Talking Texas History
Helen Cozart on Geography & Texas Oil History
Can geographic history reveal the secrets of Texas' booming oil industry? This episode of Talking Texas History welcomes Helen Cozart, assistant librarian at Ranger College, who shares her captivating journey from military service to academia. Helen enlightens us on the transformative Ranger oil boom of 1917, illustrating the massive impact it had on the region's landscape and infrastructure.
Helen breaks down the process behind the Ranger College Library exhibit, "Black Gold, a History of Texas Boomtowns." Learn about the technological advancements and environmental challenges of the early oil industry and how the infamous Ranger oil boom set the stage for future developments.
More information on the Ranger College Library exhibit: https://library.rangercollege.edu/oilexhibit
Can geographic history reveal the secrets of Texas' booming oil industry? This episode of Talking Texas History welcomes Helen Cozart, assistant librarian at Ranger College, who shares her captivating journey from military service to academia. Helen enlightens us on the transformative Ranger oil boom of 1917, illustrating the massive impact it had on the region's landscape and infrastructure.
Helen breaks down the process behind the Ranger College Library exhibit, "Black Gold, a History of Texas Boomtowns." Learn about the technological advancements and environmental challenges of the early oil industry and how the infamous Ranger oil boom set the stage for future developments.
More information on the Ranger College Library exhibit: https://library.rangercollege.edu/oilexhibit
This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene.
Speaker 1:Preuss, I'm Scott Sospe, gene. We have another one of our round-out guests of people here that are making waves in Texas and places like that. This one is Helen Cozart. She's the assistant librarian at Ranger College. That's correct, helen, assistant librarian at Ranger College. That's correct. Also, she's a history instructor.
Speaker 3:She taught history classes. I know you were doing classes at Cisco College at one time when we first met, correct?
Speaker 1:I taught at Cisco and Dallas and Ranger. Yeah, like a lot of people in this profession, they have to spread themselves out quite a bit just to make a living and how that works and all. So I want to start off with Helen why don't you tell everybody about yourself, your background, how you got into to your current position and also about an exciting we'll start the conversation. We want to talk about an exciting exhibit that the library there at Ranger College is about to open.
Speaker 3:All right. So it took me a long time to become a librarian. I didn't even start college till I was 30. And at that time I just needed some extra money. So I applied for my GI bill and you have to take college classes to go along with it. I decided at that point that I was in love with higher education. I felt like I was accomplishing something, and when I was helping my classmates I felt like I was doing something and I could really see teaching in my future. So I mean, just higher education in general really started to mean something to me. But the history aspect kind of came together.
Speaker 3:This is one of my favorite stories I was teaching, taking ancient Greece and World War II at the same time. And in ancient Greece we were talking about the Anabasis of Xenophon. And at one point they stop at this location on the Black Sea and Xenophon goes on and on about what a great site it would be for a colony and there's good defensibility, good river, good soil, all these other things. And I'm thinking, well, if this is so great, why wasn't it already settled? And then in World War II, that exact same week, we're talking about the Lebensraum of Adolf Hitler and how they needed this extra living space for Germany so that they would have access for their resources and all those kinds of things. And to me that just screamed geography matters. Geography is one of the most important parts of history and so I kind of focused on geographic history at that point. And then, after I finished that bachelor's degree, my military career needed me to get a degree in intelligence studies and I really focused on the geographical aspect of collecting intelligence. And so you know, war today is all about resources, whether it's oil or water or something else. You know it's all about that. So that really the geographic aspect of it really came together for me in all of those areas of history.
Speaker 3:So when I get to my master's thesis, after I decide after all that time I'm going to go ahead and become a history teacher, first step is a master's thesis. And when I, or a master's, when I get to the thesis, I'm living in Ranger and I have access to all of these amazing primary sources. And we had the. We had an oil boom in 1917 here that really changed all of Texas history. At that point Everything changed for Texas.
Speaker 3:So I focused on just infrastructure for that master's and that was tedious and boring. Nobody wants to ever read that part. But there were some very exciting things. You know how many miles of road did they put in and what did the contracts look like, and the sewage and plumbing and all those infrastructure details. That are, like I said, tedious. But there's aspects that are really exciting, like 100,000 people at its absolute max estimate. 100,000 people showed up here over a three-month time period when the population had been 800. So what do you do with that? And that was the core of the thesis, and now it's been the core of a lot of the other work I've done since then. All of my books and presentation and things like that are all based on information I learned during that experience.
Speaker 2:You know, that's really a fascinating study because you're absolutely right, I spent time after my degree as a landman. That's one of my famous 27 jobs that I've had.
Speaker 1:I think it's more like 37, James.
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of jobs. The thing about being in the landman and looking at that aspect of the oil business, the leasing of land, uh, to do drilling on is you're exactly right? Is you know in those contracts? Uh, the landowners say you can build this many roads, or they in in some more recent ones, they want a right. It has to be a certain way. And how do you deal with all the people coming in and leaving the facilities? All of that is something that probably as historians we kind of gloss over. But it's really that infrastructure that leaves a lasting mark on the landscape and I think we ignore that a lot in history. So I think that's very interesting. And I agree with you about geography. You know, scott and I, one of our professors was Don Walker for Texas History, epitech, and Don always talked about geography, geography, I mean he didn't emphasize a lot, but in texas history we look at geography. Today, students come in and they really don't have much geography back they really don't.
Speaker 1:I I still. I remember because don walker taught us is. I still start every one of my texas history classes. The first week is te geography and what it is. You know the old how old is DW mining's book now? But it's still. You know, it's still apropos for teaching that. It's just well.
Speaker 1:The geography is such a big thing. I think it's interesting. You say that. I mean now when you start talking about Greece and Rome, you're way out of Gina and I's league. So we don't know anything about all that stuff. We can't even pronounce it, so you're way ahead of us. But I always like to point out the same thing. I mean, we think about it. You know, the Spanish came in settlements in the south and in Texas early. The Spanish didn't build any towns on the Gulf Coast. You know why? Because hurricanes hit it and it did it. It's not until the 20th century when idiots decided to come in and build houses right on the coast. So yeah, I can get lost in a map. Geography is extremely important. I think that that's where did you get?
Speaker 3:your degrees, helen? Uh, so my first history bachelor's was at austin p university in clarksville, tennessee, and then I got my second history or my intelligence studies degree and my master's thesis through American military university. Oh, okay. Yeah, my MLIS came from university of Southern Mississippi.
Speaker 1:Oh, so were you stationed? You said you were in the, in the military.
Speaker 3:Were you stationed at Fort Campbell? I am retired army. Yeah, was you at Fort Campbell.
Speaker 1:Was that where you were?
Speaker 3:Right Fort Campbell.
Speaker 2:Helen, can you tell me what the Helen Cozart collection at the library of?
Speaker 3:No, Am I in there? Oh, I've done a bunch of the Veterans History Project oral interviews and they might be under my name, but they shouldn't be. They should be under the individual names.
Speaker 1:They're in the Ellen Cozart collection. They're under your name in the Library of Congress, if you haven't ever looked that up? You should.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I've never looked it up. I've actually never gone back to follow up any of them. I just send them off to the Library of Congress and be done with them.
Speaker 1:Well, helen, tell us about this upcoming exhibit that you have You're talking about. It has to do with the oil boom and ranger, the famous oil. I mean, whoever teaches Texas doesn't talk about ranger. It is the epitome of a boom town in Texas that it came on. So tell us about the exhibit, things like you know. I mean, when did you decide to put it up? What's it about? What did you decide to include in the exhibit, maybe? What did you decide not to include in the exhibit? All those things are relevant, so tell us about that.
Speaker 3:We had to cut so much, oh my gosh. So once I got hired here almost four years ago, we started doing a traveling exhibit in the library every semester and we get that funding for the shipping and the advertising and stuff from humanities Texas, which is a really great organization. They are a part of the national endowment for the humanities, so they get a pot of money and then they can distribute it around Texas. And we've done those traveling exhibits. I've done seven or eight now but we started to kind of run out. Humanities Texas has a handful they do and we've gotten them. Like just recently we had one from the National Health Libraries and it was about medical experimentation. So that came here, it was here for about six weeks and then we ship it on to the next school. But even those are kind of thin. There's not. I don't think I could sustain that level one every semester for the next 15 years. There's just not that many out there. And so when I was talking to the director of library services about it he says well, why don't we just make our own? I jumped all over that.
Speaker 3:We figured out what we wanted to talk about and we applied for a grant from Humanities Texas. They funded the entire thing. And it starts out because I feel very strongly about Ranger being an important part of Texas history. We don't do enough tourism here but I would love to develop that. I'm on the Ranger Historical Preservation Society and I was in the Historic Commission that puts up the historical markers, those kinds of things, and so I've done a lot of the history around Ranger with a little core group of people that we work with, about a dozen of us trying to get that started, and Ranger College is working hard to get integrated good into the community so that we all work together to develop the community even more.
Speaker 3:And we decided this exhibit. It starts out focusing on Ranger but it's called Black Gold, a History of Texas Boomtowns, and so we talk about all, not all. There's no way you could talk about all of the boomtowns but many of the other boomtowns in Texas and how the booms progressed across the state. Because you know, once we got started here in Ranger in 1917, there were a lot of things we didn't know about technology and environmental resources and protection. That caused real environmental damage.
Speaker 3:But it also used up all of our readily available oil and just about that time then we have oil booms opening up further down the road, moving down towards Midland and Odessa and then up into the panhandle and stuff. So those booms walked across the state. As each one got used up and as we progressed across the state we also became better at managing them and better at getting in the infrastructure. In Ranger we had places where they literally would dig pits and put the oil on the surface because there were no pipelines to move the oil out. And that's a scary thing to look back on 100 years later and not know if your land was an oil pit Right.
Speaker 2:So let me ask you a question about that. Has one? Has there been any ecological damage, as far as knows, from that open pit wells that they used to drill in those boom towns like you're mentioning? And it also just shows us how far technology you know, and in those days natural gas was seen as waste, so it was just let go Right At that time wasn't capped. Now you've got what's called christmas trees that regulate the oils whenever it first blows, but in those days it was just, you know it, just like shaking up a coke can and pulling the tab right, uh, and that's why you had those open pits just to collect the oil that was blowing out. So much technology has changed. I don't think most people realize that.
Speaker 3:So the gushers are part of what we talk about and how bad they are for the environment. It took an average of 10 days to seal a gusher and that just meant that much oil constantly blowing out into the air which got into the ground. And I don't know if there's been a modern survey taken of the environment here. There should be, but there's like in the Big Thicket part of Texas. There's been all sorts of environmental surveys done there and they've even turned it into a national preserve so that they can try to recover some of that land. But it just it destroyed habitats. It gets on the animals. They can no longer insulate themselves. Very, very bad for the environment to do those gushers.
Speaker 3:Also, a problem at the time was the rule of capture and so the rule of capture. You and I have property next door to each other. I have oil, but we're really in the same oil pit basically. So if I take all the oil, you don't get any. So you put your own well, in there real fast and we're both taking oil but neither of us has anything we can do with it because there's no pipelines or any place to get it out. Now there's proration. You're only allowed to take a certain amount of oil out of a hole.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it was seen as like a wild animal right and wherever it runs that's where, that's who owns it and that's how early Texas famously it's spindle top, of course, the big gusher that ushered in really the modern Texas oil industry, so you know, spewed over a hundred thousand gallons a day for a week before they capped that sucker. And if you go out there now and look around where the original spindle top is, nothing grows there. I mean it's a big flat. You know Permian Basin has all those out there around Kermit, for example, and Wink Sink holes and everything else where basically it's devastated, mainly from the oil they let collect, just like you said, in the 1920s and the 1930s into the 1940s, before they actually came up with ways to stop that collection and things like that. So when does the exhibit open, helen, tell us that, and how will the public get to see it and things like that?
Speaker 3:So it is in manufacturing now. We expect to have it back in about 10 days and in theory I could go ahead and put it out. We're going to have a reception here at the college that we haven't decided the date yet because I don't know the exact date I'm going to receive it. We'll have a reception here and then its permanent home will be in the library. So whenever it's not out traveling it will be viewable here at the Ranger College Library. We already have a few things laid on. The Eastland County Museum is going to have it through the whole month of August. We've got arrangements with all of the schools in the county. On a parent's day or a career day or something, the exhibit's going to go out there just for a single day and that way people can view it there. We plan to take it out to events like we have Rip Fest celebrating Ulrip. You know everybody knows our frog right, our horn toad. So we go out to Rip Fest and we put it out with the rest of the vendors that are out at Rip Fest and those are the plans.
Speaker 3:I do have a webpage that has a calendar on it. I'll send you guys the link so that you can post it with show notes and people can email me to schedule it Anything that's not already scheduled. On the dates that are scheduled I'm including the location and the hours of the facility. So if you want to schedule it for yourself, go ahead and send me all that information we can get it out with. If it has to be shipped, because a lot of places I'll drive to.
Speaker 3:If you want it in Weatherford, I'll places I'll drive to. If you want it in weatherford, I'll drive it over there. If you want it in abilene I'll drive it over to you. But if you want it, you know, in houston or nacogdoches, then it's got to be mailed and the receiving museum or school will have to pay for the shipping and any advertising of their own. But the exhibit itself is free. If you want to come get it, you can do that and save shipping. If somebody out in New York or Chicago wants it, that's the only cost they'll be to. It is the shipping.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great. Have you contacted per se? The Petroleum Museum in Midland might be a good place to put it up.
Speaker 3:They were very helpful on approving some of the photographs that we were able to use on the exhibit and they haven't scheduled anything yet, but it's entirely possible it could end up out there. I do know it's going to go out to the Midland Rockhounds minor league baseball team. It's going to go out there for at least one weekend, but we haven't scheduled it yet. But when I wrote him for permission to use his icon for the Rockhounds he was so excited and I was so glad that somebody was excited about it, you know. So we haven't scheduled it but it's going out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, good, you know the president of Midland College is a friend of Gina. We went to graduate school with him, david Kennedy. Maybe they would want to do something. We'll be glad to point in that direction, if that's a thing. This is fascinating. When you do come up with these exhibits and this is probably a big two for the Ranger Library, that's probably not something that you do. It's great. So how did you come? I know you've done lots of things. How did you come to work? You said that you took a long road to being a librarian. How did you come to work at the Ranger College Library?
Speaker 3:So after I got my first master's and I was interested in teaching really, without teaching experience you can't get a teaching job so I adjuncted, like we talked before. I was at Cisco, I was at Dallas College, I was at Ranger College doing adjuncting and I really enjoyed that. But after three or four years of that it kind of became more about finding full time work than it was about teaching.
Speaker 1:Adjuncting's a young person's job, not for people that are not just real young.
Speaker 3:So I applied for a job at Ranger College in the financial aid office but I had already been working here and the HR guy knew me and he said why aren't you applying for the library job? I said well, the job description says it needs an MLIS and I don't have one. He said we'll see what we can do about that. So we talked to the librarian and I didn't even like refill out another application, I just talked to the head librarian and started working here a couple of days later and I went the next semester. I started school at University of Southern Mississippi to get that MLIS. So I was qualified for my job.
Speaker 3:But I really I belong here and that makes me so happy because a long time I had been saying if I had it to do all over again, I'd be a librarian. And I did have it to do all over again and I got the opportunity. And now, instead of just the students in my classes, I really do get to help all the students. You know, I helped them learn how to do research and I help them learn how to write paragraphs and I learn how I teach them how to do all of these things that I was teaching in the classroom to 22 students. Now I have the entire student body of the college that I'm helping and I like that very much.
Speaker 1:How'd you end up in Texas? That's probably a story in itself also, so we're actually kind of from here.
Speaker 3:My dad graduated from Ranger High School and he was born in Ranger. But my grandfather was military. My father was military. I became military, so Ranger became a place we come back to when we retire from the Army, and so I didn't grow up here and I only spent a few summer vacations here. I don't really know people, but I'm from here, so my last name is Cozart. People say, are you related to? And I'm like, yes, may have never met him, but I related to him.
Speaker 1:Like our names. If you chose to be a price, we're related to you Somehow, some way, we're related to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, I don't know how, but it's there. So I'm from here, but I'm not from here.
Speaker 2:I wanted to ask you a question about Ranger and you were talking about tourism. It's right on I-20, or at least part of the county is on I-20. Because I pass by it whenever I'm going out to West Texas from time to time or going to Dallas from West Texas, not far from Abilene. So One thing that I always find amazing, that I think is often overlooked when we're talking about Texas history. We talk about agriculture in Texas history and everybody thinks Texas longhorn cows, Texas everybody has a horse and Texas, you know, oil, maybe wind farms. Nobody talks about Texas peanuts yes, Gorman, peanuts farms. Nobody talks about texas peanuts yes. So I'm always amazed. I remember the first time I think I was around coming up through cherokee and whatnot, and there's these peanut mills. Tell us about how in the world did peanuts get started in? I guess that's rolling plains, right, or is it um?
Speaker 3:we're at the very edge of the hill country and we're in Fort's Trail region of the Heritage Trails. So we're we're at that cross timbers line, where we're on the desert side and Breckenridge is on the forest side of it. You know so the earliest farmers we had settlements here in the 1860s and those farmers are the ones that brought in the peanuts had settlements here in the 1860s and those farmers are the ones that brought in the peanuts. And by 1917, there had been a really severe drought and people were abandoning their property. When the oil came in you saw people flocking back here because they owned property. They'd been abandoned because the drought had been so bad, but the peanuts came back pretty good. After that. There was a processing plant here in Ranger for a long time. My grandfather worked in it after he retired from the Army.
Speaker 2:I had no idea that peanut culture had been in that region since the 1860s, that's really One of the first crops.
Speaker 3:That and cotton. There's cotton everywhere, though, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah but I mean that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:You know, gene, they started growing a lot of. You know this challenge. Exactly right. They started growing peanuts early there in that across trimbers region as it moved in but you know one of the big centers of peanuts. Now, as long as we're talking about, let's talk about way out in west texas by seminoles in gaines county. A lot of peanuts up now uh strawberries you know ropesville, ropesville right by lava. A lot of peanuts on there and I think our last cross.
Speaker 2:I think our last processing center is in gorman, which is lower, is in the southern part of the county so let me ask you a question, since you, since you brought in ropesville also, there's a lot of vineyards that are now being put in out in that region, up and down that road, brown Hill Highway. So has wine culture made it out to Ranger yet?
Speaker 3:No, not really. We have a vineyard in Rising Star, which is also in the southern part of the county, and I believe there's a newer vineyard in Cisco, which is also that's the west side of the county. We don't do a whole lot of it here in Ranger. I don't know why, really. I know we have some grapes in our house. We imported a little strand from Kentucky many years ago and just kind of put it out there and it sort of took its own initiative and became the whole back wall of the house. But yeah, I don't know of a whole lot of people here yet in Ranger, on the west side of the county, that are doing much with wine.
Speaker 2:So, if people want to come to Ranger, what can they expect to see? What kind of you know we're talking about tourism again what kind of things besides the museum, besides the Ranger College, what things might they look for?
Speaker 3:the ranger college. Uh, what things might they look for? Uh, so we have the the oil boom museum, which is in our old railroad station, and the railroad station was built in 1924, I think, to accommodate the, um the numbers of trains that were bringing goods in. At one point we had 10 lumber yards here in Ranger because there was so much housing construction going on for that 100,000 people. Now I don't really believe it was 100,000. I think it was probably closer to 40. But if you read Boy's House you got to believe him right.
Speaker 1:Well, you don't have to believe him.
Speaker 3:I sometimes feel bad about denigrating Boy's house, but in the end he was a folklorist, not a real, you know that's a.
Speaker 1:That's a very charitable way to put it, helen.
Speaker 3:Yeah so you know he liked a hundred thousand. I think it was probably closer to 40. The 1920 census came in at 22, 000, which is still a big jump from 800.
Speaker 1:It was. It's just FYI. My maternal grandfather came and worked on that boom. He left Now not the boom, he wasn't the boom, he came later but he worked in the oil field around there in the late 1920s 1930s. He was in Oklahoma before that and did that kind of work. As we're coming to the end, I want you to touch on something that I really want you to talk about, because it's something that you can speak to, is a big part of what's happening to the historical profession and particularly the historical education profession as a whole. You did a lot of work as a contingent faculty and got into this as contingent faculty and now, while you're doing something I'm sure you love it's you know you moved to library as no or no longer as a teaching, and doing this, tell us just. I want to say a glimpse in the life of someone teaching at three different places, sometimes of a contingent faculty member, and how tough it is and how much you have to persevere really to make it.
Speaker 3:So all my classes at Dallas were in person and I got a little apartment there. To you know, I'd go up on Sunday night and stay and come home Thursday afternoon. My Cisco and Ranger classes were all online. So I would get off at Dallas, I'd go to my little apartment and then I would sit and do grading and stuff for the classes for the other schools and I mean it was, it was all right. I would so much rather be face-to-face. I wish the online courses would just go away. Students don't learn nearly as much online.
Speaker 3:Face-to-face is just. You just know when they get it, you know when you need to rethink it, when you need to restate it, you know which students need more help, because you can see it in their eyes and I just, I really love face-to-face, but it is. It's really challenging. There's a legal limit A person can only adjunct at three classes at a college, and so in order to actually make enough money to pay rent, you've got to adjunct at two or three different schools, which ends up being nine, sometimes 12 classes, and a regular professor has a four or five schedule or a five four schedule Plus. You know you've got your writing on top of that, but you know that's half the course load that an adjunct has, but an adjunct makes less than half the money.
Speaker 1:It's an exploitive system.
Speaker 2:It is very much so it honestly is.
Speaker 1:And it's just I don't kind of wish we could find some other way to do this, but with administrators and such I don't know. And I think it's going to get worse as we get into the future. And in fact in Texas particularly, I really think at all schools, two years, four years, the tenured track professor is going to go away.
Speaker 2:They're not going to. It's also a funding issue.
Speaker 3:We don't tenure anyone here anymore. We only have one person left tenured who was grandfathered in from like 18 years ago, when they changed it ago when they changed it.
Speaker 2:It's also a funding issue, because you know the state. One of the things we said you know, a couple of years ago is that instead of saying we're a state-sponsored institution, we're just a state institution, because when I was going to college this was back in the 80s and early 90s the state was paying 60% of the bill, and today they've gotten away from that. They're paying less than 20.
Speaker 1:At SFA right now our budget 11%.
Speaker 3:Wow, 11% is provided, so the state recently passed a new funding rule for community colleges that takes away the FTE component of it and makes it about numbers of students that graduate. And each type of student gets a certain amount of money for graduations and for certificates and things like that, and I think in the end, the schools are all going to end up getting more money.
Speaker 2:Actually, I'm glad you brought that up, because when I was working in an administration about 10 years ago, the talk was that's how, in the state, it was going to go. It was going to be more completion-based rather than enrollment people in the seats, and so I see that they finally followed through with that, apparently. Yeah, wow, yeah. This semester we just finished.
Speaker 3:I think, was the first.
Speaker 1:Helen, as we get towards the end and these things always happen. Since we just started, one of the things if you've listened to our podcast before what we do with all of our people who come on the last question they get is what do you know? And it's your opportunity to tell us one thing that you want to leave us with that we have to know. So, helen Cozart, what do you know?
Speaker 3:So I thought about this because I do listen to your podcast and I have decided that what I really do know is I know my superpower, and my superpower I think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants, not real creative myself, but if you have an idea, I can make that idea something that's good for me and my students and my school, and I can just take it from from your little idea to my full blown thing. So I have my superpowers taking from other people standing on the shoulders of giants.
Speaker 2:You know that's uh, that that sounds like a, like a simple thing, but really, as I get older, I think that's a very important realization and I know a lot of people say that in their dissertations, their thesis. But you know it is. We all have to work together. We all build and take from each other and borrow from each other, and it's important to know that we're not all ourselves right, we're not it ourselves and a lot of people that need to remember that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think the best story I love about this because I still do it is that we talked about Don Walker and we all steal from things. And so when I started teaching in chemistry at SFA, don had a genius, his little one page. This is how you do a book review thing that he does. And you know he had that nice quote at the end askew obfuscation and sesquipedalianism right, which is self-explanatory. Well, I just basically copied and pasted that. That became something I handed out and I felt, well, I need to tell don. I did that. So, uh, next time we talked I said I said, don, by the way, I stole your book review thing, so I'll give you full credit. He goes oh, don't do that, hell, I sold, stole it from somebody at lh who I don't even remember who it was.
Speaker 1:So so we all borrow everything we have. Tell them this has been fantastic. Folks, as you're listening, remember the Ranger Oil Boom exhibit at Ranger College. As you're hurtling down I-20 trying to get someplace God, I hope you're not going to Abilene, but you know if you have to go to Abilene.
Speaker 3:We always go to.
Speaker 1:Abilene. I have a love hate where I should go to Abilene. I was born in Abilene and now I don't ever want to go back. But anyway, if you do that, stop in at Ranger and they think they have good restaurants. If you have that, stop in at Ranger and see the exhibit. Helen, thanks for coming on with us, it's been fantastic.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you.