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JUST
MISSING ELVIS
by
George Lester |  |
I
had not seen such
a thick fog before. In fact, I haven’t seen one like it in all the years since.
For some reason I cannot recall, I was home with only my friend, Jesse, keeping
me company while my parents and my brother were 80 miles away on a fishing trip
in Louisiana.
It was early evening and we were drinking coffee and playing
cards to break the monotony of staring at the wall. After too many hands of draw
poker to remember and a couple pots of coffee we heard a car drive up. Our house
was at the end of a narrow road hidden way back in the woods so we knew it had
to be someone who didn’t arrive there by accident. When we went outside to investigate
neither of us recognized the car. Two men got out and introduced themselves. They
represented an oil exploration company and wanted to see my father. We had no
telephone so this was the only way they could get in touch with us. After telling
them where he was we invited them in to have a cup of coffee and to rest after
driving in that pea soup fog. One of the men explained that his company wanted
to build an old “standard” drilling rig near Tupelo, Mississippi and as far as
they knew my father, J.P. Lester, Sr, was the only man in this part of the country
who knew how to do it. Dad had built hundreds of them when he was a rig-building
contractor in the west Texas oil fields more than a decade earlier. To explain,
a standard rig is the kind you would see in the history books with a long shed
extending from the side of the derrick. It was all made of wood and nails long
before the advent of prefabricated steel rigs. Thus, the craft of building standard
drilling rigs had died in the name of progress.
I’m still not sure why
they wanted a standard drilling rig built but the best I can remember is that
it had something to do with the ready supply of pine timber on the lease that
could be milled for the project. I tried to give them directions but it soon became
obvious that they would never find the fishing camp. I told them I had been there
many times because my Uncle owned the place and I would be happy to ride along
and show them the way. They were delighted at my offer because their boss was
not the type to accept excuses for a delay in getting the ball rolling.
Jesse
and I were glad to get out of the house and enjoy a little adventure. I saw fog
roll in off the ocean in San Diego that was so thick I got lost in the middle
of the parade ground and it took me an hour to find my barracks. The fog that
night in east Texas was thicker. We thought that any minute we would get through
it but it stayed with us the entire 80-mile trip to the fishing camp. When we
finally pulled up to the cabin it was in the wee small hours and everyone was
fast asleep. My father was his usual cheerful self and cordially greeted the two
visitors in spite of their untimely arrival. He was thrilled to have the chance
to build one more standard rig.
We
didn’t get the chance to go visit him while he was in Tupelo but he kept us informed
through his letters about how things were going. I believe those few weeks building
that standard rig were the happiest days of his life. Upon returning home he kept
us enthralled with stories of how he supervised the cutting of the trees, sending
them to the sawmill, using the lumber to build the derrick and then setting up
the machinery to run the whole thing. I’m pretty sure the year was 1939. Later,
I found out that Elvis Presley’s family was living in Tupelo at that time. He
was about four years old. Dad didn’t live long enough to experience the Elvis
phenomenon but if he had I’m sure he would have been sorry he missed him. |
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