This year oilman and philanthropist Dick Lowe celebrates 60 years in the oil business. At present he is a founding partner of Four Sevens Oil Co. Ltd., Fort Worth.

Lowe graduated from Texas Christian University in 1951 with a geology degree, working his way through on a football scholarship for the Horned Frogs (winners of the 2011 Rose Bowl).

But Lowe says he became interested in oil and gas much earlier than his college years, when he was growing up in Wichita Falls, Texas. Every day in the summer, when he was 11, he rode his bicycle to the library to read every book he could get his hands on about the Civil War. One day the librarian, noticing this thirst for knowledge, showed him a directory of people living in the town. He decided to bike all over, to see all the biggest houses in Wichita Falls.

“I found out the majority of them were owned by people in the oil business. This was in 1939. So I told my dad I wanted to be an oilman, and asked him how to go about it. He said, ‘You have to go to college and become a geologist.’ Back then nothing ever happened unless a geologist had an idea first. That was just the way it was before these acquisitions we do today.”

Throughout his wildcatting career, Lowe has drilled in more than a dozen states, including a few rank-wildcat locations, such as Idaho and Georgia. Not that Lowe is adverse to acquisitions—and especially, divestitures. During the 1980s he went broke twice and had to restructure, once the victim of the junk-bond disasters of that era, and then, the demise of publicly funded drilling programs, thanks to federal tax reforms under Ronald Reagan.

But the 2000s have been much better. Three times since 2006 in the Barnett shale alone he has, through Four Sevens, sold assets for an aggregate of more than $1.1 billion, to Chesapeake Energy Corp. and XTO Energy. Today, Four Sevens is hunting for the next great play, along with longtime partner Sinclair Oil Co. Leasing is under way but, of course, he cannot say where.

“I feel like the oil industry is in a golden age,” he says. “Everybody is drilling into source rock. That Wolfcamp play out in West Texas is going to be huge. This business has been a rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Looking for oil is a treasure hunt. It’s almost an engineer’s business now, and not a geologist’s, with these source-rock plays you just frac.”

Investor: What was your first oil job, Dick?

Lowe: I worked morning tour for Baroid as a mud logger, catching samples and looking for shows. I did that for nine months, and then was offered a job for an independent named Rankin & Pitcock. After nine months there, I decided—like an idiot—to go independent.

Investor: Why decide on that?

Lowe: I was sitting on wells for other people as a consultant, but I had no time to generate my own prospects. I wanted to work up my own deals and get them drilled. I raised money from doctors, dentists, lawyers—and I drilled 16 dry holes in a row! I was broke.

Investor: Then what happened?

Lowe: I went out to Roswell, New Mexico, where the Abo trend was hot. This was in the late ’50s or early ’60s. I got a farmout from Mobil that turned out to be a good field. It became Milnesand Field in Roosevelt County, and we drilled 32 good wells in a row, so I became a minor millionaire. We sold it to Union Oil of Texas. Then Teddy Collins of Midland and I, and some others, formed American Quasar. I was president.

Investor: That was in the days of public drilling programs to raise money.

Lowe: We were exclusively a wildcat program. We raised about $100 million—but we were better at raising money than we were at drilling. We did make some discoveries in West Texas, and we also discovered Pineview Field in Summit County, Utah. That was the first Overthrust field ever found in the U.S. It had 132 feet of show in it. That was a 30-million-barrel field.

Investor: But some finds are not necessarily good.

Lowe: In the Canadian Foothills, we found Grizzly Valley Field. It was a huge gas field but we needed a pipeline and we had to build roads. That was going to cost us $60 million. Interest rates were 21% then; Jimmy Carter was president. We wanted to export the gas to California, but there we were with $60 million in debt at 21%, and no cash flow.

We were about broke. Drexel Burnham Lambert came in to us with junk bonds to fund it…we got so far down we never could get back up, so we restructured and called the new company Wolverine Exploration.

Investor: And that went broke too?

Lowe: Yes, in the ’80s, with the oil-price downturn. I found out the hard way—twice—the rules of the game. My wife Mary and I were down to $3,000, no car, no credit cards and no income. That’s when a friend of mine, Hunter Enis, said, “Let’s go do something in Jack County (North Texas).” We started Four Sevens in 1990, drilling in the Bend Conglomerate with mezzanine finance.

I didn’t think the Barnett was economical at the time…but then I saw from the public records what the service companies were doing, with better fracs….

The thing that amazes me is that all these conventional rocks had a source rock, and now we can produce from them, too. It’s like the 1930s again!

—Leslie Haines