United States Senate. Father Prescott was thus calling in a chit when procured George a second job
offer, this time with Dresser Industries or one of its subsidiaries.
George Bush knew that the oil boom in Oklahoma had passed its peak, and that Tulsa would no
longer offer the sterling opportunities for a fast buck it had presented twenty years earlier. Dresser,
by contrast, was a vast international corporation ideally suited to gaining a rapid overview of the oil
industry and its looting practices. George Bush accordingly called Ray Kravis and, in theingratiating tones he was wont to use as he clawed his way towards the top, said that he wished (^)
respectfully to decline the job that Kravis had offered him in Tulsa. His first preference was to go to
work for Dresser. Ray Kravis, who looked to Prescott for business, released him at once. "I know
George Bush well," said Ray Kravis years later. "I've known him since he got out of school. His
father was a very good friBush biographies show our hero riding into Odessa, Texas in the legendary red Studebaker, to takeend of mine." [fn 4] This is the magic moment in which all the official (^)
up a post as an equipment clerk and trainee for the Dresser subsidiary IDECO (International Derrick
and Equipment Company).
But the red Studebaker myth, as already noted, misrepresents the facts. According to the semi-official history of Dresser Industries, George Bush was first employed by Dresser at their corporate
headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked for Dresser executive R.E. Reimer, an ally of
Mallon. [fn 5] This stint in Cleveland is hardly mentioned by the pro-Bush biographers, making us
wonder what is being covered up. The Dresser history also has George Bush working for another
subsidiary, Pacific Pumps, before working for IDinteresting facts, there is a picture that shows father Prescott, Dorothy, Barbara Bush, and GeorgeECO. On the same page that relates these (^)
holding his infant son George Walker Bush. Young George W. is wearing cowboy boots. They are
all standing in front of a Dresser Industries executive airplane, apparently a DC-3. Could this be the
way George really arrived in Odessa?
The Dresser history has George Bush working for Pacific Pumps, another Dresser subsidiary,
before finally joining IDECO. According to Bush's campaign autobiography, he had been with
IDECO for a year in Odessa, Texas before being transferred to work for Pacific Pumps in
Huntington Park and Bakersfield, California. Bush says he worked at Huntongton Park as an
assemblyman, and it was here that he claims to have joined the United Steelworkers Union,obtaining a union card that he will still pull out when confronted for his long history of union-
busting, as for example when he was heckled at a shipyard in Portland, Oregon, during the 1988
campaign. Other accounts place Bush in Ventura, Compton and "Richard Nixon's home town of
Whittier" during this same period. [fn 6] If Bush actually went to California first and only later to
Odessa, he may be lying in order to stress that he chose Texas as his first choice, a distortion thatmay have been concocted very early in his political career to defend himself against the constant
charge that he was a carpetbagger.
Odessa, Texas, and the nearby city of Midland were both located in the geological formation known
as the Permian Basin, the scene of an oil boom that developed in the years after the Second WorldWar. Odessa at this time was a complex of yards and warehouses where oil drilling equipment was (^)
brought for distribution to the oil rigs that were drilling all over the landscape.
At IDECO, Bush worked for supervisor Bill Nelson, and had one Hugh Evans among his co-
workers. Concerning this period, we are regaled with stories about how Bush and Barbara movedinto a shotgun house, an apartment that had been divided by a partition down the middle, with a
bathroom they shared with a mother and daughter prostitute team. There was a pervasive odor of
gas, which came not from a leak in the oven, but from nearby oil wells where the gas was flared off.
George and Barbara were to spend some time slumming in this setting. But Bush was anxious to
ingratiate himself with the roughnecks and roustabouts; he began eating the standard Odessa diet of