Huntington oil heritage spans a century

JERRY PERSON

During the nearly 100 years of our city’s history. oil has been an

integral part of our community in some way or another.

If we could bring back the oilmen of Huntington’s past, I wonder

what they would think of the price of a barrel of crude oil selling

on the market at $60 a barrel?

We have so many newcomers arriving here that our oil heritage is

fast being forgotten.

We forget that the black gold financed our schools and town

projects for years.

This week, we’re going to look back at how oil has touched the

lives of four men of our community.

Our first oilman got into black gold by a freak accident.

In 1923, the McKeon Drilling Company was drilling a well on the

10-acre farm of George W. Arnold out near the old Holly Sugar factory

on Main Street.

At this time, our oil boom was in full swing and people were

drilling for oil everywhere around us and some were getting rich off

the black gold, but not Arnold.

McKeon drilled down 3,600 feet on the Arnold farm, but the well

came up dry and so was abandoned and regarded as a failure in an area

where other oil wells were producing oil.

Over the next two years, the wooden derrick was removed and only

the oil casing remained.

In February of 1925, P.O. Deaner made arrangements with Arnold to

salvage some of that old oil casing.

An explosive was lowered 1,000 feet into the well to break off a

section of the 10-inch casing.

Just after the explosion, oil began to flow to the top of the

casing and continued to flow to the surprise of farmer Arnold.

What may have happened in 1923 was that the mud pumped down the

well to cool the drill bit clogged the shaft and sealed the oil and

that the explosion two years later released the oil -- and I hope

made our farmer a few dollars, too.

For over 50 years, Standard Oil Company produced much of our

city’s wealth in black gold.

The company produced much of that oil output and the

responsibility for seeing that everything ran smoothly rested on

production foreman Earl H. Wilson.

Wilson’s family was living in Comanche, Okla., when on April 24,

1902, Earl was born.

Shortly thereafter, the Wilson family moved to Sunset, Texas, and

by 1903 moved to California and settled in Los Angeles.

For the next 13 years Earl attended schools in Los Angeles,

Alhambra and in Raisin City.

When Wilson was 15, the family moved to the oil rich city of

Coalinga where Earl got a job working for the Pacific Oil Company.

But after six months Earl left Pacific and went to work for

Standard Oil of California where he worked his way up from pumper,

gang pusher, tool dresser for cables to assistant production foreman.

On March 31, 1921, he married Louise West in a ceremony in Fresno.

In 1923, their first son Kenneth was born, followed in 1927 by

their second son James.

Wilson moved to Huntington Beach and the family lived in the old

Standard Oil camp at Goldenwest Street and Orange Avenue.

In August of 1956, Wilson had become the production foreman for

the company’s Huntington Beach operations.

With so much oil sitting in the storage tanks of the refiners,

someone needed to transport it to market and that is where Louis

Cooley came in.

Louis Gail Cooley was born on February 9, 1905 in Toledo, Ohio,

where he would live for most of his teen years.

In the 1920s, Cooley came to California to live and his first job

was driving a vegetable truck from Huntington Beach to San Diego.

But in 1929, he took a job as a driver of an oil truck for

Huntington Beach oilman Frank King.

Soon afterwards Cooley purchased his own little 30-barrel truck.

On October 16, 1937 he married Anna Beaudette at the San Juan

Capistrano Mission Church.

The next year, he signed with the McCallen Refinery to transport

the refinery’s oil output to market.

From his one little oil truck, Cooley would in the next 10 years

expand to five trucks before unexpectedly passing away on November

19, 1948.

From well to refinery to transporting to market, there is still

one more link to the oil chain and that is it needs to be sold at the

neighborhood service station and that is where our last oilman comes

in.

I’ll bet few remember that we had a gas station right next to the

entrance to our world-famous Huntington pier where Pier Plaza is

today.

Standard Oil owned this station and during its lifetime one of

those operators was Paul Eugene Nicholson.

In Hume, Ill., on October 30, 1914, Nicholson was born, and for

most of his life would remain in that area until just after World War

II ended and Nicholson moved to Huntington Beach.

During his time in Huntington, Nicholson operated the service

station at Main and PCH before operating his own Chevron station at

Warner and Bristol in Santa Ana.

In 1957, his wife Mary gave birth to a baby girl, Nikki Jean, and

in 1963 the Nicholson family moved to Modesto to

live, where Nicholson ran a neighborhood grocery

store.

It was on February 14, 1967 that Nicholson quietly passed away and

in that same year Standard Oil pulled down Nicholson’s old gas

station at the pier.

So, you can see how the lives of these four men were connected by

Huntington’s black gold and over the years oil has come in contact

with the lives of countless more of our residents in one way or

another.

* JERRY PERSON is a local historian and longtime Huntington Beach

resident. If you have ideas for future columns, write him at P.O. Box

7182, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.