The Pipeliners: The Story of El Paso Natural Gas

Perhaps the inception of The Pipeliners began when they brought in Santa Rita No. 1, the discovery well in West Texas. Surely it began before El Paso Natural Gas was but a twinkle in the eves of a young man named Paul ha}ser and his partner H. G. Frost. Perhaps it all really began when the remains of tiny plant and animal life sifted down into the beds of prehistoric seas. But it did happen. Now. here is the corporate history of a company that started with one employee (not including the two principals), a tiny office and a telephone. The story f that company is told here in an unusual way, relating it not merely from the boardroom viewpoint, but from the words, memories and recollections of the vital people who made the organization into one of the United States' and the world's great corporations. The author takes the reader from the oil boom towns of the 1920s through the innovative and pioneering beginnings of a gas pipeline operation, to its emergence as a major factor in America's continuing search for new sources of energy. Infinite care and attention to detail were the motivating forces in the preparation of the material, but none of the romance and drama of one of the most exciting times of this century has been lost in the relating of The Pipeliners, The Story of El Paso Natural Gas. FRANK MANGAN is a journalist-historian whose approach to history is not unlike that of a writer for a television documentary ... giving equal time to romance and color as well as to chronological events and dates. A native of El Paso, Texas, and presently residing in Houston, Mangan is a 1948 journalism graduate of the University of Missouri. For the past twenty-six years, he has been employed in public relations and advertising with El Paso Natural Gas Company. Besides being a competent Sunday-painter and being at home with all of the graphic arts, he wrote the text for this book and was responsible also for its design, typography and layout.