Black Gold

The Wahoo Newspaper job was good experience, but as a single man I didn’t have much of a social life. I lived in a rooming house owned by a Mrs. Smith, whose late husband was a doctor. Her main concern in life was whether her money would come out even with her being alive to enjoy it.

In a small town in Nebraska populated by descendants of Czechoslovakians, hanging out in a tavern drinking beer was accepted social conduct. It was no different than meeting for a cup of coffee at a café.

Shannahan’s (how that Irish name got to Wahoo, I do not know) was our after-work stop, and many evenings too. Most of the employees of the newspaper stopped by there after work for at least one beer, so when a practical joke for the tavern owner was proposed, we all went along.

One week, after we had put the paper to bed, I removed a story from the front page and substituted a fake item, which one of our linotype operators had set a few minutes before. It related a story about John Shannahan being accused of abusing his baby sitter when taking her home at 2 a.m. and his being questioned by the police.

We then printed just one paper with that story and put the tavern owner’s address on it. It was stacked with all the other papers being readied for mailing that evening and delivery the next day.

We thought it was a terrific joke but John didn’t see it that way. When we came in after work, he was livid and began reading us all off. I ran back across the street to the newspaper office to get one of the actual papers to show him what we had done, that only his paper had the story in it. He was so mad all explanations went right by him and it was much later before he accepted the true situation. We were lucky we didn’t get sued for libel, even though only the aggrieved party had access to the story.

I was left much to my own discretion in determining what stories to run and how much emphasis to place on them. However, when an oil rig was brought in and a well drilled, I was questioned on my judgment.

I ran only a short story with a 14 point headline (about the smallest used on the front page). The patriarch of the family, Guy Ludi, was not active in the business but in this case he went to Darrell and asked what was going on. Wasn’t this a big story? Oil being discovered in Saunders County?

As a matter of fact, I was skeptical about the motives of the promoters of the oil well. The well was actually drilled with a smattering of an oil shown. A local real estate agent was hired to sell leasing rights all around the test site so I decided to check the story further.

I called the state geological survey at the University of Nebraska. I found out all wild cat wells had to be registered but no information could be released for a minimum of six months. This law was to protect wild cat drillers from predators who might come in an take advantage of their find.

The man I talked to said he would crawl all the way from Lincoln to Wahoo if marketable oil was found in the county. Because of the law, what he told me had to be off the record and if I quoted him, he said he would deny even talking to me.

The reason he said “marketable” oil was because the site not only lacked the quantity needed but there was no way to transport it profitably. On large oil strikes, quantities are sufficient to invest either in pipe lines or gathering tanks. No such conditions prevailed here.

People around town pointed to the fact that the promoter had left a valuable steel pipe in the ground at the well site and was evidence of good prospects. To my knowledge, that pipe is still in the ground and more than 40 years later no oil has ever been sold out of Saunders County.