50 years and still going for columnist

Filed:April 27, 1999

By BOB CHRISTIE
Californian staff writer
e-mail: bchristie@bakersfield.com

Most would consider 50 years in any job just about enough. Not Bill Rintoul, who has worked as The Californian's oil columnist since 1949.

At 76, Rintoul has no plans to change his daily routine of sifting through the goings-on in the oil fields of Kern County, California and Alaska, then writing his daily column, which appears six days a week in the paper's business section.

His son, Jim, says he believes he keeps on writing because he really doesn't know what else he would do.

"It isn't like he's itching to get out on the golf course," said Jim Rintoul, a computer software training specialist who lives near Santa Cruz. "I'm hoping personally that he slows down a little bit, stops doing the daily grind. He deserves a little bit of relaxation."

The father thinks that's unlikely.

"I'll probably go on until they find me collapsed over the keyboard," says Rintoul, who spends his days writing in the converted garage of his Westchester home of 50 years.

He is only half joking. Since he was a teen-ager in Taft, he's never wanted to do anything but write.

Rintoul does talk wistfully about writing a novel, or returning to short stories. But compiling his column keeps him busy for now, although the day may come when he switches to his other writing interests.

Rintoul's "Oil-field news" column has such a loyal following among industry insiders that nearly anywhere on the West Coast, oil people know his name. Before the advent of e-mail and fax machines, his columns would be mailed by readers to friends working in far-flung drilling locations. In years past, he would show up on offshore platforms or remote drilling sites and be greeted with respect bordering on awe by the roughnecks working the rigs. Once, while visiting the North Slope of Alaska, Rintoul found one of his columns tacked to a bulletin board at a remote site in the middle of tundra.

His speciality is California and especially Kern County's oil fields, but he's been known to travel as far as Saudi Arabia to see and write about fields there. His historical knowledge of the local industry can at times leave listeners and readers staggered.

"Bill has tremendous recall," said friend and Kern oil history buff Dean Van Zant. "He can stand in any spot out in the Midway-Sunset (oil field) and identify the history of that spot. You talk to any oilman in California and you mention Rintoul and their ears perk up."

When the paper began publishing its content on-line at bakersfield.com, readers from across the nation and the world wrote requesting his columns be published there. Concerned about his publishing rights, Rintoul at first would not consent to having his work placed on the World Wide Web. But the requests kept coming in, and the paper eventually was able to convince him to agree to having his columns posted.

Besides the daily column for The Californian, Rintoul has contributed stories published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and Tulsa Daily World.

He also has written four books on California oil industry history, has had two collections of his short stories published, and has written for major magazines on oil, sports and travel. A host of oil companies, plus the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, have commissioned him to work on histories or anthologies.

His books and short stories, like many of his columns, focus on the people who made the oil industry thrive. They are filled with stories of men who took chances that paid off in discoveries, or who toiled in relative obscurity to bring oil to the surface.

How does the son of a water company employee in Taft become a prolific and respected oil writer? Ambition, stubbornness and hard work mostly, but he himself says it also took a great deal of luck.

Rintoul's father, Henry Ward Beecher Rintoul, was a Canadian-born immigrant of Scottish descent whose family came to San Francisco at the turn of the century.

Of his 12 siblings, "Pete" Rintoul, as Bill's father was called, was the only one to get a college education. He had worked as a carpenter in the Bay area, but also attended UC Berkeley, where he earned a civil engineering degree. "Dad was determined not to be a carpenter," his son recalls. Pete Rintoul's first jobs took him to Arizona, where he met Deane O'Connor, who was to become his wife. The young couple moved to Bakersfield, where Pete had landed a position with the Kern County Land Company. Within a short time, the senior Rintoul had moved again, this time to Taft, where he spent the remainder of his career as a civil engineer for the water company.

Bill Rintoul was born in 1922, the third of Pete and Deane Rintoul's sons.

Taft was a booming oil town, but as a teen, Bill never saw himself ending up working in the industry. While attending Taft High School, he became interested in only one sport, boxing. Strangely, that interest can be credited with spurring his ambition to be a writer.

Rintoul says he would write to famous boxers of the day, asking for autographed photos. The times were different — in those days it wasn't uncommon for a letter from a boy to a celebrity to be answered. He still has autographed photos of boxers Max Baer and Joe Louis. More important than those black and whites, though, was the correspondence he struck up with a prizefighter named Max Marek.

After their initial letters, Rintoul says Marek wrote that they needed to discuss something more substantial than boxing, like literature. This spurred the impressionable Taftian to abandon his western pulp novels in favor of more substantial works like Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and the writings of Upton Sinclair.

"After I started reading them, it was like you had been drinking beer all the time and discovered Irish whiskey," he explained. "I had been reading Zane Grey, but when I read Upton Sinclair it really opened my eyes."

By the time he graduated from high school in 1939, Rintoul says his path was nearly preordained. After a year at the junior college in Taft, he transferred to Berkeley, his father's alma mater, majoring in journalism.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Like hundreds of thousands of other men, Rintoul joined the Army. But he wasn't called up until he had earned his degree in 1943.

Rintoul could have entered the service as an officer by virtue of his college education, but he spurned the idea and became a foot soldier with the 89th Infantry Division. He said he felt he belonged with the working men like those he grew up with in Taft.

His experiences in the war profoundly affected Rintoul. His son says he is wary of the reasons governments commit their men to battle, concerned about civil rights and incredibly loyal to those he befriends.

"I think his experiences in the war make him feel that there has to be a better way," Jim Rintoul said.

More than 55 years after returning to Taft from war-torn Europe, that part of his life brings a mixed bag of emotions, from recollections of narrowly escaping a burst of machine gun fire "like a bunch of angry bees flying past your head" that left him shaking in his helmet, to the close friendship he forged with a couple he met in a French village.

That friendship speaks more about the soul of the writer than any of his oil columns ever could.

Rintoul the 22-year-old rifleman entered France through the port of Le Havre several months after D-Day. Always on the lookout for an exciting assignment, he told his captain that he could act as an interpreter. He failed to mention that although he was fairly fluent in Spanish, he couldn't speak French.

The trick, he said, was to walk up to people and ask if they could speak Spanish, then get the interpreting done that way.

As the 89th prepared for battle, his company was bivouacked in a small Normandy town of Ponts-et-Marais, where Rintoul met Oscar and Muriel Lhermurier. Oscar had been severely wounded early in the war and the couple were extremely poor. But they offered the lonely soldier several evenings of conversation and hospitality, and Rintoul would never forget them.

"They didn't have anything," Rintoul said. "We were just good friends. They never asked anything of me and I never asked anything of them. Just friendship."

After several days, the soldiers were issued ammunition and grenades, and received orders to mount up.

"When we pulled out of that little village they all came out to wish us well and wave," Rintoul says. "It almost makes me cry to think about it."

The couple urged him to write a simple letter saying "bon sante," or good health, when he could, just to let them know he had survived.

Survival was very much in doubt for the American soldiers doing battle across Europe in 1944, and Rintoul said he never expected to live through it.

Rintoul's division fought two major battles in the coming months, and he lost friends, but was never injured. When the war ended he found himself on the Czechoslovakian border, and never managed to drop a line to the French couple. Others in his unit returned to the village, and not seeing him, Oscar and Muriel assumed he had perished.

When he got out of the Army in 1946 and returned to Taft, he had only $500 in his pocket, $300 of that his discharge bonus. He had rarely saved his pay, he said, because "money doesn't mean much when you're about to lose your life."

His first job after the Army was as a surveyor, but what he really wanted to do was travel. He and three of his best Army buddies had planned to work their way to South America after the war, but it turned out he was the only one who ever really did.

He spent much of 1947 in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, but as Christmas approached he was running short of cash and longing for home. The timing proved to be perfect. At a party to celebrate the New Year, he met the woman who would soon become his wife, Frankie Jo. They married in 1948.

After he married, Rintoul took a job as a roustabout for Standard Oil in the Taft oil fields, laying pipelines, setting pumping units on wells and the like.

"It was a pretty hard job," he said. "It had the reputation — pretty rightly — that it was one of hardest jobs in the oil fields."

But it wasn't for him, and Rintoul knew it.

"I thought what I'd do is be a writer," he says. "I'd read a lot of books and thought ‘shoot - I can do that.'"

He returned to school on the G.I. bill, this time to Stanford, and in a year had earned his master's degree in journalism while working vacations in the oil fields.

His first paying writing job, in 1949, was as a freelancer for The Californian, covering the Delano area. His assignments included covering weddings, crime and fires, all the normal goings-on in a small rural town, and being paid by the column inch made him a better observer.

"I wrote up everything from the wedding ceremony to what the bride wore," he recalls with a chuckle. Early on in his freelance career, he was approached with a proposition that would support him and his family forever.

"The Californian wanted to start up an oil column and they didn't have anyone who knew about oil," Rintoul said during a recent conversation in his converted garage office. "And I had worked in the oil fields, so I started writing about it then."

Although he could have taken a salaried position, Rintoul had never wanted to work for anyone. He truly believed he could make do selling his work freelance.

As the decades unfolded and the Rintouls started to raise a family, writing about oil became his primary vocation. More and more publications asked him to submit stories, including a newly formed oil magazine run by McGraw-Hill in New York. That job paid better than any other he'd had, although it wasn't enough all by itself.

"I didn't make a living out of any single one," Rintoul says. "Its always been that way." When the publication folded, there were a couple of lean years, but he had prepared for that. Writing freelance meant expecting there to be ups and downs, and he had put some money in the bank for just such a day.

Frankie Jo gave birth to the family's first child in 1950, a daughter named Susan, while the couple still lived in Delano. Susan is now a teacher in Fresno with two grown children. After the family had moved to their current Bakersfield home, Jim came along, in 1951.

Having a father who could work at home had its benefits for the family, his son said.

"He was always here," Jim Rintoul said. "I remember many a time bringing the neighbor kids over to play in the back yard and my dad would be in there typing away. He said it made him feel good to have us out there playing while he was working."

Travel became the Rintoul family passion. When the children were small, the goal was to travel to all 50 states, always with Bill at the wheel of the family sedan. They completed the tour by the time Jim was in his mid-teens. Since the children left home, Frankie Jo and Bill have visited dozens of nations, usually taking tours.

But one of their favorite spots of all is a small French village near the shores of the English Channel. It is the same village where the young soldier forged a friendship in the dark days of 1944.

After arriving back in Taft after the war, Bill Rintoul finally wrote the letter to Oscar and Muriel Lhermurier to say "bon sante."

The reply was joyous, Rintoul says, partly because they were so happy to hear he hadn't perished in the war. Rintoul himself was humbled with their outpouring of affection.

"They had a son and wanted me to be the godfather!" he recalled.

The friendship blossomed and strengthened over the years, and the Rintouls were welcomed by the whole village. Oscar passed away several years ago, but Muriel is still alive, as is the godson, Leonel, and his three children, two of whom have visited Bakersfield.

"It's just a friendship that has just endured and it will endure until we're all dead," the writer says. "It was just nice to have somebody somewhere that acted like they would not like to see you get killed."

Having reached an age in which some look back with regret on their lives, Jim Rintoul says his father has none. "He pretty much wrote his own ticket, and has been at peace with that," he said. "He's a content man. He's made his bed and slept in it and taken everything that ensued from it without bitterness."

As for his writing, Bill Rintoul says being a scribe about the oil industry was just a niche he found for himself.

"If I could have made a living on writing a novel, I would," Rintoul says. "But I just wrote about what I knew about."