TRAVELS IN PURGATORY
Memoir Of An Itinerant Petrophysicist

This is a memoir of my life and times, the story of a long career in science and technology that might never have occurred. I was born in the year 80 BC (Before Covid) and I have been legally blind for more than half my long life. My travels and career may be an inspiration to others with poor vision or some other disability. If you start early, amd put in the effort, amazing things can happen.

My brother tells me a memoir should be a series of stories about life, but not in chronological order. To satisfy him, I have placed the last part at the beginning, but after that the story is mostly in order of occurance with minor flashbacks to refresh my memory and yours - there are just too many network connections and world events that could not be explained any other way.

So scroll on down and see how it all happened. If you remember it differently or just want to say hello, send me an email  .

Living in happy valley
In most democracies, the "ayes" usually have it. In my case, the "eyes" have had it, so my consulting and teaching gigs ended June 2016. Retirement is great -- just as much work but fewer deadlines, less paperwork, no data quality quagmires (unless you count fake news).

After 40 years living on my ranch near Rocky Mountain House, I moved to Valley Ridge on the west edge of Calgary. Here I manage to stay busy in a very attractive condo, surrounded by green space, trees, and flowers that I can imagine are always in full bloom.

If you don't see this sign, you are at the wrong door or building. The front entrance actually faces Valley Ridge Park NW. Confused? Talk to Calgary City Planning .==>

Back in the early 1960s,this area was known as Happy Valley. I much prefer this name to the current one as it recalls the fun and freedom of 60 years ago. Happy Valley was a privately owned recreation park and campground 12 miles west of Calgary. It had indoor swimming, go-karts, golf, trampolines, horse rentals, plus skating rinks and lighted ski hills for winter - great for a day trip on "days-off" (we worked 24 hours on call for 10 days followed by 3 days off in those days). Happy Valley died a slow death in the 1970s and several attempts to revive it failed. Then the City limits spilled over and the area was subdivided, turning into Valley Ridge  "Country Estates" in 1992-93.

      
 <== Valley Ridge Estates, my unit is at top left.

My condo is a block east of the old swimming pool. The current golf club house is a short block north and has a fine restaurant, patio, and garden with fountains and pools. The golf course circles the eastern half of the community, providing sanctuary for deer and rabbits. The odd moose and coyote wander through but are smart enough to return to the river before they show up on the TV News.
   
Below is part of the brochure for Happy Valley, from those 1960s "Happy Daze".

Happy Vallet in thw 1960x
 

FIRST FLIGHTS - PROLOGUE TO A LIFE WELL LIVED
Even as a boy, I had no significant peripheral vision, so I bumped into people and things, broke some bones, couldn't see in dim light. Until I was 16 years old, no one knew, so I thought everyone saw what I saw. I didn't know it at the time, but I was slowly going totally blind.

There is a fancy Latin name for the condition, but call it tunnel vision for easy reference. The tunnel gets smaller every year, so today, I can see about 4 characters at a time on this screen - pretty small tunnel! Like most young people, I was determined to succeed in life. At what, no one could tell and the outcome surprised everyone, especially me.

This history highlights my travels across time and territory. My jobs have taken me all over the world to many uncomfortable places – from the Arctic Islands at 55 below to the Arabian Desert at 130 above – from the swamps of Bangladesh and Viet Nam to  downtown Beijing, Kuwait City, Tripoli, Caracas, Jakarta, Bogota, and many of the major cities of the English speaking world.

Impending blindness is a hell of a motivator – get educated, get a job, see the world before it's too late. Every year had the same prognosis, “You’ll be blind in 5 years, so hurry, hurry!” So I hurried.

The result: 60 years as an engineer in the oil and gas industry, 49 of them as an independent petrophysical consultant, and a concurrent career as a rancher for 40 years. The technical work covered 36 countries and I visited at least 35 countries on assignments or vacations. 

More than 3000 students learned the art and science of petrophysics from my course presentations, and this continues today with my  petrophysics training website. I pioneered some cutting-edge innovation by  implementing software on desktop computer systems 5 years before the "invention" of the personal computer. A number of unique software solutions for petrophysical analysis followed, including research and development on rule-based expert systems, a form of Artificial Intelligence.

I am proud of two other achievements: the use of "computer-ready" math (instead of academic style) in my 1986 textbook, and the use of the Internet to publish its successor, which has been continuously expanded and updated since 1999. Training manuals and software documentation have been on the Internet for some time, but I was there  before the crowd. Computer-ready math has not yet caught on in the publishing realm, but it must come. Why continue to use archaic forms when, easier methods are available?

Living with a disability of any kind, including an "invisible" disability such as poor vision, is exhausting and isolating. To compete with the best in your chosen career is always a challenge. Add to that the difficulty of navigating a dangerous world or social situations without the benefit  of "body language" clues. Some hazards can be overcome with practice; sometimes you just give up in pure frustration. Try getting through an airport to the boarding lounge with your eyes firmly closed. I am a very independent cuss and relying on others for assistance was always hard on the ego. I once held a rather one-sided conversation with an airline hostess in Bangkok airport. She was a cardboard cutout at the entrance to the first class lounge. What did the other passengers think?

Lots of people helped me along the way; many are mentioned in this account. But the dreams were mine, and I made them happen. Dream your own dreams, then MAKE THEM HAPPEN ! 

There is much more to tell -- linked to the rest of the story are at the top of this page
 

First flights - In The Beginning
It says Ottawa on my passport, but I have no memory of those early days of World War II.

Canada's Parliament Building in Ottawa Ontario,
with tulips in full bloom

I do remember the move to Montreal in 1944, rationing books for meat, eggs, and other essentials, my grandfather's big black car, my brother's birthday in a massive November snowstorm.

Looking back on history, it is clear that we did not "win" this war. There were 30 million dead soldiers to remember and 41 million civilians killed. This was current events when I started school, not ancient, forgotten history.

True, the Americans, British, Canadians, Aussies, and a rag-tag of French resistance fighters liberated Western Europe. But the Russians won Eastern Europe and milked it dry for more than 40 years, until bad management and television brought about an anarchistic form of dependent independence to the satellite Republics. All the US got was a lend-lease bill for a few trillion dollars, a lot of distrust because of the Bomb,  and some strategically useful but economically worthless Pacific Island possessions, who would probably rather not be possessed.

My parents, sometime before 1940

The Canadians barely get a "thank-you", except from the Dutch, who rewarded us with tulip bulbs to decorate Ottawa's parkways.

 In high school, we all agonized over the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Cold War, and other precursors to a possible World War 3. The names have changed, but the crises continue to evolve and control by fear is now normal in many, many countries - what would George Orwell write if he was still alive today?

In the following 17 years, l learned the 3-R’s plus science and engineering in Montreal. It was then, and still is, a beautiful, cosmopolitan city with great entertainment and 400 years of living culture. Growing up here was an education in its own right, and spurred an interest in the rest of the world that has never left me.

I entered Grade 1 before my 5th birthday, four months after VE Day and just 3 weeks after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and VJ Day, The radio news told the story and even children were aware that something terrible had happened. The Bomb had been born and the world was forever changed.

Grade school and high school were easy. My homework was usually done before class was over. Coming first or second in scholastic achievement made me a "nerd" long before the word was invented.  Poor eyesight made me poor at sports, bringing some taunts from classmates.

In Cote Des Neiges, I worked on a horse-drawn milk cart on the way to grade school to earn streetcar fare for the homeward journey. This got me past the scary part of the trip.

There were no school buses and no lunch rooms, so we all had  to  make  the  trip 4 times a day. The streetcar fare was 1-2/3 cents (3 tickets for a nickel) - inflation over the past 70 years has multiplied this fare by more than 200 (a 20,000% increase), so if you think your present salary and savings will carry you into retirement, think again!

We rode brand-new PCC streetcars on Route 29 that ran to within a block of home and the school. The rest of f the MTC fleet was much older.

Family outings in the early days were mostly by streetcar: the open-air "Gold" cars gave a circle tour of the city, "White" cars to the end-of-line at Cartierville, "Green" cars to downtown for Christmas shopping, and Montreal and Southern Counties interurban cars to "see the country-side". These trips were cheap and could take all day, with a picnic lunch thrown in.

          

    
Gold, green, and white trolley cars of Montreal, circa 1940-50 (top row)
Montréal and Southern Counties car (bottom).

When gas rationing faded away, we toured the Montreal Harbour and all the train yards, giving rise to my permanent interest in transportation, especially full size and model trains. Today, you can't get within a mile of these places without a dozen security checks.

We had two weeks vacation each year at Grandpa's  cottage at Constance Bay just west of Ottawa. The 200 mile trip took all day on Highway 17 in the 1948 Austin A40. No heat, no power, no running water, and lots of Poison Ivy were easily overlooked. The beach was a great adventure, replete with bagpiper who brought all the kids home at sunset.

                   Constance Bay, near Ottawa

Our family moved west to Notre Dame de Grace in 1950. King George VI died in 1952 and Queen Elizabeth II became Canada's reigning monarch. One channel of black-and-white television arrived in Montreal that year, but our first set didn't arrive until 1954. Montreal West High School (now privately run Royal West Academy to avoid Quebec's draconian language law) was a healthy walk 4 times a day until our move into the new house in Montreal West itself. 

  
              Elizabeth Ballentyne School               Montreal West High School
(Couldn't find a picture of Cote Des Neiges School)

I still remember some of the teachers: Miss Matthews in Grade 8 (she wanted me to walk home to get dry clothes after arriving wet - it was still raining), Mr. Cummings (he kept a half-size model of a Guillotine in the room to intimidate troublemakers), Mr. Mann (a great and caring PT instructor), and Mr. Wolf (who thought we should be able to recognize any piece of music by merely listening to him tap out the rhythm with a pencil). Mr. Parsons, the Principal, was the stereotypical pompous-ass. If you have ever heard "Our Miss Brooks" on old-time radio, you know what these people were like.

As a young entrepreneur -- newspaper photo after selling the most chocolate bars for a charity event

To further test my courage as a businessman, I sold Regal Christmas cards, gifts, and wraps door-to-door for 3 years after school and weekends. Demonstrating samples, taking orders, cash, cheques, delivering the products to the right house at 11 - 13 years of age. All adults knew every kid for a mile in all direction so I was safe and accepted into their homes. 

In grade 8, all of us were given IQ and aptitude tests. My aptitude was to be a farmer or a clerk (Big surprise, I loved animals and I was good at math). I knew better – I was going to be an engineer. I did become an engineer and recently retired after 54 years practice engineering in the oil and gas industry.  But circumstances also made me a farmer and a clerk. I built a cattle ranch out of the bush at age 40 by choice and was forced to become a clerk to satisfy the tax collector. At least I had the aptitude if not the desire for bookkeeping.

My parents were great travelers. My brother and I had seen all the Canadian provinces and all the US states east of the Mississippi by the time I was 16. The Trans-Canada Highway was just a dream and the US Interstate network was mostly disconnected chunks of pavement in the middle of farmer’s fields. I loved those wide open spaces - there was no doubt that I would continue traveling.

During my high school years, I worked after school and summers at Montreal West Hardware to earn pocket money. Here, I learned how to repair almost anything - there were no throw-away gadgets in that era - and how to sell Christmas trees, lawn mowers, and small appliances. Ray Nettleship, two full-time clerks (Red and Ernie), and a handyman were generous to a fault. Stock in the basement included horse harness and ferrier equipment; the main floor was nails, screws, post-war appliances, and unbreakable dishes; upstairs was living quarters for the owner and his family.

After high school graduation, I took a week's vacation to visit family friends in Florida. Eastern Airlines ran Douglas DC-7B's at about 7000 feet, following the highways to aid navigation. I'm not sure what they did on rainy days - there was no weather radar.

My first air travel was on an Eastern Airlines DC-7B to Florida

For some reason, the crew though I was an Eastern employee and treated me extremely well, until my true age slipped out (a mere 16 years). After that, I was just another passenger. This was my first aircraft trip; since then, I've covered well over a million miles in dozens of countries on every type of aircraft imaginable.

Eastern was run by Eddie Rickenbacker, a famous World War 1 flying ace, who lost his CEO position in 1959, when he resisted the purchase of jet aircraft to replace the propeller driven ships. He thought jets were just a fad. Even with astronaut Frank Borman as CEO, Eastern faltered in the 1970's, was taken over and raided by Frank Lorenzo's Texas Air, and finally died in 1991. Failure to adapt to changing technology dooms businesses, politicians, and ordinary human endeavours - a lesson best learned early in life.

Getting my driver's license posed no problem although the examiner placed a restriction requiring me to have side-view mirrors due to my tunnel vision. Side-view mirrors were only available in the after-market -- no manufacturer offered them as a standard or optional accessory. When I moved to Alberta 4 years later, they had no such restriction, so they insisted I wear my glasses at all times, as if that would fix the tunnel somehow. I did install the mirrors on all my vehicles, including company cars, until they became standard on new vehicles.

With many family connections, I took a promotion from hardware to a summer job with the Bell Telephone Company while attending McGill University. The company had been around since 1880 and was a pretty solid bet. There was well over 100 years of Bell service in the family and I was expected to follow these hallowed footsteps. The first summer was pole inspection -  a real dream job in the country and elegant neighbourhoods, a little hot in the tight quarters of the older city center. Our foreman turned down an invitation on our behalf to Honey-Boo's pool, even when it looked like a great idea to the rest of us at noon on a 95 degree summer day.

The next 3 summers were spent in the Outside Plant Engineering department at Bell Telephone. The Bell System Practices (BSP's) were our bible and code book for everything. The only job I did that wasn't in the book was to move a concrete underground man-hole 6 feet to the west to get if off private property. Since every long distance wire between Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto went through this man-hole, it was a tricky maneuver. My final project was to design a cable TV system to be routed on existing telephone poles. It would be a contract job for Bell, but by the end of summer, it became clear that all my work was for nothing. The client could not raise the capital for the job, and it was done by others over the next couple of years - a disappointing end to my telephone career.

Unfortunately, I have forgotten the names of the engineers and technicians who taught me so much, save for one. Andy Berczy stayed alive in my memory for his escape from Hungary to Canada in 1956 as the Russians poured in to quell a populist rebellion. Andy mastered English and Canadian culture in a year and was my mentor for my first summer in Bell's Outside Plant Engineering Department. Thanks Andy.

Streetcars, later the new busses, and red maples meant back to school

Back to University signaled the end of the summer job as Trainee Engineer at the Bell, where the job, the people, and the freedom were far more interesting. So it was a bit of a melancholy moment to change from employee back to student, until the pressure of homework squeezed out all such thoughts.

Thanks to the financial and moral support of my parents, I graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 1962 from McGill University. I was merely 16 years old on entering and barely 21 when I graduated from the 5-year degree. I am quite ambivalent about my education at McGill. Transistors were invented in 1955, IBM and UNIVAC computers existed, and Sputnik was launched in 1957, but we learned nothing related to these. Wrong choice of electives, maybe. In 1959, I built transistorized stereo hi-fi amplifier and radio tuner kits from Harmon-Kardon and a couple of instruments from Heath Kit - my sole exposure to the post vacuum tube era.

The Macdonald Engineering Building was 49 years old in 1957 when I started University and is still in use today, with little change except for better lighting. The lab gear was turn-of-the-century (19th century, that is). It all seemed so primitive. I remember a Wheatstone bridge that Professor Wheatstone himself must have built in his garret.

 

The MacDonald Engineering Building circa 1958

The new McConnell Engineering Building opened in 1959, doubling the number of classrooms and labs. Strangely, I don't have any memories of this building except for the main two-story  theater-style lecture hall. I remember very little of the instructors. They were a cheerless lot with little interaction with individual students. My fault or theirs, I'll never know. 

Sixty years have passed; new buildings, modern facilities, and the trend toward a less formal teaching style have changed all that. The school has always ranked extremely well in surveys over the years. Even US customs and immigration people have heard of the place. I did learn advanced-math, physics, chemistry, mechanics, and thermodynamics, and these served me well in my later career in the oil industry. I could design an AC motor and a transformer back then -- not any more.

The well dressed student in 1961 at the Engineer's Ball. I designed the Tic-Tac-Toe machine using a telephone switch board device called a cross-bar switch to create the logic that allowed the machine to always win. I didn't appreciate it at the time but I had built my first computer, and possibly the first "video game".

Swimming at lunch hour was my escape while others went to the pubs on Peel and McTavish Streets - still too young to be legal, although that didn't always stop me from joining in.  

Graduation photo, Spring 1962

Job offers were plentiful – pulp mills, transformer design, power line design, telephone and cable television – the world was being wired in 1962. So I chose well logging. It had wires and electronics too, and a chance to travel.

“What is well logging?” my mother asked. “I have no idea.” I replied. “Where is it done?” she asked. I told her. She cried. Western Canada was uncivilized territory, at least in her opinion.

The FLQ had begun bombing mailboxes in Montreal in 1962, in support of Quebec separation. It was hard to say which place was less civilized.

!!   Keep scrolling down - there's 60+ years to go!

 

Learning The Trade - Schlumberger
I bought my father’s Austin A55 Mk II, filled it with prized possessions, and ended up in Red Deer, Alberta. For the next 11 years, I learned the oil business on the job in western Canada, from Schlumberger, Geophysical Services, Dome Petroleum, J. C. Sproule, and Digitech.

Lets start with Schlumberger, well logs, and travelling. This four year stint shaped the foundations of my entire career. No matter how hard I tried to get away from them, I was always drawn back to well logs.

My memory of the first field job is still vivid. It was a warm evening beside a wheat field near Eckville, Alberta, a few days before the summer solstice. The  northwest sky was still bright at 11:00 PM, beautiful shades of blues and purples. We rigged up the equipment in the derrick, ran the job, and started rigging down. A glance to the northeast and the sky was bright again with the tip of the sun just appearing -- it was 3:00 in the morning. Amazing! I was hooked and Alberta summers have been a joy ever since. Winters are a different story, but we will ignore that for now.

So, what is a well log? It is a record of the physical properties of rocks recorded versus depth in a well bore, using various electrical and radioactivity measuring devices. It is recorded on paper or film (and now as a digital data file) so that we can view the data values, analyze them using calculators or computer software, and generate numerical answers that help us understand the possible presence of oil or gas or minerals that might be economically extracted for use by all of us.

Each wiggly line on this image is a well log "curve" and the entire image is a portion of a complete "well log". Depths in the well bore run in the vertical direction on the image. Each log curve represents one particular physical property of the rocks.

Modern society could not survive without well logs - in a round-about way, they keep us warm, power our homes, and drive our trains, planes, and automobiles. Virtually every object we own contains some part made directly from oil -- lipstick, nylons, clothes, furniture, paint, plastic, not to mention the energy that it took to extract the materials needed to manufacture the item, and deliver it around the world to you.

I lived in 13 different small towns and ran well logs for Schlumberger from southwest Manitoba to Peel Plateau in the Yukon. I learned to work “on-call”, learned to drink on “days-off”, and drive 80,000 miles a year just to get to work. Passenger planes still had propellers and a mobile phone set weighed in at 50 pounds.

During one of the 3-day "days-off", I drove from Red Deer to Seattle over the Rogers Pass and return in the Austin to see the 1962 World's Fair. This was the year the Trans-Canada Highway was finally finished with real pavement. A piston blew at the top of the Rockies on the way home, leaving no choice but to continue homeward engulfed in a cloud of blue smoke maintained by five gallons of 80 weight gear lube "borrowed" from a construction site. Other 1962 milestones were Canada's first satellite (Alouette 1, using those new-fangled transistors), the first James Bond movie (Doctor No, starring Sean Connery), and the arrival of the Beatles in North America.

Each location manager treated me well; most would all have connections to my career later on. Log analysis was charts and monographs, or pencil and slide rule. There were no calculators, no spreadsheets,  no personal computers. While still stationed in Red Deer, I did vacation relief in Stettler and Drayton Valley. Both were one-truck stations with good crews and good TAS (telephone answering service -- no voice-mail yet).

Training was intensive, constant, and judged by exams. The Houston training session was serious stuff. The day I arrived it snowed and froze – the Canadians were not forgiven. I drove there and back as part of my vacation time, seeing a bunch of the Western states for the first, but not the last, time. On the way home, I followed snowplows from Farmington to Durango, where I spent a week watching the weather channel (it had great background music) studying for my field engineer exam. Barry McVicar was my examiner and he still tells tall tales about the event.

My 1964 Plymouth Fury

I was assigned a series of company cars with crapped-out steering and soggy suspensions, finally receiving a new Plymouth Fury in 1964. A company car was home - bedroom, kitchen, living room, and office while at the well sites. I drove over 80,000 miles in 1964, just to get to work.

Dave Dudley's "Six Days On The Road" was our theme song. Many nights on the road were spent listening to distant radio stations: country music on WSM Nashville, Studs Turkle telling stories on WGN Chicago, and a good variety of music on KFBK Sacramento. KFBK is now right-wing shock-jock-talk - what a waste of bandwidth. Local stations in that era went off the air at 11 or midnight and didn't reappear until 6 or 7 AM. I have been a fan of old-time radio (OTR) shows ever since and have a large collection -- helps to keep the old memory banks alive.

During 1963, I was a YESS man: Young, Eager, Single, and Stupid, so I did the relief engineer slot – 3 days on each truck in Oxbow, Weyburn, and Swift Current - 12 days on duty, on call 24 hours a day, then 3 days off. After 6 months of this, I ran the station in Lanigan, Saskatchewan for about 4 months. Then I had a truck of my own in Oxbow. 

The Cuban missile crisis, the beginnings of Viet Nam, and the Kennedy assassination took place during all this turmoil. Everyone old enough to remember knows exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot in November 1963. I was on the side of a lease road, in a company car, filling out a service order near Hazlet, Saskatchewan. Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins died earlier the same year in a plane crash. Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe had both committed suicide the previous year. Icons were disappearing quickly and it was a lonely period for a single man bouncing around in small towns.

A recent email reminds me to mention that we ran well logs for things other than oil and gas, namely potable water, potash, and helium. Some years later, I would also log wells for sulphur and copper. The helium well was logged in southwest Saskatchewan in 1964 and finally put on production in 2016! The potash industry got me transferred to Lanigan, SK.

This chart and related equations were the
end result of my first research project

There was nothing, I mean Nothing!, to do in Lanigan, so I did original research, in my spare time, on log analysis in the Saskatchewan potash beds. I was invited to visit the underground mine at Esterhazy to see how the real rocks compared to real logs. Seeing geology from the "inside" sharpened my appreciation for the variability of nature.

IBM 1620 computer in Regina, 1964

My first computer program was written in 1964 to calculate potash analysis from well log data. It ran on the IBM 1620 with 60K memory in Regina. This machine read the program and data from punched cards and printed results on a chain printer. There were no disk drives on this machine, although such things did exist - they were 2 feet in diameter and held 1 Megabyte, with access times that could reach 1 second per retrieval.

The results of this research were presented at the CIMM convention in Edmonton. Al Gorrell, of J. C. Sproule and Associates, listened to my practice presentation and taught me how to project to a small  audience in a large room. The conference was held at the Macdonald Hotel, amidst gobs of gilt and masses of mahogany, the tell-tale signs of the grand-chateau style hotels built by the Canadian railways (now owned by Fairmont Hotels, in turn owned by an Arab investment group).

My independent research surprised Schlumberger and they awarded me a “Salesman of the Year” scroll, even though I wasn’t a salesman. The results from this research ended up in four other technical papers and a several Schlumberger Interpretation Manuals.

 

Lesser Slave Lake at sunset, my home for the last 2 years of my Schlumberger career.

I was “a little too interested” in logging potash wells, so I was transferred to Valleyview in late 1964, then to Slave Lake. The town of Slave Lake suffered from a severe wildfire in 2011 and many businesses and homes were lost, including the fourplex I had lived in many years before (1965 and 1966).

From here, we covered a huge territory with few paved roads, stretching from Fort McMurray and Calling Lake to the East, Swan Hills and House Mountain to the South, Rainbow Lake and Zama to the North, and Fort St. John and Monkman Pass to the West. We flew in Beavers and single Otters, cruised the treetops in Bell 204s and G-4s, slogged through swamps and snow drifts on Nodwells and Bombardier Sno-Cats,  forded rivers and played daisy-chain at the end of D-8 Cats in the company car. Sometimes we even got to drive on pavement.

On one job near Calling Lake, we drove into a Hudson's Bay Company Trading Post. A little blond girl ran from us, screaming "Mommy, Mommy, White Men!" We were Strangers in a Strange Land.

My first job in northern Alberta was out of Swan Hills. I had driven from Oxbow in southeast Saskatchewan (about 700 miles) to find a hand-drawn map to the wellsite taped to the shop door. I was used to the square grid of township roads in the south and the map looked pretty square. But there are no grid-line roads in Swan Hills - I spent about three hours going in circles, finding my self back at the same confusing intersection in the middle of the wilderness. The route least traveled turned out to be the trail to the rig.

The church at Teepee Creek Alberta, 1965

The marriage license said Slave Lake married Red Deer in Teepee Creek – how much more Western Canadian could you get? Mother cried again. We honeymooned in Hawaii – it was a long way from Wabasca, Fort Nelson, and Fort McKay, the Purgatories of the day - and a whole lot warmer. The plane was a CP Air Super Constellation, with 4 noisy engines and 4  propellers.

Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, Royal Hawaiian Hotel

We drank Mai-Tai's on the catamaran cruise, circled Oahu in a passionate-pink Jeep, and dined at the Royal Hawaiian. It was pink, too.

I had been listening to "Hawaii Calls" on the radio every Sunday night for years in Montreal - Hawaii was like coming home!

Back at Slave Lake, my wife insisted on seeing a wireline logging job at a drilling rig, so we went out to a Big Indian rig, drilling "post-holes" near Calling Lake. The rig camp was atrocious and the cook had an oozing knife slash across his left eye. We declined breakfast and my wife slept in the car. She didn’t ask to go out again.

There were some exciting trips. On the way to Peel Plateau in the Yukon, we boarded the Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-3 passenger flight to Dawson City from Edmonton. The plane was painted Bright Orange, the stewardess (no one had heard of flight attendants in that era) was dressed in a gorgeous blue uniform, nylons, and high heels. Knowing we would soon be in mud-heaven, we were in our best grubbies. Our logging tools were tied to the floor in the aisle. Coffee, sandwiches, and cookies were served while carefully perched on the sonic log sonde. The stew later admitted she had been assigned to this flight because she had done something “bad”, but declined to specify exactly what this might have been.

Electronics in the logging unit in the pre-digital era circa 1964

Next day we transshipped everything to a Beaver and set off to find our skid unit at the rig. A Beaver can’t climb much with a full load, so my photos (now lost to posterity) show mountainsides only a few hundred yards from the cockpit window. It was summer but it snowed throughout the job. There were not enough bunks so I slept on a spare bed with no mattress in the meat locker – cold but quiet and no cigarette smoke.

On the way out, we had a two day layover in Dawson City, waiting for the orange bird – the geologist played the washboard and one-string laundry tub in the bar that night, although it never got dark, of course. During the day, we explored Robert Service's cabin, open and untended, but full of furniture and books. The hospital, abandoned since the Klondike Gold Rush, was collecting museum artifacts - railway locomotives, mining machinery, old cars.

The heart of a well logging job is the logging truck, which houses all the electronic equipment, the down hole tools, and the winch and cable connecting the tools to the surface recorder.

On a spring breakup job in Red Earth, we got stuck in the mud on the way out after the job and ran out of fuel and food and water. We were out of radio contact too. Someone claimed they sent a chopper to find us after we went missing, but we never saw it. On the second night the rig’s fuel truck showed up inbound on the frost and filled us up. We drove out, two days late and suffering dehydration from drinking swamp water. We got a lecture from the boss, who was wearing a sport jacket and pressed slacks at the time. We were less attractive.

On remote fly-in jobs where there were no roads, a skid unit was used instead of a truck

Many trips were fly-ins, especially during spring and summer. This meant driving to an airport, or more likely a staging area beside a bush airstrip. Loading tools into an Otter or slinging them in nets under a Bell 204-B was hazardous. The usual problems of weather, icing, navigation, mud, and weariness made it all a little surreal.

What made the stress worse was the need to strip all the equipment and connecting cables from your logging truck, keep them dry, and reconnect everything inside the skid unit at the rig. One missing cable or tool and the job could be delayed for hours, even days. On return, you had to strip it all out and reconnect back in the logging truck before you could have a bath or go to the bar. You don't have to go to war to experience battle fatigue.

Somewhere along the way, I purchased a 1948 MG-TD, rewired it with armoured logging cable, and used it as my personal car. No heater and no side screens made it useless for about 8 months of the year, but it was fun.

Wives don’t thrive in isolated oil field towns. There was a strong push to get a “real” job, in the city, in the office. And lo, it was so.

Schlumberger is still the recognized leader in well logging, but competition is more capable than in my logging days. My connections to Schlumberger persisted through my entire career. I supervised their crews in the Canadian Arctic and Alberta as a client rep for 10 years, consulted to them or their subsidiaries on several occasions, and recommended their services to many of my consulting clients.

Ironically, 40 years after leaving SLB, I was invited to teach Schlumberger stimulation and coiled tubing engineers all about logging and log analysis several times a year at Tulsa University. This went on for 5 years. The students were so young, so keen, so naive - just like I was once upon a time.

Special thanks go to Tom Wilson who interviewed then hired me from McGill, Barry McVicar who made sure I had learned enough to become a General Field Engineer, and to all the Location Managers like Al Chase, Al Dorin, Bill Anderson, Bob Wilson, Mel Gray, and others, as well as all the Operators who made me look good. Barry McVicar also gave me a most entertaining "Roast" in 1994 at my induction as an Honourary Member of the CWLS. He remembered, or invented, 20 minutes of hilarious anecdotes about me, all of which I categorically deny. The audience loved it.

 

Learning The Trade – Geophysical Services
Geophysical Services Inc had been acquired by Texas Instruments and was bragging about their new TIAC model 870 "automatic computer" for processing seismic data recorded on digital magnetic tape. Up to this point, all seismic data was acquired and processed on huge multi-track analog tapes. Sounded intriguing. Applied, hired, moved to Calgary in a week in June 1966. My wife smiled all the way there.

An anonymous TIAC 870 computer

The TIAC had only 8 Kb ferrite core memory (really slow) and read field data from 1 inch, 21 track tapes. It filled a large room, weighed a couple of tons, and needed massive amounts of air conditioning to stay alive. The program was read from punched paper tape, as were the analysis parameters prepared by us, the "geophysical engineers". Due to the small memory, some intermediate calculations were written to and read from a tape drive - disc drives arrived a few years later. A FORTRAN compiler allowed us to write our own routines when needed. It should be noted that when disc drives did arrive in the late 1960's, they were huge and heavy - one TI version was mounted on a horizontal shaft that needed Boeing 737 landing gear bearings to support it.

The wiggly curves on the left-hand image are the original recorded data from a single seismic dynamite shot. Time is in the vertical direction instead of depth as on a well log. The cross section at the right is the final product derived from many records, after processing to remove noise and geometrical effects. Bright areas in both images are "reflections" of sound waves from different layers of rock beneath the surface. By mapping these reflections, we can locate possible places where oil and gas may be found.

GSI patents gave them the lion's share of the digital acquisition and processing business for a few years. The IBM/360, 9 track field tapes, and competition broke this near-monopoly and by 1970 most people were using the newer formats and processing centers. Digital recording and processing of geophysical data was a genuine revolution in both technique and in the quality of results. It was a great learning experience to be so close to the cutting edge.

Calgary skyline, 1968

I bought a used Austin A55 station wagon to survive the first winter and traded it for a nearly new MGB-GT hatchback in gleaming white - a very rare car. The MG-TD continued as the summer car. I put a down-payment on a house in Brentwood in Calgary, on the western edge of the city. Yuppie-dom was looming.

A few crash courses in geophysics and I was a geophysical engineer, working for Carl Hickman, setting up data processing runs. I remember learning to convert decimal numbers to hexadecimal and back again, but I can't remember why, since the input parameters were coded in decimal. The TIAC worked in hex, so there must have been a conversion program in the system somewhere.

My logging experience made me an instant “expert” so logging, then geology  courses were suddenly part of the job. I certainly learned more preparing the courses than my co-workers did from my presentations. Imagine an electrical engineer with a one-semester course in hard-rock geology teaching soft-rock oilfield geology - not a pretty sight.

In 1967, I wrote a seismic inversion program for the TIAC to generate a synthetic sonic log from deconvolved seismic traces. It didn’t work, of course, or I would be world famous. I didn’t understand the need for low frequency data – data that wasn’t in the seismic signal. Roy Lindseth solved the problem a couple of years later and he IS world famous. We'll meet Roy again in the fifth reel.

On vacation, we drove to Montreal in the MGB to visit Expo 67, the celebration of Canada's 100th Birthday. Similar to the World's Fair, it highlighted achievements of many countries, not just Canada's, which were somewhat overshadowed by the US and Russian pavilions. It was the middle of the Cold War. My fondest memory is the Mariachi music carried on the gentle harbour breeze from the Mexican pavilion.

Panorama of the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary -- a view I cherish to this day.

The Calgary Tower was built during 1967-68 to a height of 190 meters (630 feet) providing a rotating restaurant and a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains. No longer the tallest building, it still acts as the focal point of downtown Calgary.

TI headquarters in Dallas, 1968

Meetings in Dallas and assignments in Midland taught me what hot weather was really like - kind of a Purgatory I was told. I’ll take Alberta winter any day. On a side trip from an SEG convention in Houston, we took a long weekend in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The Appleton Express, then a Budd RDC1 rail diesel car, took us to the interior  of the island and a tour of the Appleton Rum Distillery. The 80 mile return trip took all day and certainly got into the hills to see local sights. Out of service for many years, there is talk of revitalizing the railway as a tourist train.

I did a little PR-style marketing in Edmonton, Regina, and Quebec City, plus market research, data acquisition logistics for Dan Brennan, GSI's Regional Manager. On one such trip to Quebec, I was bumped to First Class and sat with a Toronto lawyer, sipping free brandy for several hours. This was when Air Canada's First Class was actually first-class. Conversation turned to pastimes and wives. He said his wife was a pianist. I said "My wife plays the piano, too." He replied "I said she was a pianist, she does not "play piano".. The conversation ended there; fortunately the brandy flowed on.

During a trip to Regina, Air Canada pilots went on strike, so I arranged to take the rental car to Saskatoon and catch the Via Rail "Canadian" to Edmonton and a PWA commuter flight to Calgary. My seat-mate this time was a very nice lady headed to Vancouver to visit her mother. We had the dome car to ourselves and conversation was very pleasant. We watching the snow-covered prairie scenery slide by in the moonlight - very romantic. Ah, Diane, where are you now? 

The original GSI left Canada many years ago. Texas Instruments sold the company to Halliburton in 1988, who tried to merge it with GeoSource (ex-Petty-Ray Geophysical) but this failed due to personality conflicts. Halliburton sold its seismic assets in 1994 to Western Atlas. Baker Hughes bought Western Atlas in 1998. Western Atlas was merged into Western Geco in 2000, a 70-30 joint venture between Schlumberger and Baker Hughes. Not a single GSI employee survived this corporate struggle. Although I was not involved in any of this, it is an instructive insight into the precarious nature of employment in the oil and gas industry.

One individual, Davey Einarson,  survived the mergers until 1994 when he purchased the rights to the GSI name and the non-exclusive seismic database. He might have acquired the first non-exclusive data set that I set up for GSI in 1967. So the GSI name lives on today, in Calgary and Houston, but it's an entirely different business.

 

Learning The Trade – Dome Petroleum
A headhunter found me buried in his files and convinced me to move to Dome Petroleum as a reservoir engineer in early 1968. With well logging, seismic processing, and a tiny bit of geology training, I was far from a reservoir engineer. I knew it but Dome didn’t. So I read Craft and Hawkins, wrote down a dozen equations so I could talk sense about material balance and pressure buildup, and learned the rest on the job.

The IBM 1130 was the size of a large desk

I was slightly computer literate because of the GSI training, so soon I was adapting IBM 1130 Fprtran IV programs for Dome’s use. The 1130 read punched cards but had removable, multi-layer disks, about the size of a huge birthday cake. It booted by setting toggle switches on the console, and could take 8 hours to compute a single petrophysical analysis -- a task that takes microseconds today.

Guess who taught log analysis to the engineers and geologists?

Martin Luther King and Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy were both assassinated in 1968 - more icons gone.

Inside of a year, this job was leading nowhere. Even though I had adapted the IBM 1130 reservoir engineering programs for Dome's use, no-one actually wanted to use them, preferring instead pencil, paper, and slide rule. Darwin was wrong. Evolution is not survival of the fittest; it is survival of the most adaptable.

I resigned and my wife and I drove the MGB-GT to Toronto in a little under 48 hours to see the 1968 Grey Cup game. Calgary Stampeders lost 21-24 to Ottawa Rough Riders, but it was a great game. No job, no prospects, no problem. Father was concerned – he had worked all his life for Bell Telephone – here I was looking for my fourth job in 7 years.

This was long before Dome grew to be the biggest bankruptcy in Canadian history, after blowing eight billion of Other People’s Money on worthless assets and Arctic gas that no one could deliver to market. Dome Petroleum is long gone and most of its assets wound up at Amoco Canada in 1988. Amoco merged with British Petroleum (BP) late in 1998 and the Amoco name on gas stations was merged into oblivion in 2002.

 "Smilin' Jack" Gallagher and Charlie Dunkley ran a tight ship in the early days of Dome - too bad they didn't keep a tighter rein on the debt later on.

Dome became a major client of mine in the mid 1970s, when Jim Hamilton, one of my mentors at Dome (and ex-Schlumberger engineer like me), acquired three of our LOG/MATE desktop log analysis systems, and offloaded a significant amount of consulting work to us as well. Sadly, cancer took Jimmy from us long before a sane world would have allowed.


Learning The Trade – Sproule and Associates
I had finished an industry course on Petroleum Economics given by Tony Edgington of J. C. Sproule and Associates Ltd, so I phoned him to see if he knew anyone looking for someone with logging, geophysics, and reservoir engineering skills. He did. He was. The company was only 8 years old but was well known for its reserves estimates and for its pioneering work in geological exploration of Canada's Arctic regions. It was Dr. Sproule's work on the geology of northern Canada and his personal drive that led to the formation of PanArctic Oils Ltd. More on that later. Dr. Sproule received little credit or financial gain for his effort to convince government and industry to develop the North.

The integration of geology and engineering was very appealing, so I accepted the offer without a second thought. Cam Sproule introduced himself on day one. Tony Edgington, Noel Cleland, Mike Brusset, and Blake Marshall became my mentors, taught me how to “leave footprints in the snow” so anyone could pick up my projects and update them without re-doing them. This was the most valuable lesson I ever learned on the job.

Al Gorrell, the senior geologist at Sproule, was instrumental in guiding my early attempts to find truth in log data. He was successful in instilling a sense of excitement and wonder about all things scientific, especially the infant science of quantitative log analysis, soon to become known  as the science of petrophysics. He gave unstintingly of his time, experience, and knowledge to all who asked. He traveled the world over on oil, gas, water, and mineral exploration projects, as well as social and humanitarian endeavours. Al Gorrel was killed in a terrorist attack on a hotel in Manilla, Phillipines, on 12 February 1985 while on a mission for the United Nations. Al's legacy lives on in all who knew him. Unfortunately, terrorism seems to live on as well.

Four ladies actually ran Sproule; the tea-lady, the librarian, the geological secretary, and the engineering secretary ran everything, and very well indeed, thank you. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it never paid to forget their power. Today, of course, there are no tea-ladies or secretaries, just coffee machines and executive assistants, and damn few of the latter.

The reservoir engineering tasks were interesting and the cash flow was purposely conservative. The banks loved it and it suited the Canadian psyche of the era.

Early on, I wrote a log analysis program that ran on the CDC 3300. Computrex could digitize short chunks of logs and put them out on punch cards. There was only one building in Calgary with a floor strong enough to carry the weight of the rotating drum memory. It was an old grain mill. We used the program only rarely – many jobs were done with pencil and paper and a slide rule, just like we did it at Dome Petroleum.

Then, in the spring of 1969, came King Resources. They wanted to explore for sulphur on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic. This would involve seismic, gravity, magnetics, strat hole drilling, surface geology, ocean and ice surveys – you name it, it was on the list. Sproule were the Arctic experts and landed the contract to run the program.

I was assigned to create a logging system for slim hole sulphur exploration. Out came the catalogs and shortly a helicopter-portable mini-logging unit was a reality. Someone had to run it. Me.

My wife objected. We were trying to build a new house in Bragg Creek. I went anyway. This was the summer that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. We heard about it from Voice of Russia, which came in well on my portable radio. Most of the crew at Caribou Lake on Melville Island felt that we had landed there too. Pretty barren, pretty cold, and our life-line was long and tenuous.

Nothing happened on the house – no contractor would listen to a wife when the husband was off in terra incognito. At Caribou Lake nothing was happening either. Someone had forgotten to assign a project manager. I radioed back, explained that every team was waiting on orders. Sproule assigned a project manager. Me, with help by radio-phone from Stan Harding who had years of experience in the Arctic.

So I surveyed the well locations, got the drills to work; laid out some seismic lines on a map, got the seismic underway. Others saw action, so on their own, they started to work. I did the initial well location surveys with sun shots and an almanac, just like David Thompson 170 years earlier. Later we used a Tellurometer that didn’t like cold weather and computed the data with a Monroe comptometer, assisted by 7-figure trigonometry tables. People would sneak in to make the machine divide 1.0 by 3.0 and watch it run forever, but it never died on us. Surveying was hampered by the fact that one of the Canadian government benchmarks wasn’t located where it was supposed to be.

Dome Petroleum's Drake Point blow out in 1969 about 2 miles from our base camp. This picture is the relief well the following year.

Early in my first tour of duty at Caribou Lake in 1969, the well being drilled by Dome Petroleum a couple of miles away blew out. We watched proceedings from a safe distance, but went on with our work. The blowout built an ice cone 200 feet high and was visible for many years on satellite photos. In 1973, I was back at Drake Point, supervising logging crews for PanArctic Oils -- small world!

 

   
Resolute Bay Airport                      PWA Hercules

I logged the sulphur exploration wells too, but spent most of my time on logistics: food, fuel, accommodation, camp staff, drilling supplies, land and air transport, radio communications, marital counseling, daily reports, planning, and more planning.

I had to fire the helicopter pilot because he scared the rig hands (that takes a bit of doing) and he refused to stop buzzing rigs and camps. The nearest replacement pilot was in Montreal. We got him, but it took nearly ten days for him to arrive. In the meantime, crews slept at the rigs while the sky-jock was “sick”. He probably was sick, burnt-out and unbalanced from too many hours on traffic patrol for a Toronto TV station.

This was my first management post and I still don’t like telling a person that his services are no longer required, regardless of how dire the circumstances.

King Resources was a high-flyer. They brought a plane load of Directors and investors to camp and expected meals and beds. John Glenn, the first US astronaut to circle the globe in a spacecraft (Feb 1962), was among them, as was John King himself. The nearest spare beds were at Resolute Bay. They weren’t available so we hot-sheeted for three days until the illuminati got tired of the primitive facilities.

Native sulphur lay on the surface in several locations, the result of erosion and chemical alteration of gypsum from Barrow Dome. NASA insists that this dome is a "salt dome" and uses it in training materials. When I tried to explain that gypsum is not "salt" in the sense of "halite or rock salt", they replied that gypsum was also a salt, so they were "Right". "Stuff" and nonsense - don't use gypsum on your next steak. It takes years to dissolve (that's why we make wall board from it) and it tastes terrible.

All the King Resources brass went home with a bag of loose sulphur, probably all the native sulphur to be had on Melville Island. We didn’t find any more than a trace in the drill holes.

We did find oil at the south edge of Barrow Dome, the gypsum dome that was the source of the surface sulphur, but no one was interested at the time. It could have been a wreck as the rig hands were getting sick from fumes emanating from the well. There was oil in the samples and probably natural gas or CO2 flowing freely. There could have been a fire and there was no blow out preventer (BOP). In time, the gas dissipated but I had the crew shut down the rig anyway.

This was 1969 and only a few wells had been drilled in the High Arctic, and except for Dome Petroleum's gas blowout at Drake Point near our base camp at Caribou Lake, none showed much in the way of hydrocarbons. I ran a drill stem test by tying a burlap sack to the end of the drill pipe and then squeezing the oil into a few sample vials.

I kept one sample as a souvenir and in 1973, donated it to Bob Meneley of PanArctic Oils Ltd, who had hired me to supervise all their well logging and petrophysical analysis for the company. Bob quotes this oil discovery in some of his technical papers as evidence for more oil plays to be found near this and other piercement domes in the Arctic. He forgot to credit me with the gift of this oil sample, my one and only claim to be a real Oil Baron. History will never record it, but I found the first oil in the Canadian High Arctic!

Another disaster in the making involved wildlife. King Resources had agreed to let Al Oeming, owner of a game farm/zoo in Edmonton, to use our camp while catching, with permits, three caribou. We had no spare beds for the 4 men and little spare food, with our bi-monthly supply flight still a long time off. After 10 days without catching a caribou, I assigned the chopper and two rig hands with nets to assist. In no time they bulldogged the critters, wrapped them in nets ready to travel. Even tanked, they were not happy campers.

It was time for my rotation back to Calgary so I got the chance to ride with two of the trussed up caribou in the twin engine Dornier to Resolute Bay. Our French speaking pilot said a few unkind words that sounded like “merde” as various body fluids seeped into the cable channel that went to the tail rudder. It wasn’t hard to remember that everything freezes at 10,000 feet. The caribou and I caught the Pacific Western scheduled flight to Edmonton. I arrived safely, but I can’t speak for the caribou.

On my next trip out, the pilot and I both fell asleep on the way to Res Bay – the autopilot worked beautifully until we ran out of fuel. The silence woke us both up and after flipping to auxiliary tanks, the engines caught and we stayed aloft, and awake, for the rest of the journey. After one more rotation, the job was packed up, and I returned to the office. Our house was finally built that winter – there was someone in charge again. I did the wiring, insulation, inside paneling, and roofing in my spare time.

King Resources went bankrupt shortly after. John King was charged with fraud when a mutual fund found some King Resources properties "went missing". He was given one year in bail.   This was big news at the time, but small potatoes compared to Worldcom and Enron two decades later.

I had loaned them my photos for inclusion in their annual report. None appeared in print and the photos were never returned.

The irony is, of course, that there never was any sulphur worth mining. Two men with two shovels could have demonstrated that the surface deposit was only inches thick. The source, too, was obvious – the yellow streaks on the surface led directly to the base of the gypsum dome. Oh well, it was a very interesting and educational project.

People remember the first moon walk in 1969. Few remember that Intel invented the first microchip CPU, and the precursor to the Internet (ARPANET) appeared that same year.

In the fall of 1969, I was given an opportunity I couldn't refuse and I left the safety of Sproule for a much riskier venture in Australia. Bill Anderson, one of my bosses from my Schlumberger days, took over my position at Sproule. Later, Bill was responsible for starting my independent consulting career.  Same small world.

Dr. Sproule passed away in 1970, at the far too young age of 65, before his dream of major oil and gas discoveries in the Arctic were finally proven. Sproule and Associates survived, and is still considered the pre-eminent resource evaluation consulting company in Canada.


Learning The Trade - Digitech
I would have been happy to stay at Sproule for the rest of my career. But the headhunter who got me to Dome phoned to see if I wanted to go to Australia. Maybe. Probably. Yes!

After a short orientation at Digitech’s Calgary facility, we were whisked off to Sydney to help get the Australian operation up and running. This was to be a modern geophysical data processing business serving Australia and southeast Asia. I was to be Managing Director. So we sold the MG’s, packed the dishes, rented the Bragg Creek house, and set off for further adventures.

I arranged to finish a 3 year Business Development Certificate, started 2 and a half years earlier at University of Calgary, by correspondence. I passed but the non-standard final exam, designed just for me, took nearly three weeks to write – 20 essays on 20 business topics. The exam would have taken two hours had I stayed in Calgary.

Digitech's Managing Director in Sydney, 1970

Digitech in Sydney was exciting and hard work – new computers, new people, new work ethic. The computers were an EMR 6050 with an EMR 6130 to read tapes and drive the plotters. EMR was a subsidiary of Schlumberger - you just can't get away from those guys. We used a motor-generator set to convert the 50 Hz current to 60 Hz to keep the computation cycle speed up to its design specs.

   
There were perks: Doyle's Seafood at Watson Bay and my house rented on Camp Cove Beach

Business went well during the first year. Dave Robson was a great mentor and Sydney was a great city to live in.  I traveled to the capital cities; Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Brisbane, Canberra  – each had its own list of oil companyy and government contacts. New Plymouth, Auckland, Wellington, Queenstown, even the top of Mount Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand.  Jakarta, and Singapore were also on the tour. These still had open, running sewers on both sides of most streets – crossing these at night on narrow cement planks was no fun at all.

       
Day sailors on Sydney Harbour and Tall Ships to celebrate the Bi-Centennial

In Jakarta, we dined on an authentic Dutch East Indies ristaffle with about 10 courses in an early colonial mansion. On another trip, we ate at a restaurant on stilts about a mile from shore, returning in pitch-black to a waiting rickshaw. In Singapore, the night-out was spent with business associates at the bars of Boogie Street – not a good place for good boys at night. We also worked the daylight hours contacting potential clients.

My early trips to Jakarta in 1970 were just as the Russian influence in the area was declining. Suharto replaced Sukarno as President in a military coup in 1967, murdering thousands of Communists and possibly a million ethnic Chinese. There were many abandoned construction projects, all blamed on the pull-out of Russian contractors. The streets were a riot of rickshaws, taxis, mud, and water. People defecated into, and then washed themselves and their clothes, in the open sewers. After a monsoon rain, this seemed practical, but after a dry spell, I was astounded to see the habit continuing.

On more recent trips in 2001 and 2002, everything is paved, there are no open sewers, and the freeways and hotels look like Houston. It’s amazing what oil money can buy, at least close to the seat of power. The Shangri-La is the place to stay today. However, political unrest, student demonstrations, murders of ethnic Chinese, and terrorist bombings continue. Visitors are warned to keep a low profile.

Back in Australia, John Boyd came in as second-in-command later in 1970 and was instrumental in raising the quality of our staff and our processing. Rick Bogehold kept the software in shape. Dave Pratt ran the mineral exploration side of the business. All three went on to run their own independent processing centers in later years, John in Calgary, Rick in Denver, and Dave in Sydney. All three have recently retired but their businesses continue under new names and management.

Then came the Australian Federal election. The new Labour government ran the foreign oil companies out of town and made it difficult for local firms to raise capital. Seismic crew activity dropped to near zero. The rig count dropped to less than a dozen. Digitech hadn’t the resources to carry on in Sydney. I tried to raise capital in Australia but realistic forecasts made the outcome pretty obvious. I finally had to lay everyone off and oversee the auction of all the assets.

Sydney had been Paradise. We were regaled by fabulous weather, gorgeous beaches, fine food, and a cosmopolitan atmosphere that Calgary lacked. We saw the tall ships come in from the sea for the bicentennial of Captain Cook’s discovery of Australia. We watched the fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We partied on the beaches and enjoyed a very active social life. Just watching the sailboats on the Harbour was a thrill to the eye, not to mention the bare beginning of the topless bathing craze.

Bondi Beach

There was a bit of trouble in Paradise, too. The Viet Nam War was slowly building toward its debacle and the Aussie men were tired of the US troops snagging their women while on R&R. Australian troops were also in-country and it all made for some ugly demonstrations and newspaper rhetoric. We weren’t directly affected except when we were mistaken for Americans while shopping or at a bar. A Maple Leaf on the lapel helped, but it wasn’t the universal symbol of sanity that it is today.

Although I initially had a company car in Sydney, I abandoned it for a 1947 MG-TC, wire wheels and all. It cost $800 and could be used all year in the NSW climate. I sold it before I returned for $900. How dumb can you be? It was worth 10 times its cost here in Canada had I thought to ship it home.

I returned with the other Canadians to work in the Calgary office as VP Operations. I had the task of overseeing all programming and computer center operations – about 35 people in all. I hired the first female computer operator in Calgary and the first female computer programmer in Digitech. There was shock and horror but they worked out just fine. This was pre-Gloria Steinem.

 

An anonymous Univac 1108

We also got new computers - a Univac 1108 replaced the EMR 6050. Cmdr. Grace Hopper, a computer science pioneer and legend, and a US Naval Officer, showed up for the inauguration of our 1108. In full dress Naval uniform (she never appeared in public any other way), she held court at a Digitech reception for clients. "Formidable !" as the French would say.

Like most other mainframe manufacturers, UNIVAC survived a few mergers and divestitures, to disappear completely in the early 1980's. Dinosaurs cannot survive the meteoric impact of the mini-computer, now more popularly known as the personal computer.

The VP Operations, 1972

During an expansion in 1972, Digitech took prime tenancy in a new building. I was assigned to oversee the special facilities needed for the computers, and nearly died while doing it. For weeks, I had been walking up to the second floor to inspect progress. The stairs were unlighted and the second floor had no windows. One day, I headed for the stairs, but felt a draft and stopped. The stairs weren’t there! I nearly walked off into empty space. It turned out the stairs failed a fire inspection and had been jack-hammered away – no barricade was put up. Just one of the hazards of poor vision.

Shortly after, we moved all the computers out the windows of the old building with a crane, trucked them to the new building, and craned them up to a hatch in the second floor wall. The second floor location was a security measure - there had been several bombings of computer centers in the USA and one in Canada.  Ludites are everywhere! Remember: Darwin was wrong - not the fittest but the most adaptable win the race.

Thirty-six hours later, we were up and running.
 

The control console and some of the tape drives
 in the new Digitech center in Calgary

We also took control of Computer Data Processors Ltd and moved all their equipment to the new building. CDP was Roy Lindseth’s first major business venture and there had been tremendous rivalry between Digitech and CDP. Roy went on to an illustrious consulting career .

We also installed the first remote job entry terminal outside the computer center. I can’t claim much credit for this as Univac and Texaco were the prime instigators. However, the negotiations with the telephone company to get a full duplex, uninterruptible line that was clean enough to carry 300 bits per second for at least one mile was the daunting task assigned to me. Took a while to make it all work.

At Digitech, I was un-promotable – I was one of 3 VP’s and the Pres was not going to croak any time soon. I left Digitech in 1973 to travel some more.

Digitech went bankrupt in 1979, but the name carried on for a few years under new owners. Ben Berg went on to develop a business to scan pre-digital seismic sections and maps – scanning was a new and emerging technology in 1979,

Dave Robson took over Calgary based R. Cruz and Associates, changed the name to Veritas, and grew it into a world class giant in seismic acquisition and processing. Rafael Cruz moved back to Texas and is the father of Ted Cruz, who ran in the 2016 Republican primaries. Ted was born in Calgary -- it would have been interesting to see if he would have had the same problem proving his American citizenship as President Obama did.

After Dave retired from Veritas in 2004, he formed a private equity business. Shortly after, Veritas merged with CGG, the result now known as CGG-Veritas. (CGG was born in 1931 by Schlumberger, with a number of small French firms and banks, combining their various geophysical methods and licenses into a single independent company. Schlumberger sold its interest in CGG in the early 1950's).

!!   Now it's 1973 - about to head to the Arctic Islands, found a comsulting business in Calgary, and build a Hereford ranch from scratch in Central Alberta. Time flys when you stay busy.


 

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