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Memorial to Wallace Everette Pratt 1885-1981 AMOS SALVADOR Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas, P.O. Box 7909, Austin, Texas 78712 When Wallace Pratt died quietly at his home in Tucson. Arizona, on Christmas Day, 1981, at age 96, the world lost one of its most distinguished geologists. But Wal­ lace Pratt was not only a geologist, he was also a businessman, a scientist of broad interests, a humanist, a philosopher, and a magnificent human being. He combined the very best qualities of a creative scholar with those of a practical-minded executive, the qualities of a successful industrialist with those of a nature lover, and the qualities of an entrepreneur with those of a far-sighted prophet. His career—indeed, his whole life—was a clear reflection of his character, his optimism, his vision, his courage, his flexibility, and his deep affection for and his genuine interest in his fellow men and women. Photo, courtesy of The Lamp, Exxon Corporation Wallace Pratt was indeed a “man for all seasons.” He was born in Phillipsburg, Kansas, on March 15, 1885. He recounted some of the history of his youth in a lively 1978 letter to Hollis Hedberg. His father, William Henry Pratt, a wounded Civil War veteran, traveled by stagecoach from New York to the river crossing where Kansas City now stands. Here he joined a wagon train bound for Oregon “headed by a ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ adventurer, M. J. Bostetter. By the spring of 1873. the wagon train had gotten as far as the present Phillips County,” north-central Kansas, immediately south of the Nebraska border, on what Wallace called “the frayed-out eastern margin of the short-grass country of the high plains.” “There was dissension. Part of the group chose a new leader and pushed on, but most of them, including Bostetter” and Wallace Pratt’s father stayed and founded Phillipsburg. “Beautiful country! Vast prairies—grass stirrup-high. What could Oregon have as good as this?” William Henry Pratt married Bostetter’s daughter, Olive Belle Bostetter, and from this marriage ten children were born. The senior Pratt became a circuit-riding judge and wanted his son Wallace to study law. “But Blackstone proved to be ‘the furthest thing I was from.’ ” His father was disappointed in him. “More than that he was exasperated. ‘What are you going to do with yourself? Here you are 15 years old and you still don’t know what you are going to do. You don’t want to raise wheat. You don’t want to study law. You don’t want to learn banking. The only thing you can think is, you want to go to college. All right, you just go to college. But don’t expect me to pay your way. You pay your own way.’” Since there were four younger children in the family to be raised and educated. Wallace understood his father’s position. On September 3. 1903, at the age of 18. with his savings of $142 (earned as a farm worker during the year following his graduation from high school) pinned to his undershirt, he did go to college—the University of Kansas at Lawrence. He was the third young man from Phillipsburg to enter K.U.—his older brother Frank had been the first one, eight years earlier. 1 THU GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY Oh AMERICA The University of Kansas opened a new world for Wallace Pratt. His latent interest in geology was stimulated when, as a 19-vear-old sophomore, he came in contact with Erasmus Haworth, state geologist and dean of the School of Earth Sciences (“he was a second father to me”). From that point on. in his own words, “geology became for me not only a means of livelihood but quite literally a way of life." He worked his way through the university first as a night clerk at a local hotel and later as an assistant in various capacities to Professor Haworth. He received his A.B. and B.S. degrees simul­ taneously in 1908. his M.A. degree in 1909. and in 1914, after five years of professional experience, he was awarded the degree of Engineer of Mines in Geology. Thus it was that the world lost one more farmer, lawyer, or banker, but gained a geologist whose exercise and practice of his profession over the next almost three-quarters of a century can only be described as truly extraordinary. Upon graduation from the University of Kansas in 1909, Wallace Pratt joined the U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs as a geologist in the Division of Mines of the Bureau of Science of the Government of the Philippines in Manila. He became chief of the Division of Mines in 1913. According to Wallace his only real accomplishment in the Philippines was “largely fortuitous.” On January 29, 1911, Taal volcano, 40 miles south of Manila, “blew its top.” Pratt, on his own initiative, rushed to the volcano before any other scientific observer and was the first to report the devastation and the frightful loss of life caused by the eruption. He claimed modestly. “The eruption made me. It took a cata­ clysm to do it.” Wallace Pratt returned to the United States in 1915. For the next two years he worked for the Producers Oil Company (an affiliate of the Texas Company) first conducting geological reconnaissances in Costa Rica and Mexico, and then as division geologist in their Wichita Falls, Texas, office. In 1918, Wallace Pratt was approached by a small, one-year-old Houston oil company in urgent need of new oil reserves. They wanted geological advice. He accepted the offer, and on March 1, 1918, Wallace Pratt was employed as the first and chief geologist of the Humble Oil and Refining Co. Shortly after, he also became the head of the Geologic. Lease, and Scouting Department. It was the beginning of a brilliant career that would last 27 years and that would lead him to eventually become a vice president and member of the Executive Committee of the Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), now Exxon Corporation, since 1919 Humble’s parent company. Wallace Pratt’s years with Humble in Houston illustrate some of his qualities as a businessman and petroleum geologist: his courage, his excellent judgment, the belief in his own ideas, his unflagging optimism, his vision, his flexibility, his shrewdness as a trader, and his great ability to select, train, and deal with people. These were the years that marked the dawn of the professionals in the oil business, the years when, for the first time, science and industry began to work together in harmony, when geologic principles gradually came to pervade the thinking of the oil business. In this environment, Wallace Pratt was at his best. At Humble. Wallace Pratt pioneered in the use of micropaleontology in the search for oil, and in the astute use of geological scouts. He undertook geophysical prospecting, initiated exploration research, recognized the significance of the new scientific and engineering developments in oil production, and, perhaps most importantly, began an extensive leasing program, particularly of large blocks of land not subject to competitive drilling and production. Wallace Pratt clearly saw how critically important it was to hold extensive acreage in attempting to develop new reserves. He himself negotiated many of these large acreage acquisitions. His most celebrated success was the leasing in 1933. after MEMORIAL TO WALLACE EVERETTE PRATT 3 15 years of patient negotiations, of the one-million-acre King Ranch in south Texas, the largest single oil and gas lease ever purchased in the United States. Wallace Pratt’s leasing and exploration initiatives resulted in Humble’s phenomenal growth in 20 years from a struggling small oil company to the leading producer of oil and the holder of the country’s largest petroleum reserves. This prodigious achievement was recognized by Pratt’s election to Humble’s Board of Directors in 1925 and to Vice- President in 1933. In 1937, Wallace Pratt left Humble to become a director and member of the Executive Committee of Humble’s parent company, the Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), in New York. In 1942 he was elected a vice-president of the company. During his years with Jersey, Pratt directed the worldwide exploration activities of the company with the same sagacity and clear-sightedness with which he had guided the young Humble during its first and most critical years. But he was now playing a different role: he was now the international negotiator, the worldwide representative of his company and of his country. His open mind, his sense of fairness, his broad outlook, and his attention to social and civic responsibilities served him well in this capacity. In 1945, at age 60, Wallace Pratt, partly for health reasons, retired from the Stan­ dard Oil Co. (N.J.). After the death in 1939 of his first wife. Pearl Stuckey, the mother of his three children, whom he had married in 1912, Wallace married Iris Calderhead in 1941. Upon his retirement, the Pratts went to live in a ranch house Wallace had built on a property acquired several years earlier in McKittrick Canyon at the foot of the Guada­ lupe Mountains of west Texas and New Mexico. He first got interested in the property in 1921. “I had been told simply that it was the most beautiful spot in Texas,” he recalled, “so I drove 100-odd miles in an old Model-T to see for myself and it seemed to me that it probably was. So, over a period of years and largely with borrowed money, I gradually achieved full ownership of McKittrick Canyon and its surrounding acreage.” Even though originally his interest in the property was purely esthetic, its unusual geological significance soon became apparent to him: the canyon displayed one of the most spectacular exposures of an exhumed barrier reef complex anywhere in the world.

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