HARDER, Lloyd Kenneth (Boots)

Lloyd Kenneth Harder was born December 22, 1912 died December 9, 2004. He was sometimes called L.K., but most often Boots and was called Lloyd only by his sisters and an occasional nurse at the doctor’s office. He was often asked about how he came to be called Boots. His answer was usually something like “Oh I got it when I was very young.” When pressed he would finally fess up to the whole storey. When he was about 7 or 8 years old his dad and two of his uncles let him go with them on a hunting trip. He insisted on wearing boots like those worn by his favorite uncle. However the only boots available were several sizes too big for him and he complained most of the trip. The uncles started calling him Boots and he then complained about that. Well that was the wrong thing to do to these two. The more he complained the more they insisted on Boots. It didn’t take long for the name to stick and for the next 80 plus years it was Boots. Having a nickname turned out to be a blessing when he began working in the oilfields where everyone it seems was tagged with some moniker like Bull, Pug, Digger or sometimes something much worse. Dad was born on the family farm in Many Springs Missouri. At an early age the family moved to Stroud Oklahoma where his father soon found work in the nearby oilfields. At every opportunity Dad went to work with his father and learned to love the drilling business. School did not hold the same fascination for him as the drilling business. His first grade teacher who was also his aunt sent a note home one day asking why Boots hadn’t come to school for the last couple of days. Well he had been sent to school, so his mother went looking for him and found him hiding in the corner of the field in the back of the house. The importance of school was impressed on him and he became much more consistent in his attendance. One summer vacation when he was in high school, Dad and a cousin hopped a freight train to see the world. Preplanning was something Dad was very good at in later years, but apparently it was a skill he had not yet acquired. They were gone for several weeks and they did not eat on any regular basis while they were gone. By the time Dad got home he was very hungry and all he found in the ice box was a bowl of cold turnips. He didn’t like turnips but sat down and finished off the entire bowl. He later claimed he acquired an appreciation of turnips of all kinds from that day forward. At the age of eighteen and early into the Great Depression he left home to find work in the oilfields of Wyoming. He was warned when applying for work not to tell anyone he was from Oklahoma. The Okies apparently had a reputation for heading home at the first sign of winter, and Wyoming could certainly show those signs at the drop of a hat. He was asked at the first place he was hired if he had ever worked on a drilling rig and he replied honestly that he had not. In those days the rigs were moved to a new location in pieces and had to be assembled at the drill site. The foreman watching him work accused dad of lying about not having worked on a rig because he could see that he knew as well as most of the hands how to assemble a drilling rig. Of course he had watched his father do it many times but didn’t want to admit being from Oklahoma for fear of being fired on the spot. It was shortly after coming to Wyoming he met Gordon Cameron who was to become his best friend and later business partner. Gordon was a driller at that time and took dad under his wing. If you knew Gordon, you will know, being under his wing wasn’t necessarily always a good thing. They remained close friends for nearly forty years until Gordon’s death in 1970. Gordon was the brother Dad never had. Drilling crews at that time were extremely close knit groups. They were constantly moving from one well field to another and had to depend on each other. All of the friendships Dad formed during those years were with people he worked with on a crew. When moving to a new location it was common for the men to go to work in the morning while the wives found suitable housing and often had dinner on the table when the men came home that evening. These were not necessarily the dream homes. I remember hearing of jealousies when one wife found a place with a two holer outhouse when the others suffered with the ordinary one holer. One of my favorite memories as a child was when one of Dad’s old friends from the oil fields would come to Buckeye to visit. They would invariably sit around the dinner table and swap tales of their days in the Wyoming boomtowns. While dad was not one to bring up anything he thought his children didn’t need to know about him, his friends were not nearly so reluctant. The Wyoming oil field towns were reincarnations of the boomtowns of the Gold Rush days. Dance halls (that’s a nice name for them), saloons, gambling halls were the rule rather than the exception, and Wild West like gun fights were not unheard of. As the governor of California might say, it was no place for Girly Boys. Often times the locals developed a true dislike for the oil field hands. One story I remember hearing went something like this. The local cowboys decided it was time to run these oil field folks out of town and a group of them headed for the local boarding house. Dad was in the boarding house at the time. The bad news was he was the only one there. He said he knew if he ran he would never be able to show his face in town again, so he went out the front door and met those cowboys right there in the street. He said the next thing he knew he was lying in the gutter with someone on top of him. Dad was getting a good pounding and was literally saved by another cowboy who decided that a killing probably wasn’t something they really wanted to do and pulled the man off and left dad lying there in the gutter. After six years of bachelorhood, Dad walked into the Excel Restaurant in Lusk, Wyoming and his life took a sudden and by all accounts a positive turn. Working there was a young 18 year old waitress by the name of Hilda Zimmerman. Eight months of courtship and they both knew they had found a winner. That June the drill crew Dad was on had a day off and they all decided that would be a good time for a wedding. They picked Mom up in Lusk and headed to Sioux County Nebraska to find a Judge. Now Sioux County is where Mom grew up. The only town in that county was Harrison and the only judge in Harrison was Judge Wilmsdorfer. The judge was also a friend of my grandfather and he would not perform the wedding until my grandfather gave his permission. The wedding was delayed but only by hours. With Cleve and Millie Zimmerman in attendance and Gordon Cameron as best man, Boots and Hilda were wed. Dad had sowed his wild oats and was ready to settle down. He told Mom he would give up drinking if she wouldn’t ask him to dance. It was a deal they could both live with. Their first year of marriage witnessed 18 moves. Mom learned quickly the ways of the oil field wives. She actually thought it was an adventure. During the next fourteen years they saw the oil fields of Wyoming, Montana, Oklahoma and California as well as the birth of their three children. In 1949 Gordon had moved to Buckeye with one of the first rotary rigs in Arizona and began drilling irrigation wells. He immediately began recruiting Dad to come and join him. In 1952 Dad did just that. The family packed up the household belongings and one Collie dog in September and came to Buckeye to begin one more adventure. During those years Dad worked pretty much 12-16 hours a day seven days a week. An occasional weekend would be taken off to do chores around the house. Laying tile in the family room and kitchen or re-roof the house. He had a work ethic that just can’t be found today. He truly loved the drilling aspect of being a drilling contractor, but was not especially fond of the business side. Almost all of the wells he drilled were with the shake of the hand. He believed if a mans word wasn’t any good, what was on a piece of paper wasn’t going to help. He trusted others and they trusted him. It worked very well in almost every case. Dad and Mom joined a local bridge group. Bridge was played every Saturday night come rain or shine. Dad could work late every night of the week but Saturdays meant he had to be home unless there were serious problems at the rig. Bridge was simply a must. Dad once remarked that he hoped he didn’t die on Bridge night. Family vacations were something to behold. We had a two week vacation each summer that usually involved a 3,000 mile round trip by automobile. We would get up around 4:30 AM and pile into the car and drive straight through to western Nebraska, arriving there sometime in the afternoon the following day. Dad usually drove all night and let Mom drive a few hours the next morning while he slept for 2 or 3 hours. The festivities started almost immediately upon arrival at the Zimmerman homestead and would go on well into the evening. Even when I was 9 or 10 years old I marveled at how Dad could act as if he had a full nights sleep the night before. After a few days in good ole Sioux County Nebraska we would jump into the car and head out to see Dad’s side of the family scattered across Oklahoma and Missouri. After a brief flurry of visits across those two states we made a mad dash for home in time to see Dad leave at the crack of dawn the next morning for work. He may have actually gone back to work to get a little rest. On one of these vacations when my sister Jo was about twelve we were at Granddad Harder’s in Missouri. Jo was perfecting her driving skills on Granddad’s tractor. I was in a more or less secure location on the tractor while Dad was standing back on the hitch. Granddad had opened a gate and told Jo to let out on the clutch and drive through. I learned how to pop a clutch from my little sister. That tractor jumped forward and I looked back just in time to see Dad fly backwards off the tractor and land flat on his back with one of the most surprised looks on his face I have ever seen. Dad had a very good sense of humor but displayed it so seldom that it could take you completely by surprise. Dad taught me to drive on some of the back roads out here. I remember one of the early lessons I was driving down some particularly bumpy road when Dad suddenly told me to stop. I quickly stopped an asked him what the matter was and he told me to go back. I asked back where and he told me to go back I had missed one of the chuckholes in the road. When I came back to work with Dad I gained new respect for Dad’s native intelligence. One example comes to mind. Fishing jobs in the drilling business is usually costly and time consuming. Fishing becomes necessary when something has been inadvertently added to the hole. It almost always has to be fished out. Dad was as good at this type of fishing as anyone I have ever seen outside of some who did it for a living. We were finished drilling on a well and the morning drill crew had dropped about 600 feet of 2 ¼ inch tubing into a 1,400 foot deep 26 inch hole. Dad came out and just started cutting and welding until he had built a tool he thought would work. We ran that tool into the hole and Dad got on the brake and rotated and moved the string of pipe up and down until he was satisfied he had the fish and told me to bring it out of the hole and go back and clean out the hole and get ready to set casing the next morning. He was going home. I asked him what we should do if when we came out of the hole the fish wasn’t there. He just said oh it will be there. And sure enough it was. In 1977 Dad retired. I truly worried how he would adjust to retirement after he had worked for most of his life long hours with minimum days off. When spoke of retirement he always talked about a fishing pole and a boat. The truth is he really wasn’t very good at that kind of fishing. I did not need to worry. He took to it like a duck to water. He just continued to work but switched from drilling to honey do’s. Mom always was creating projects for something. If it wasn’t table tops or Bazaar booths for the Church it was a project for the Buckeye Women’s Club. Travel figured into his retirement plans also. They traveled to Europe, Africa, Mexico and made many motoring trips within the good ole US of A. One of those trips was a motor home trek up the Alcan Highway with long time friends Wallace and Alberta Bales. There were several trips to Lake Powell where the whole family would rent a houseboat and just explore that beautiful lake. He spent many hours with his grandchildren and later great grandchildren. Hours that were so enjoyed by him and built great memories for them. L.K. Boots Harder, Great-grandfather to fifteen, Grandfather to 7, Father to 3 and for 67 years husband to Hilda. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ West Valley View, Avondale, Arizona December 14, 2004 Lloyd Kenneth “Boots” Harder, 91, of Buckeye died Dec. 9, 2004. Mr. Harder was born Dec. 22, 1912, in Many Springs, Mo. After attending school in Stroud, Okla., and later the Luscombe School of Aeronautics in Dallas, he went to work in the oil fields of Wyoming. Mr. Harder later met Hilda Mae Zimmerman there, whom he married June 5, 1937, in Harrison, Neb. In 1952, after working in the old fields of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Montana and California, he and his wife moved to Buckeye. Mr. Harder spent the next three decades drilling irrigation and municipal water wells across Arizona. After retirement, he and his wife traveled extensively. Mr. Harder was a member of the Community Church of Buckeye, the Masonic Lodge and Good Sam’s Camping Club, and a charter member of the Arizona Water Well Association. Mr. Harder is survived by his wife of 67 years, Hilda; two daughters, Darlene Carlson of Scottsdale and Jo Phillips of Mesa; one son, Bill Harder of Mesa; seven grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren. A service will be held at 10:30 a.m. today at the Community Church of Buckeye, 808 Eason Ave. The Rev. Beverly Ritland will officiate. Interment will be in Harrison, Neb.