened young Jim and for the first time he felt at home among the wildcatters and oilmen in the dust and sun of west Texas. The challenge of the work invigorated him. The harsh conditions of the desert inspired him. The boom-bust cycle of the petroleum industry, however, did little to help secure the human needs of food and shelter. The men who made the real money on the drilling sites, Jim had noticed, were the geologists; those who only found the oil and didn’t stick around to do the hard work of pulling it out of the ground. Jim was charismatic, and it wasn’t long before he found work as an assistant for a local surveying office and began to learn the fine art of finding things underground. (edited)
He was almost ready to settle down when he received a call from home: His father had suffered an intracranial aneurysm and had died before emergency medical treatment could be administered. For the first time in years, he went home. In the days after Walters funeral, Jim was forced to confront his future. Jim was twenty, with little occupational prospects, but now had a twenty-five thousand dollar inheritance; enough in 1965 to get into nearly any business he wanted. He knew he still didn’t have the patience for college, and he had already figuratively “gone west.” Out of either a feeling of guilt, or a desire to not cause any further trouble to his family in California, he returned to Texas with the goal of finally striking out on his own.
By 1973, James Jackson was a man who, at least on the surface, betrayed no insecurities about his expertise. He exuded confidence and, after a few lucky breaks locating petroleum where none was thought to have existed, was billed as a “guru of the underground”. A small office was leased in Midland, a clerk and eventually a geologist, a few engineers and surveyors were hired. For a short time it was a mundane but generally honest living. What he lacked in experience as the chief of the small firm he more than made up for in the energy and zeal he brought to every job he undertook. He detested office work and would personally show up to every site, rain or shine, with the enthusiasm and showmanship of a circus ringmaster.
The job for Dale Whitmer was no exception.
