The Los Angeles Times once called
William Rintoul “one of the West’s
most unusual writers.” Oil field
journalists are indeed rare and are becoming
even rarer. Nevertheless, their contributions
are not to be ignored. Petroleum history is
a chronicle of the largest industry that has
shaped the modern world for the past 150
years or so. Lighting, heating, transportation
(on land, on the sea and in the air), rocket
propulsion, petrochemicals and medicines
are all gifts of this black gold. There have
been many authors of the history of the oil
and gas industry, but William Rintoul, who
died 20 years ago next month, on June 26,
2001, was different. He crystallized in his
lifelong work the very history of the oil and
gas industry in California. For five untiring
decades, he wrote thousands of articles on
this subject.
It is impossible to decouple California’s
petroleum history from Rintoul’s legacy.
A Kern County Patriot
The third and youngest son of his family,
William Thomas Rintoul was born on April
30, 1922 in Taft, Calif. His father, Henry Ward
Beecher “Pete” Rintoul, was born in Canada
in 1887, but grew up in San Francisco,
and graduated in civil engineering from
the University of California in Berkeley in
1911. Beecher Rintoul first worked for the
Southern Pacific Railroad and then for the
Western Water Company (largely associated
with oil fields), becoming the company’s
general manager in 1940. He married Deane
Gertrude O’Connor in 1917 when they both
worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
They raised three sons: Henry Ward Beecher,
Jr., John David and William. Both the
younger Beecher and John David graduated
in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley.
Beecher worked for the Southern Pacific
Railroad, and John David for the Standard
Oil Company.
The city of Taft (named after U.S.
President William Taft) is located in the
foothills of the San Joaquin Valley, in Kern
County, Calif. Bakersfield, another oil town in
Kern County where Rintoul spent most of his
life, is only 32 miles east of Taft. This setting
in the midst of prolific oil fields had a lifelong
pull on Rintoul’s life. While a teenager,
Rintoul became interested in boxing
and wrote articles on famous boxers for
magazines in the United States, Canada and
Europe. One of these heavyweight boxers,
Max Marek from Chicago, who promoted
himself as “The Man Who Beat Joe Louis”
after having done so in the Golden Gloves
finals in Boston in 1933, was a book lover
and sent Rintoul a list of his favorite novels.
Consequently, Rintoul became a voracious
reader: he read Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair,
Zane Grey, John Steinbeck and other
renowned novelists. While a senior in high
school, Rintoul also worked in oil fields near
Taft on some weekends.
When John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes
of Wrath” was published in 1939 (the year
Rintoul finished high school), the book was
banned (and burned) for a while in California,
but Rintoul was proud to say that he had
already read it. In this novel, Kern County is
depicted as the final destination for the Joad
family’s arduous migration during the Great
Depression. The Joad family represented
the plight of many people from Texas,
Oklahoma and Arkansas who went to the
Golden State in search of jobs.
In 1940, Rintoul went to UC Berkeley to
study journalism. After graduation in 1943,
he joined the U.S. Army and served in the
89th Infantry Division in Europe, later earning
a Bronze Star. In 1946, Rintoul returned to
Taft, then took a year to travel in Mexico
and Central America. During Christmas of
1947, he returned again to Taft, where he
met Frankie Jo Miller. They married on June
19, 1948. For a while, Rintoul worked as a
roustabout for Standard Oil, but his passion
lay in writing. Using the G.I. Bill program for
the returning World War II veterans, Rintoul
returned to school and obtained a master’s
in journalism from Stanford in 1949. He
soon began working for The Bakersfield
Californian as a stringer in Delano, Calif.,
where his daughter Susan was born.
Rintoul’s early assignments were to report
on anything making news – fires, crimes,
weddings, etc. But when the Californian
decided to launch an oil column, Rintoul was
picked as their writer.
In 1950, Rintoul moved his family to
Bakersfield where their son James was
born a year later. Based in his home office
on 2721 Beech Street, Rintoul continued
his freelance writing for the Californian and
numerous other periodicals for the rest of
his life.
Rintoul was proud to be from Taft and
Kern County. He was Taft’s Oildorado Grand
Marshal in 1980. (In 2020, Taft’s 10-day
party and parade, Oildorado, celebrated
the 110th anniversary of the city.) James
Houston, author of “Californians: Searching
for the Golden State,” in which Rintoul was
featured, called Rintoul “a Kern County
patriot” and “a living encyclopedia of
petroleum lore.” During the second oil shock
of 1979-80, Rintoul was proud to say that
Kern County was the fourth largest oilproducing
area in the United States.
Chronicles of California’s Oil
Rintoul was a six-day-a-week “Oilfields”
columnist for The Bakersfield Californian;
he wrote this popular column for 51 years,
from 1949 until his retirement in May
2000. For more than a decade, Rintoul
was also a regular contributor to The Los
Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle,
The Sacramento Bee, the Tulsa World
and Pacific Oil World, and often wrote for
magazines such as Petroleum Week, Drilling
Contractor, Well Servicing Magazine, Oil &
Gas Investor, Oil & Gas Journal, Offshore
Magazine, Westways, California Business,
California Crossroads, Sports Illustrated,
Popular Mechanics, Nation, and so forth.
From 1976-81, Rintoul published three
illustrated books that are indispensable
to any student of California’s oil history:
“Spudding In: Recollection of Pioneer Days
in the California Oil Fields,” published by
the California Historical Society in 1976;
“Oildorado: Boom Times on the West
Side,” published by Western Tanager Press
in 1979; and “Drilling Ahead: Tapping
California’s Richest Oil Fields,” published by
Western Tanager Press in 1981. Reading
through these and his other writings, one
finds a continuous thread in his craft: oil
is humanized. Rather than simply writing
about rigs, drill bits and gushers in a dull
and dry language, Rintoul focused on
people – their lives, dreams, struggles, pains
and joy. For instance, after narrating the
1899 discovery of the Kern River oil field in
California, Rintoul concludes with this line
from “Spudding In”: “Hundreds of men came
from all over the West to see the Elwood
discovery well. At one time a picture was
taken of two hundred men in the lobby of
Bakersfield’s Southern Hotel. An agent for
the Southern Pacific bought oil from the
Elwoods for use in the line’s locomotives.”
This humanization of the oil industry
is also evident in the photographs Rintoul
included in his books. The vast majority are
pictures of ordinary men walking or working
in oil fields. Rintoul often described oilfield
work as hard, dirty and dangerous, and
appreciated the work of these men.
Rintoul also captured the dynamics of
life in oil towns and oil fields of California in
short stories published in more than a dozen
magazines. Some of these were collected
in two books: “Rig Nine” and “Roustabout,”
published respectively in 1983 and 1986 by
a small press, Seven Buffaloes, in Montana.
Two of the stories in “Roustabout” were
translated into Russian and included in an
anthology of American writers entitled, “I
Believe in Humanity,” published in Moscow in
1986. The book’s Russian editor noted that
Steinbeck would have written like Rintoul,
had he written about oil fields. In 2011, 10
years after Rintoul’s death, his children,
Susan and James, published “The Collected
Stories of William Rintoul” in a hardcover
volume; it contains 45 short stories.
Rintoul’s last book was a “big history.”
He was commissioned to write the history
of California’s Division of Oil and Gas for
its 75th anniversary. Rintoul used it as an
opportunity to write a succinct chronicle
of California’s oil. The result was “Drilling
Through Time,” a profusely illustrated
“coffee-table” book published in 1990.
Rintoul ends his book with the hope that
many of the wells “would still be making
contributions to California’s oil production
on into the next century.” Now in that
next century, the petroleum industry is
facing many economic, environmental,
and technological challenges, and
historical perspectives like the one Rintoul
documented will offer some aid with these
challenges.
Although Rintoul largely focused on
Kern Country’s oil industry, his freelance
journalism took him to many other places
both in the United States, such as Colorado,
New Mexico, Texas, the Gulf of Mexico and
Alaska, and overseas, such as Scotland and
Saudi Arabia, among others.
Rintoul was also a sought-after speaker,
and he gave more than 150 speeches. As for
the topics, “the standing family joke,” recalls
his daughter Susan, “was that his topic was
always: ‘the changing oil scene.’” She also
remembers her father in these words: “We
never went out to dinner without people in
the oil industry buttonholing my dad to ask
about what was happening in the oil fields.
He always knew.”
Irreplaceable Legacy
In an interview with the renowned writer
Gerald Haslam (also from Kern County),
Rintoul expressed his feelings about his
profession as freelance journalist: “The
advantage of working as I have worked
is, I’m my own boss. The disadvantage is
a total lack of security.” Nonetheless, he
worked hard, made a successful career,
and supported his family – a life lesson to
the members of any generation who may
be thinking that life is hard only to them.
Aside from journalism, Rintoul also
taught classes in writing at Fresno State
University and Bakersfield Junior College.
He was an active and a lifetime member
of the Kern Press Club, the Petroleum
Club of Taft, the San Joaquin Chapter of
the American Petroleum Institute and the
Petroleum Production Pioneers. For his
contributions to petroleum journalism and
historiography, Rintoul received a number
of awards, including the Pacific Section
AAPG Journalism Award in 1986, the Oil
Baron Award from the American Petroleum
Institute’s San Joaquin Valley Chapter in
1989, AAPG’s Journalism Award in 1990
(presented to him during AAPG’s annual
convention in San Francisco), the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Independent
Oil Producers’ Agency in Bakersfield in
1995 and the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the California Independent Petroleum
Association in 1996.
Rintoul died in 2001 at age 79, after a
year and a half-long battle with Alzheimer’s
disease. Newspapers in California, including
The Los Angeles Times, Bakersfield
Californian and Daily Midway Driller, all
published his obituary. Many “letters to
the editor” from readers, well-wishers and
colleagues honored his life and contributions.
One person remarked that Bill Rintoul was
irreplaceable. Indeed, since his death, no
journalist has filled his shoes. Rintoul is a
Kern County and California legend.
Acknowledgements: I express my
gratitude to Susan Parker Rintoul and
James Rintoul for sharing their time and
information sources and documents on the
life and career of their beloved father.