David Mitchell INTERVIEWER

PETROLEUM INDUSTRY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEWEE: David Mitchell INTERVIEWER: Nadine Mackenzie DATE: July 1984 NM: This is Nadine Mackenzie speaking. I am interviewing Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell, thank you very much for having accepted to participate in our project. Can you tell me, when and where were you born? DM: I was born in Calgary, in 1926, one of the few locals left loose running the streets. NM: So you are a true Calgarian? DM: Yes, I am. NM: What did your parents do? DM: My father was a baker originally and a very successful one, until he became an excessive gambler and then he ended up working as a City employee in relief administration back in the Depression, just before his death, as a matter of fact. My mother was, in the classic term, a housewife. Both from Britain, she was from London, and he was from Blackpool and to their dying day both of them argued which was the better city and to my last day my mother was a devout believer in the monarchy and supported everything to do with it. They were an interesting pair. NM: Why did they come to Canada, and do you know when? DM: They came to Canada in 1908. My father was a very good singer and an entertainer and he jumped ship in New York and swam to shore and came into the country, I suspect a lit illegally. My mother came here because her brother had immigrated looking for opportunity and they met, father and mother, in Calgary in 1908, the days of the mud streets on what was then, Stephen Avenue, and board sidewalks. NM: So you were educated in Calgary? DM: Yes, I grew up in Calgary and attended various schools here. An interesting background on how that early schooling affected me, I’ll come back to that one when it’s more practical but yes, here in Calgary and then graduated from the University of Oklahoma in Petroleum Engineering in 1950. NM: Why did you choose petroleum engineering? DM: Well, that’s the part that I look back on with great relish because I really knew most of my life that I was going to be an oilman. Calgary, in my early days, was a city where the southern sky was lit. Lit by the flares of surplus gas being burned in the Turner Valley oil field. Gas had no value, you wasted it. NM: You just burned it. DM: You just burned it. There was huge flare out there, so large they used to call it Hell’s Half Acre and Hell’s Half Acre had a patch of green grass year round, with the snow and frost not even able to touch it because of the enormous surplus gas. So you looked out, you knew which direction was south. That’s where the lights were turned on in the sky, the pink glow. There are other reasons too Nadine, if you’d like I can just elaborate on them, they’re part of the background. In those days, I was born in ‘26 and caught enough of the tag end of the Depression to know what it was like without ever really suffering very much. But in those days a trip to Turner Valley was a great expedition and my holidays in the summer frequently were with a sister of my mother who lived there. And I would go out and spend time in the Turner Valley oil fields. We used to climb the wooden derricks at night because otherwise we’d get caught and that of course, was doubly dangerous. We collected the beer bottles that these rich oilmen threw in the ditches as they were driving up and down the roads and that impressed me, I thought that had to be wealth. And as young kids we’d sit outside the Black Diamond Hotel where the oil drillers drank their beer of a Saturday night and it was our form I guess, of what would be television, watching the fist fights as they came barrelling out the door and the battles raged and the euphoria of the Turner Valley boom. #041 NM: It must have been quite entertaining too? DM: In those days they created towns that they called Little Chicago, Little New York, Little Philadelphia, they are Longview and other names now, and we got to know them well. I guess it was that combination that initially tickled my fancy and got my attention. These were vibrant people, they were part of the community that I sort of lived in or near, they seemed to be very successful and they were doers. And I guess I knew at the age of 12 I was going to be in the oil business. NM: Why did you choose the University of Oklahoma? DM: At that time, first of all I’d been in the Air Force, a bit of a checkered career, having been tossed out for being underage and then in 1945 released. I finished my schooling, what I needed here, my various high school and so on but I wanted petroleum engineering. The Department of Veterans Affairs in Canada offered you one month of free university tuition and about, as it turned out, $100 a month for living for each month of service. I had enough months that I could basically, almost get my way through university. So I wanted to go petroleum engineering, I checked at several places, there were no courses in petroleum engineering in Canada so I went to the Department of Veterans Affairs in Calgary, said I’d like to go to the University of Oklahoma or Texas. They had a number of veterans then saying, we’d like to go to a foreign university and they realized that in many cases, this was but a gambit in order to have a trip and have some fun somewhere, so they denied it. One of the most interesting coincidences in my life and I still look back on it, I went to the Calgary Public Library, which is over at Memorial Park, 4th St. and I got some books on petroleum engineering and I came down the steps. Up the steps came the man from the Department of Veterans Affairs and he remembered me. He said, what are you doing here and I said, I’m getting books and he said, on petroleum engineering because I was showing him and I said, yes, I was serious and he said, come and see me tomorrow. That’s how I got my permission to go to the United States. It still touches me. Luck or whatever, call it what you will. NM: He realized that really, you were serious. DM: Yes. I get very emotional on this, as a matter of fact, this is the reason I met my wife of course, in Oklahoma and we’re married 34 years now, a fine woman, a wonderful woman. And that’s how I got to Oklahoma was going to the library and walking down the steps at the right time when the man came up the other way. #072 NM: Fantastic encounter. DM: Yes, a real coincidence. NM: How long did you stay at the University of Oklahoma? DM: I was there from 1948 to 1950 on a condensed course. They allowed us then to go through summer and also, I took a full curriculum, the maximum number of hours and then took 2 courses by correspondence. That’s over the legal load limit, in order to get through in a hurry because I didn’t have that much money. And as a matter of fact, I borrowed some oil money from an oilman to finish the last year but that’s another story. NM: And after graduating from the University of Oklahoma, what did you do? DM: I should back up a little bit. During the time when I was off in the summer months, I worked in Canada on geological field trips and this involved going to mountain places. We measured the section of rock, tried to interpret how much of the rock and where it would be under the plains of Alberta, in order to begin the process of oil seeking which is now much more advanced with a lot of drilling. So I worked for a man who was called Nick Nickels, in the summer months, part time. When I was at the University of Oklahoma he wrote to me and said he was starting a company or being involved in the start up of a company and would I join him. And another coincidence in my life, I hadn’t talked to him or had any correspondence with him for months and I decided to write to him and ask what was going on and he wrote to me and our letters crossed in the mail. We were fully 4 weeks getting this straightened out as to whether I was applying for a job or he was asking me to join him and it was a very pleasant sort of overlapping coincidence. So I came to work. NM: ??? DM: Yes. I’d never applied for a job and that’s interesting and I worked with them for a long time. Go ahead. NM: What did you do after the university then? DM: I joined the Great Plains Development Company and at that time, as a junior engineer in various positions through the company. I was the land man, the scout, I should tell you some tales of scouting, those are intriguing.

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