L. A. LEONARD
The following bio was taken from page 284 of the book entitled “Rusk County History” compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.
Transcribed by Shirley Koym
Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Cemeteries of Texas
I was born near Wenthworth, Missouri. My mother was Eva May Hooker. Grandpa was a first cousin to General Joseph Hooker; my father was William Christon Leonard. I was told both families were traced back to the Mayflower.
We moved to the oilfield in Oilton, Oklahoma when I was eight years old. I married Oleta Prather of Welch, Oklahoma in 1928 and we had two daughters, Eva May Dennison of Henderson and Jewel Dean Wooley of New London. Their mother died of tuberculosis in Phoenix, Arizona in 1942. I took the disease, carried the girls to my sister in Oklahoma, then went to Talahina, Oklahoma State Hospital to die. They told me if I stayed in bed that I might live for three years. I had no desire to live – I had bedsores on my hip; I saw roaches in the food; I stopped eating; I lost weight to below eighty pounds. I think I started to die one day and had a vision. Oleta and I walked arm in arm down to a dry wash with stepping-stones across it. She started across first; then I saw her. She had white hair down to her waist; she seemed taller and had the most beautiful body I will ever see. She stopped halfway across and motioned me to go back. She went across to my mother, who was sitting on a log, and my mother got up and took Oleta by the arm. I stood and watched them out of sight over a hill, hoping they would look back. They didn’t.
I was back in bed; my stomach felt like it was eating me up. Like I said, what we have to do – we do. I had to get well. I ate anything I could get, without tasting or looking, and in eleven months I was discharged as an arrested case. One lung and a fourth of the other were gone.
Mattie Jo Lawery and I were married in 1944. She had three children by a former marriage to W. C. Hogan. Her children are Walter Claud Hogan, Jr. of Tyler, Helen Dorase Sykes of Paris, Tennessee, and Norma Elene Arnold of Longview, Texas.
Mattie was born at McAlester, Oklahoma. Her mother was Florence Milley Ellis and her father was John Lawery. He immigrated from England. He was killed in a coal mine explosion when she was very young. Her mother then married Delaney Turner, who was a good parent. Mattie and W. C. Hogan had separated when the children were young. Though she had no special training, she worked at many jobs to raise her family. During World War II she operated a press at the Navy Depot, making ammunition.
We accidentally immigrated to Texas. I spent a short time at Kilgore in the 1930’s. I could work a day or two a week at home and make almost as much and there, in a pinch, I also had credit.
In 1958, Mattie and I came to Tyler to spend Christmas with our daughter and family, the Billy M. Arnolds. He was a geologist for the Gulf Oil Company. I worked for Plas Dawson at Turnertown and we lived near the Gaston School. The next spring we went back home to Bowlegs, Oklahoma, where a friend and I started a battery shop. We watched a fellow build batteries in a shop one day for a couple of hours to get our training, but our first batteries were a mess! Junk batteries were cheap and our customers kept bringing them back, and we kept giving them another. It wasn’t long until we were doing a fairly good job and we got a contract with a contractor at Tinker Field repairing airplane batteries.
I got a call from Mr. Arnold asking me to come to Texas to supervise the reentry of a dry hole in the Chalk Hill area where he and some other people had a lease. They thought it would make a well. They offered a new pickup, expenses, salary, and an interest in the well; and I had done that kind of work.
The transmission had gone out of my car, but I had come by a 1928 Chevrolet that ran good, so we came to Texas in it. It was a long time before I got even a second hand pickup.
The drillers had $5,000 and three days to start work on the well. I hired a rig, and they got some of it on the location to hold the lease. After rigging up, we got on bottom and cemented in forty-eight hours. The well pattenceled over three million, but I got nothing but expenses. We made one failure, had one good oil well reentry, and drilled two gas wells. I still got nothing but expenses, so I quit.
Three partners – a geologist, a lawyer, and a promoter – and I started a company. The field was my job. Our first well was the Orr Tipps at Brachfield. It blew out all the way down. I was sixty days with catnaps in the car.
We made a dual completion, pattenceled the Fourth of July, 1960 – The Travis Peak one and one-fourth million, Hill three and one-half million. I put a heater on each end of the line because we had trouble with freezing that winter. Ours never froze. They pulled $97,000 worth of products from the well in eight months. It was shut down in nearly two years – over produced.
We made eight more wells but had no market for most of them as gas was only ˝ 150.00 a million then. The company got in trouble because the bills weren’t paid. We went into receivership and the receiver sold the wells. I moved into our lake house on Lake Striker.
I started looking after some wells, and we bought a home at 300 Morningside, stayed there until it was paid out, then bought at 1106 West Main, and rented 300 Morningside. I went to work for Craftmade Homes.
We got my daughter’s baby who was just about a year old. I worried about starting with a young baby after sixty. I can see now if it had not been for having Debra, we would probably both be dead by now. But there is a thing about humans: we do anything we think we have to do – if it’s walking on the moon or living past one hundred. Mattie and I both are living on borrowed time. Debra Jo’s parents have their lives straightened out now and they live here in Henderson. Debra lives with them, but she is here about as much as there.
I retired, then took a guard job for Pinkerton at Kilgore, stayed there one winter, and went to work for Riddle Oil Company, and retired again the first of 1981.
Mattie and I both enjoy hobbies. Her hobbies are flowerbeds and the garden. She is no less than an expert at tatting, crocheting, knitting and punch work. My hobbies are gardening and writing poetry. I love to prospect and invent things. I never had backing to produce or patent anything, but now and then I see something put on the market that I dreamed up years ago. For years I have had two that are among the greatest! One is a method of generating electricity from almost nothing. Electric bills could be less than poll tax and there would be no pollution. The other is a car that will get up to one thousand miles a gallon with almost no pollution. These are not pipe dreams. They are so simple a fool could see that there is no way they could fail!
Submitted by L. A. Leonard