SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It has been about four years since a major blackout in Texas. Millions of people were in the dark for days after a huge winter storm knocked out power plants across the state. Hundreds of people died. And since then, a lot of Texans have been nervous about their power grid.
A podcast out of member station KUT in Austin has been looking at Texas' grid, what's changed and what hasn't since the deadly blackout. It's called The Disconnect: Power, Politics And The Texas Blackout. In its latest season, they are zooming in on the role the state's natural gas system played in the disaster. It begins almost 100 years ago, at the very beginning of the oil and gas industry in Texas. Co-hosts Mose Buchele and Audrey McGlinchy tell the story of how a legendary con artist discovered an ocean of oil in east Texas.
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MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: So to learn about this, we're also going to hear from a guy who knows a ton about all this stuff.
PAGE FOSHEE: My name is Page Foshee. Forty years of my life were devoted to being an oil and gas landman.
AUDREY MCGLINCHY, BYLINE: A landman is someone who works for an oil company, and they go to landowners and try to get them to lease their land so that they can drill for oil.
BUCHELE: But Page is also a historian and a writer. And his family is, in fact - his family on his dad's side is from the very part of east Texas that we're going to be talking about.
FOSHEE: My father took me to see his side of my family when I was 11, in 1965, and I spent two weeks with my grandmother. I'd never seen pine trees before nor oil derricks 80 and 100 feet tall, and I thought about the oil business and compared it in my mind to gold strikes and rushes. I found it - and still do - I find it romantic.
BUCHELE: And it is. It's a history full of gamblers, underdogs and conmen, like the one we're going to be talking about in particular.
FOSHEE: Columbus Marion Joiner.
BUCHELE: But for reasons, you'll soon understand he came to be known as Daddy or Dad Joiner.
FOSHEE: And Dad had been working the east Texas field for 20 years.
MCGLINCHY: Joiner's official job was a lot like Page's. He would go out, convince land owners to lease their properties so they could drill oil. And in exchange, everyone would usually get a cut of future profits.
BUCHELE: Right, and this is where the con comes in. See, after he got the lease, Joiner would get a bunch of investors together to raise money to drill. This is a pretty normal way of financing a kind of independent oil project. The thing is, in the case of Dad Joiner, he appeared to have no intention of actually finding oil.
FOSHEE: Absolutely. If you found oil, you blew it.
MCGLINCHY: See, as long as he did not find oil, he never had to pay anyone back. He could just keep gathering up new investors, new investors and taking all their money.
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FOSHEE: He would drill and drill and drill, and he would sell parts of oil well projects. Hey, I'll sell you 25% of my well for, you know, $5,000.
BUCHELE: Yeah, he could sell the same project to different people multiple times over.
FOSHEE: He really made a ton of cash by overselling every well he drilled. That's where his income came from.
MCGLINCHY: As long as he failed, he never had to pay anyone because they had invested in the hope of future profits that would come when Dad Joiner struck oil, which he was never going to do.
BUCHELE: Like, these days, you might get, I'll pay you in stock options on this startup or whatever, you know? But it's like - it's almost the same thing, right?
FOSHEE: Oh, certainly. It's not a new story, it's probably one of the oldest.
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BUCHELE: And when it came to targets, like marks for this particular, Joiner allegedly specialized in doctors and widows.
FOSHEE: Yeah, he was especially kind to widows and maiden women. The older and with more property, the better.
MCGLINCHY: He bragged about knowing a special place on a widow's neck. If he touched it, she would write him a check.
FOSHEE: Oh, he was a master of amore (ph).
BUCHELE: So in 1927, Joiner was drilling for oil on the property of a widowed woman in Rusk County in east Texas. Her name was Daisy Bradford.
MCGLINCHY: Joiner had gotten the lease from Bradford, and he'd pulled together a lot of investors to fund this drilling.
BUCHELE: So it's 1927, and he drills his first well. It's called the Daisy Bradford No. 1. Well, at the time, I don't think it was called the No. 1.
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BUCHELE: But they call it the Daisy Bradford No. 1 because he drilled it, and there was no oil, right? This is what they call a dry hole. But for Dad Joiner, that was no problem, right? It was an opportunity to go out and get more investors.
MCGLINCHY: So a couple years go by. It's 1929, Joiner drills another well, the Daisy Bradford No. 2. And what do you know, also dry.
FOSHEE: I think the trouble with the Daisy Bradford No. 1 and 2 wells was they didn't drill deep enough.
MCGLINCHY: So Joiner got more money together, wrote more IOUs and started drilling on a third well. This third oil well - it started to show promise, signs of oil and gas coming up with the mud and water below.
BUCHELE: At this point, the local people around Joiner couldn't help but notice that he seemed uneasy with this. He actually brought in one of his longtime partners to take over operations, a guy named Doc Loyd.
FOSHEE: Practiced as a doctor, you know, without the formality of a license.
MCGLINCHY: And again, it seemed to Daisy Bradford and others that Joiner and Lloyd were maybe trying to screw this up.
FOSHEE: They were looking for dry holes.
BUCHELE: So at this point, Bradford and the other workers on the site wrestled control of the operation from Joiner. Basically, Daisy Bradford used her position as landowner to have him sidelined. And that's probably why the Daisy Bradford No. 3 struck oil in October 1930.
FOSHEE: It came in big.
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BUCHELE: So there's a book about all this called "The Last Boom," which I highly recommend if you can get your hands on it. And in it, there is a description of the moment that Dad Joiner realized that Daisy Bradford 3 was a winner. And it says he did not dance a jig. No, no, no, he did not shout for joy. They say he just kind of briefly closed his eyes and leaned against a nearby tree, his expression kind of blank.
FOSHEE: Oh, he could not have been happy. He oversold that well, just like all the rest of them.
MCGLINCHY: Joiner knew he was in trouble. What he could not have known was that the Daisy Bradford No. 3, that third oil well, had uncovered the biggest oil field in U.S. history.
BUCHELE: So this is how he got his nickname, right? Columbus Marion Joiner was renamed the father of the field, hailed by east Texas as Dad or Daddy Joiner in the newspapers.
MCGLINCHY: Which means his investors came knocking.
FOSHEE: It was just terrifically fortuitous for everybody except Dad Joiner who died broke in the late 40s. And I shouldn't laugh, but he was a scammer, and I don't have much sympathy for that.
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DETROW: Mose Buchele and Audrey McGlinchy are the hosts of the Disconnect, a podcast about energy in Texas from member station KUT in Austin. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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