HOUSTON IS OUR NEW HOME TOWN

Glenn pushed for a decision in that direction, and relatively soon he got the home office approval for his request. As a result, by mid April 1981, I began commuting between Salt Lake City and Houston every week, flying out to Houston very early on Mondays and returning to SLC late on Fridays. The Hyatt hotel in downtown Houston, which was only three blocks away from our office on Lamar Street, became my home for nine months, and the Restaurant Benihana of Tokyo became my dinner place every night. Dining at Benihana in a table for eight people made my daily solitude more bearable. That was the time when I became a fan of Japanese food, which I still love.
Working in Houston resolved one problem but created another. I was given high responsibilities in Houston and I felt that I was indeed earning my salary and making a good contribution to our company, but, I was away from my family seventy percent of the time, therefore they missed me and I missed them too. Working for APCO required that I travel to Argentina at least once every two months for a couple of weeks. Usually I would fly to NYC to make a connection to Buenos Aires, a flight that would take between 10 and eleven hours, but was not too tiring because, number one we were flying within the same time zone, and, I was always flying first class, a luxury that was allowed in all company business flights with a duration of four or more hours.
Those were the days when I began loving Buenos Aires in particular, but, Argentina in general, its people, and its food but I never got used to the tremendous fluctuations of Argentine prices and exchange rates. In one trip the cost of one night’s stay at the Claridge Hotel, one of the most traditional hotels in Buenos Aires was about $70, and the next trip it was $250, all because of the never ending escalation of prices and exchange rates. Between the bimonthly trips to Buenos Aires and the weekly trips from SLC to Houston, the rest of the year 1981 went by. In April 1982, I discussed the matter with Glenn and he requested and obtained approval from the upper management in SLC to have me and my family moved to Houston, which we did in June 1982.
Moving to Houston with the whole family we did in May of 1982. At first, we rented a house in a very nice golf area in NW Houston, about ten minutes away from Interstate Hwy 10, better known in Houston as the Dixie Highway. We lived in the Heartstone subdivision, 45 minutes away from my office in downtown Houston.
Houston was in those days something like the world’s capital of the oil industry, almost everything there was somehow connected to the ever expanding oil industry. It was the home town for the most important players in the world’s oil such as Mobil, Pennzoil, Royal Dutch, Shell, Texaco, British Petroleum, Conoco, Halliburton and the likes. In fact, it was home to the oil barons of those days.
Our company, Northwest Pipeline Corp, in spite of being a large company in the US Stock Exchange, was small in comparison to all those giants in the oil industry, in fact it had no significant oil fields in the continental US and 95% of its revenues were generated by its gas production and transportation geographically located in the Northwestern United States. APCO Argentina, its small subsidiary, domiciled in Houston, the company I was now assigned to as a Controller, derived all it revenues from the Entre Lomas oil field, located in Neuquén, in Southern Argentina, where we were a minority shareholder of Petrolera Perez Companc, the concessionary of the field, which was operated by our associate Naviera Perez Companc (“Naviera”). The company’s revenues deriving from the oil field, however, were very seldom materialized in cash, since the operator and majority shareholder of the oil company was always “reinvesting” in the field.
My job as a controller of the company in Houston was to make sure we kept a good eye on what our Associate Naviera was doing in terms of “reinvestments” in the oil field, since all works in connection with those reinvestments were carried on by Naviera our majority shareholder. I saw it from the beginning that it was a no winning situation, because the contract did not allow the minority shareholder (APCO) a veto power on the “reinvesting decisions of the majority shareholder. As a consequence, in the end, my job was to try to report, as accurately as possible, how much we were being screwed by our Argentine associates in Naviera.
Neither the continuous and clear technical reports from our people in Buenos Aires headed by Alberto Angeleri, who was always waiving red flags to Houston, nor the continuous visits to Buenos Aires by Glenn Nelle who was meeting with the top shots of Naviera , improved the cash flows for APCO Argentina. Somehow, The Northwest people had decided that in the end, patience will pay its dividends. No significant dividends were reported to the company for my entire tenure as a controller of the company which ended in May of 1984.
Meanwhile, our life in Houston was different in many ways to our life in Salt Lake City. To begin with, we were now living in a much larger city, a city of two and a half million people, as opposed to only half of a million people in SLC. People in our neighborhood in Houston were not nearly as friendly as they were in SLC., each family seemed to live their own lives, minding their own business and letting every body else mind their business. Our older kids were registered in the nearest public school, in a school district that was well known to be very good for the State standards, so that was OK, in fact neither Mariuxi, nor Rafaelito felt any significant negative or positive impact from the change.
In the absence of friends in our neighborhood, we looked and soon found some friends elsewhere in the area or through a networking that we began to apply when we started to feel the isolating effects of the lack of friends in the area where we lived. First it was some dear and old Ecuadorian friends living not very far away, and then the net started to work. Soon we began to feel as a part of a social group it was nice to be associated with, then the group made us feel as an important part of it. Our children found some friends of their age to play with, some of them attending the same school they attended. Felipe Rodriguez, a former classmate at the U of Guayaquil and a man who loved Houston more than any other place in the world (he called it “paradise”) was the first friend we found, and through him we found many other friends, including the Ecuadorian Consul, Mrs. Huerta who was the one who introduced us to many other Ecuadorian people who had been living in Houston for many years and loved it.
In spite of all the friends we found, and the fact that my wife Fanny felt much better in Houston than in SLC, I did not find very amusing the fact that I had to mow the lawn in my 2000 sq ft backyard, twice a week under 100 degree temperatures in the Houston Summer time, where I could almost watch the grass growing in the hot and rainy summers of the “oil capital of the world”. It was like being inside a sauna box. I did not enjoy this at all, so, when a year later my bosses in Salt Lake City announced that I had to go back to live in Salt Lake City, because the APCO Argentina offices were being moved to Utah, I was so much relieved and happy, I felt almost like getting out of hell. Our children loved it too. Fanny was less enthused but finally she was very happy to go back to our loved Utah too.
In my next posting: BACK IN SALT LAKE CITY