We lived in Berkeley when I was a young child, and my father was an oil engineer. The Chief Field Engineer for Standard Oil’s Saudi Arabia operation was killed in an airplane crash. Dad’s response was that he would leave the next day to take over. And he did. This was in 1938 just as oil had been discovered there in commercial quantities. It was like stepping back several hundred years to an entirely different culture with different values and a different history.
One must recall that in those days Saudi Arabia was one of the poorest countries in the world. The terrain then - as now - was a desolate moonscape. The weather was miserable: tropical along the coast and scorching 120° + inland. A few ancient trading routes crisscrossed the far north, and there were a few cities on the coasts. But no foreign government had ever conquered the fearsome Saudi peninsula because no one wanted it. It was considered wasteland, until the discovery of the largest oil deposits ever known.
In the 1930s Saudi Arabia had only been a nation for about 30 years. The remarkable Ibn Saud, its king, had united its warring clans through conquest, diplomacy, and his charismatic leadership. The kingdom had no exports, and practically all of its subjects lived at a bare subsistence level. Many of the subjects were Bedu (Bedouin) - desert Arabs who raised camels, sheep, and goats under unbelievably harsh conditions.
King Ibn Saud had been courted by both the British and American petroleum interests for the rights to develop the suspected oil fields. He liked the Americans he met. Most were young men like my father, up-from-the-bootstraps, hard-working people who believed in the value of education, as did the Arabs. The British treated the Arabs as colonials; the Americans treated them as equals on a grand adventure. The king and the oil men reached an unspoken understanding: The king wouldn’t meddle in the oil business, and the American oil men wouldn’t meddle in Saudi politics or culture.
Standard Oil of California was chosen, and by 1947 the oil discoveries were so extensive that Standard had to bring in additional capital. Esso, Texaco, and Mobil all bought into the company, now named the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). By the 1960s the Arabian government bought out the company, and today Saudis run Aramco, although hundreds of Americans still work for it and live in the kingdom.
This was the world into which my father stepped in 1938. One of our family treasures is a grainy home movie Dad took of King Ibn Saud turning the spigot to fill the very first oil tanker to take Saudi oil to market.
Enter L. Miles. After a year apart, my father was allowed to have his wife and two children join him. We did so in early 1940. I have been told that my sister and I were the 5th and 6th American children to enter this very tightly closed country. Because I distinctly remember jumping off the launch onto the wharf before my father carried my little sister ashore, I claim to be the fifth.
We stayed for a period of ten months because World War II loomed. I was seven years old in 1940 and have memories of that first stay and swimming in the local pool, speed-boat rides into the Arabian Gulf, and shopping trips to Bahrain island. We had a wonderful Indian cook named Peter who has blessed my family with a recipe for chicken Palau that I enjoy to this day.
The Italian Air Force woke the Americans to the probability of a world war by a bombing raid. One of the planes that intended to drop bombs on the British facility in Bahrain dropped them instead on Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.
My father remained in Arabia during World War II while my mother, sister, and I lived in Berkeley. In Saudi Arabia there remained only 100 Americans to keep the oil pumping for the Allies. Theirs were amazing adventures.
After the war, we returned to Arabia in 1945. I was nearly in my early teens, and the memories are vivid. My mother and sister were confined to the Aramco compound as were all the women, but I was taken along by the men many on trips into the still closed interior and had many contacts with the native Bedu. My mother was a science teacher and made all nature interesting to me. One of my pets was a great horned viper snake, one of the world’s most poisonous, that I kept in a waste basket.
I saw and participated in a way of life, both in the desert and in town, which had existed for at least 2000 years. It has now vanished. Riyadh, the then-closed capital city, was a large collection of adobe dwellings without plumbing or even electric lights. A truck entering Riyadh was a sufficient event to draw a crowd.
At about age twelve I was introduced to King Ibn Saud himself in his throne room. On either side of the room, on padded benches, were arranged a group of men. They listened attentively and discussed the king’s business. I later realized that it was a formidable gathering of leading political figures, including two future kings of Saudi Arabia and the great explorer Philby (father of the British spy). I had been a year in the Saudi sun, and was brown as a walnut. With my black hair and tan complexion I looked like a native. Out of courtesy to Saudi sensibilities we were dressed as Saudi Bedu. The king mistook me for an Arab boy. In fact, he thought I was the interpreter for the group! When he opened conversation by speaking to me in rapid Arabic, my astonished and blank look immediately corrected his misunderstanding. Business was conducted, and, as we left, the king said to me, “ Be an Arab.” This was a high and heartfelt compliment. I had the presence of mind to reply that I would like to do so.
As I recall these formative years in an undeveloped Arabia, my strongest memory of the character of the people is the combination of abject poverty and a profound graciousness. If we visited a Bedu tent, even as a child I realized we could purchase everything the family owned for less than $100. Nevertheless, our host always offered and served coffee and tea to his guests with a natural pride and majesty that Buckingham Palace would be hard pressed to equal.
The Bedu of the Eastern Province were amazingly skilled. The land on which they lived was a flat gravel plain with few if any landmarks. Yet they had an innate ability to tell direction. Their culture recognized north because of the North Star. On hunting trips in the interior the Americans would ask a Bedu guide to draw a north-south line in the sand. He would think for a moment and seriously draw the line. Then we would drop a compass on his line and find it to be perfectly true.
A British explorer was lost in the plain. He found a Bedu herding sheep and asked for directions to Kuwait. The Bedu pointed and said, “three days by camel in this direction.” The explorer took a compass reading on the outstretched arm, and, sure enough, after three hours by truck following the compass reading, he was in Kuwait.
I have returned four times to Saudi Arabia, the last visit in 1975. lnstead of camels and donkeys, Riyadh was filled with Mercedes automobiles and skyscrapers. Still, while the face of Arabia had changed, my perception was that the heart of Arabia had not.
One of the other “Aramco brats” just published a long suppressed but well-written account of those days by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner entitled Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (Selwa Press, 2007). It is a fascinating read and includes several mentions of my Dad and his pictures of those long-ago days.
He, by the way, was promoted to Aramco headquarters as an executive, first in San Francisco and then in New York, and sat on the Board of Directors of Aramco for many years, retiring in 1960 . We lived in Stamford, Connecticut during my high school years. Yale and Boalt Hall followed, and I became a Sacramentan.
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