The youngest Gen-Xers picket against the hostile takeover of Phillips Petroleum Company by corporate raiders including Carl Icahn, February 1985. Source: Bartlesville Public School District Office of Community Relations / Granger Meador, Once Upon A Time In Bartlesville Facebook page

Shopping

I loved browsing the high-end shops in downtown Bartlesville and at Eastland Center. I especially loved Britches, Etc., which carried United Colors of Benetton and ESPRIT. There was also Vandevers, a department store painted light pink with tall, stately columns. I couldn’t afford clothes from either place, but it was thrilling just to look and dream.

When I wasn’t in school or at work, I spent nearly all my free time going to church and youth group activities. That’s where I became friends with a group of teenagers whose parents worked for Phillips Petroleum Company. Bartlesville was a true company town, home to the company’s corporate headquarters. There was no part of Bartlesville the company didn’t touch. Its presence and influence were felt in every corner.

Most of my church friends lived in historic homes in downtown Bartlesville or newer, spacious homes in the Cherokee Hills neighborhood. My father found work shining shoes at the adjacent Hillcrest Country Club, where Ree Drummond grew up. Her childhood home reportedly overlooked the fairways. When I learned this about 10 years ago, I wondered if my father shined her father’s shoes. Was he one of the doctors whose generous tips ensured our family ate better that week than we usually did? I’ll never know.

Poverty

My years in Bartlesville, like the rest of my childhood, were marked by  substandard housing, food insecurity, poverty, and violence. The hell never changed, only the ZIP code.

Poverty hits differently when you’re a teenager. In Bartlesville, surrounded by what felt like affluence, I just absorbed it all. I marveled at the wealth around me, though, looking back, it was probably just ordinary middle-class comfort. I was always too curious and captivated to be plagued by jealousy. Also, I had already accepted poverty as a kind of verdict. I was passively convinced a better life wasn’t meant for me, even if I earned a college degree.

My Bartlesville friends were sophisticated. They took ballet and swimming lessons, played stringed instruments, listened to Simon & Garfunkel on their Walkmans, and wore Izods and Calvin Kleins. They had Sweet 16 birthday parties and bought their prom dresses in Tulsa. I lived in an 800 square foot rental in the Oak Park neighborhood. The living room was so tiny I dragged the coffee table into the kitchen so I could do the 20-Minute Workout with Bess Motta. These were my mornings in Teenage Wasteland. In the afternoons, I hung laundry on the line. Do you know how fast clothes actually dry on the line? So fast. It really wasn’t that bad not having a dryer.

We buried our dog Daisy in the backyard of that house. I came home from work one night and she was dead. “She was trying to wait until you got home,” my father said. We buried her under a rose bush and left her behind when we moved to a new rental a few months later.

The Bartians

Everything in Bartlesville seemed beautiful for the families connected to Phillips. The Bartians lived in nice homes, drove great cars, took vacations, and sent their kids to college. But one day, without warning, and half way through my senior year, everything changed. Some guy named T. Boone Pickens launched a hostile takeover bid of Phillips Petroleum and literally, nothing would ever be the same.

Shocked and dismayed, the community turned out in a show of support that was unique and probably unrivaled in 1980s America. Rallies were held. People picketed. Churches held prayer vigils. My friends and I along with half the town wore Boone Buster T-shirts styled like Ghostbusters. I wish I still had mine, but it was sold in a garage sale when I was away at college along with my inaugural issues of Sassy magazine. There are far worse things I could be bitter about, and still, this is what I hang on to.

Disoriented

People in Bartlesville were completely thrown off during this time. Everyone was disoriented and defiant. Even kids I knew just 20 minutes up the road in Kansas whose parents also worked for Phillips were rattled. From day one, the Phillips employees overwhelmingly wanted the company to stay independent, and they fought hard for that outcome.

Pickens offered shareholders $60 a share, well above market value, and plenty of people were tempted. It was fast money. But Phillips leadership didn’t wait for a vote. To block the takeover, they started buying back their own stock in massive quantities and took on more than $3 billion in debt. In the end, they paid Pickens a hefty settlement to walk away. He made $90 million in profit, but he never got control.

Icahn

Everyone in Bartlesville was so happy when they beat Pickens. People at church cried and said that God had answered our prayers. But the celebrations were short-lived. Just as the dust settled from Pickens’ failed takeover, Carl Icahn slipped in with a quiet stock grab and a bold offer to buy nearly half the company.

Once again, the community showed up in unprecedented fashion. Around town, businesses displayed signs with slogans like “Down with Icahn” and “Have a Heart for Phillips,” echoing the sentiments on placards carried by supporters at the event. Among those supporters were children, mostly young Gen-Xers, who joined their parents to show support for Phillips.

In the end, Phillips was forced into a settlement that made Icahn $50 million richer.

Although the company beat the corporate raiders the defense came at a high price. For starters, the company took on more than $8 billion in debt. Profits plunged, and thousands of jobs were cut, many of them in Bartlesville.

Merger

In 1981, more than 9,000 people worked for Phillips in Bartlesville, nearly one-third of the town’s population. By 1995, that number had fallen to just 2,400. In 2002, Phillips merged with Conoco to become ConocoPhillips. A decade later, the company spun off its downstream assets into a separate entity: Phillips 66, which is headquartered in Houston.

Today, Phillips 66 employs about 1,300 people in Bartlesville and still maintains a significant presence there. The last time I visited was about 10 years ago, when my youngest was competing in a gymnastics tournament at Phillips Gymnasium. The stunning facility once known as Adams Gym is where shareholders gathered in 1985 to decide the fate of Phillips Petroleum Company.

Ripping

At 17, I’d never heard of T. Boone Pickens or Carl Icahn, but overnight, my teenage fears grew the way they did in springtime when tornadoes tore through nearby towns, ripping roofs off houses and lives off their foundations.

Each night at dinner, I sat at our Duncan Phyfe table, picking at dried pork chops, canned spinach, and Rice-a-Roni, while my father cursed the raiders between bites.

My eldest daughter, who lives in a historic neighborhood, has that table, now. It sits in front of a beautiful brick fireplace between two Prairie Craftsman windows. The cold air from the window unit and the afternoon light remind me that peace is possible for a table that saw more than its fair share of heartache.

The Woods, The Creek

My parents were members of the Silent Generation and they mourned for Bartlesville like villagers mourn a gentle king deposed by thieves. These were folks on the rungs above them: the middle class whose security had been hollowed out.

It wasn’t the first time my father witnessed a world destroyed by oil and greed. A Native Texan, he grew up in the Piney Woods along the clear, spring-fed creeks of Montgomery County. Born in 1930, he spent every day of his childhood playing barefoot in the thick, pine forest. He told us kids stories about his many fishing adventures and how much he loved cooling off under the canopy of towering loblolly pines.

These stories always ended with a mist of tears on his face, which was scarred with deep pores and hard lines, misfortune and time. Over and over he told us about the day he went to his beloved creek and found all the fish and frogs floating belly up on a slick that shined like a rainbow on the water. He was horrified. The creek had been a lifeline for his family providing drinking water and a steady supply of fish to eat.

Lost Boys

The Conroe Oil Field was struck in 1931, a year after he was born and not far from where he grew up. For a time, it was one of the biggest oil producers in the world. But there were no real environmental protections in place and so brine and crude leaked into the creeks. Waste pits overflowed. Pipelines cracked. Fish were poisoned. Plants died. Birds stopped singing. Boys grew lost.

In 1990, I began my formal career in public affairs at Tinker Air Force Base, an installation with one of the most critical missions in the entire U.S. military infrastructure. Tinker is a Superfund site and among my assignments was managing public involvement required by numerous environmental laws including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970; the Clean Water Act of 1972; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, and the Clean Air Act of 1990.

I coordinated activities of the Air Force’s first restoration advisory board, a community panel that oversaw cleanup of the installation including Soldier Creek. The implementation plan I spent months writing was replicated by bases and installations across the United States.

I thought my dad would be so proud of me but he didn’t want me anywhere near Tinker. He was already showing sigsn of dementia and worried that I might become contaminated.

Save Tinker

My passion for that job was largely fueled by my father, an Atomic Veteran who suffered not only the heartbreak of pollution, but also health effects from atomic bomb tests including Mushroom Mike.

When Base Realignment and Closure threatened to close Tinker, I was tapped as the lead journalist assigned to write the base’s success stories. These were pitched to publications in Washington most likely to be read by members of Congress and specifically, members of the BRAC Commission.

I received praise for those stories including a few awards and a personal note from a two-star general. My bosses, all Vietnam Veterans, marveled at my ability to cut to the heart of a story. To write about depot maintenance in a way that moved people. Among my career memorabilia are photos of me suited up and shadowing workers repairing fuel bladders and packing parachutes. Also, children circling the base with Save Tinker signs.

They didn’t know it, but I had been there before, during my brief years as a Bartian.

Corporate America

Throughout my entire life, my parents lived with such brutal resignation. Their dreams, and then mine, were for little more than bags full of groceries or a decent car to drive. (One whose bald tires we didn’t replace with used ones.)

It’s hard to explain the poverty of possibility that exists among the poor. It’s hard to have a big dream when the smallest needs rock on unmet year after year, decade after decade.

My father’s sorrows and the corporate raiders did little to inspire my confidence in Corporate America. I spent one summer working for a major car rental company and was so full of existential dread all I wanted to do was move to Israel and work on a Kibbutz. If I couldn’t make my life better I figured the least I could do was carry the burdens of a world a weary.

I would spend my entire career working in the government and nonprofit sectors.

Erosion

The explosion of hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts and greenmail tactics in the 1980s deeply affected not just me but all of Generation X, the 13th generation of Americans born, by broadest definition, between 1961 and 1981. The long chapter of layoffs, downsizings, transfers, lost pensions, broken companies, instiutional failures, economic volatility and wage supression was written during our formative years. These things badly eroded middle-class security in America. The hell of it all nurtured Generation X’s distrust in corporate leadership and even capitalism-as-it-was.

The Rise of Generation X

What formed in the wake of all this was a voting cohort that to this day is deeply cynical, skeptical, pragmatic and independent. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Generation X became widely known as an enterprising generation full of grit and an entrepreneurial spirit formed by certain realities. Companies did not take care of our fathers and they would not take care of us.

The corporate raids and various other corporate scandals that hammered at the foundation of America occurred as Generation X was coming of age. Pickens and Icahn among others targeted the weak, the undervalued, and the mismanaged. Their actions were in stark contrast to the Judeo Christian values that permeated life in the Heartland. They shocked the tender sensibilities of my friends and me as we witnessed power used against ordinary people. Although what they did may have been legal, it violated the moral compass. People and communities were sacrificed on the altar of share holder profit.

Irony

In 2003, Pickens began making large gifts to Oklahoma State University, his alma mater. He was getting old and growing more concerned with how he’d be remembered. The irony was not lost on anyone, especially Generation X. Pickens had nearly ruined one of Oklahoma’s proudest companies only to later rebuild one of its proudest universities with gifts exceeding $650 million. Perhaps this is how he made his peace.

We all have peace to make.

Today, OSU’s football stadium bears his name, which we hear year after year as the days roll by to infinity and beyond.

40 Years

Forty years have come and gone since those days. I have grown up a Gen Xer and have learned that nothing of this world lasts forever. Not jobs or weather. Not money or promises. Not even people. Booms always give way to busts and everything here is always at risk of being lost or stolen.

What endures is harder to name: the discipline of doing without, the instinct to brace for disappointment, the quiet pride in surviving something hard. Also, the dignity in showing up and fighting like hell for something you love even if you can’t save it.

I didn’t leave home in 1985 with money or security, but I left with strength, which I earned living on the edge. No matter what, we keep going. This is faith. 

© 2025 The Jennifer Chronicles: All rights reserved.

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