He was a derrickman for Sojourner Oil. And they were working in Nolan County in, down near Sweetwater. And back in the day, the only way that they had to light the platforms and the oil rigs for night shifts were to use these great big hot lamps, you know? The, just really bright lamps to, to light the platform and, and the work field. And so as a result, doing what they called a drill stem test was illegal at the time. And that's where they would take the drill stem and they would back it out to check for pockets of gas. Obviously it's illegal because if they do hit a pocket of gas, gas escapes, hits the heat from the lamps, bad things happen.That's exactly what happened

My dad should have had what they call a geronimo line, which was a line that attaches from the derrick and goes past the platform to a place of safety should an accident ever happen. The company didn't have a geronimo line up. We buried an empty casket. They never found remains. So we're not really sure what happened. We just know that he didn't survive the explosion.

After a period of time at, at other's encouragement, my mom decided to go ahead and sue the company. So we filed suit against Sojourner, as did, the parents of the young man, the other young men who died. And, it was weeks long trial. You know, I, my job was to go in and play Little Orphan Annie. So I was supposed to go in and be quiet and just be the face, you know, of loss. Anyway, we go through the trial. It goes to jury. The jury comes back and when it came down to the question of negligence on behalf of the company, they found the company not negligent in the death. So we lost everything. The whole case was just a wash. We got nothing.

So you fast forward to my late 20s, and my mom ended up encountering the parents of the young man who died with, with my dad. And they had found out through time, as it happens, that one of the jurors was first cousins with one of the senior VPs of the oil company.. That was just, it, it, like I said, it's one of those stories that I often think I just need to write the screenplay because somebody needs to tell these crazy stories. It sounds like some sort of crazy whacked out documentary kind of thing.