“Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy.” — Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE “Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.” — Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk A saga of family, … Long Halftime Walk
A saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king…
In 1892, Bryan Mealer’s great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, religion is only an agent for rebellion.
In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, “How’d you like to be a millionaire?”
Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring’s streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.
Grady Cunningham, Bobby’s friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady’s oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider’s journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.
A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. And in telling the story of four generations of his family, Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.
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I bought this book for my cowboy brother for his birthday but confess to reading it before I gave it to him. After all, I had to be sure he would like it.
I was born in Big Spring, the primary setting of The Kings of Big Spring. When I went to college, I left the little city behind and have only rarely been back for a few days at a time, usually for funerals. The author, Bryan Mealer is considerably younger than I am, but he captured the Big Spring of my teens. Reading his book, I recognized names I hadn’t thought of in decades and realized some of them were relatives. When he mentioned the 1967 Old Settlers’ Reunion, I recalled being at that event with my paternal grandparents. Similarly, when Midnight Cowboy was filmed there, my conservative relatives were aghast and made quite a stink over the movie’s Motion Picture Association of America “R” rating.
Nostalgia aside, Mealer weaves a unique history of a West Texas town. He seamlessly blends his family history with the history of Big Spring and its environs with that of the nation. Though he focuses on local goings-on, there’s enough national news to set the scene. This is not an in-depth history of America, but a close-up portrait of a small town. For instance, the Vietnam war warrants only a few lines here and there, but it’s enough to give the flavor of the deep divide between the pro- and anti-war factions in the country—and to show the war’s effect on Big Spring’s inhabitants.
Likewise, this is not a deep family portrait. Mealer covers four generations over many years, so there’s not a lot of emotion, but a retelling of family stories set gem-like into local life in Big Spring. The threads tying the stories together include oil and Jesus.
I enjoyed this book because the Mealer family history somewhat mirrors that of my own family. The Schafers arrived in West Texas forty years earlier and had already survived several droughts by the time the Mealers arrived. Though my family was recently blessed with the discovery of oil on our property, we haven’t taken the road of high-living the Mealers did. My uncles and aunts still run sheep and grow cotton, living in the same homes they’ve lived in for decades.
The Kings of Big Spring is a fascinating read, an epic tale of a a truly American family as well as a portrait of a time and place people outside of Texas can relate to, a family that started in tarpaper shacks and rose to dizzying heights, only to drop to the lows again.
A great read for Texans, especially if you have connections with west Texas and oil wealth. A memoir worthy of your attention. It has been called the Hillbilly Elegy for Texas. I have not read that one, but this one is memorable and worthwhile.
I lived in Big Spring in the 1960s and personally knew many of the people in the writer’s family.
A West Texas version of Heartland or Hillbilly Elegy. Particularly rings true if you’re from that part of the country.
Book takes place in my part of the world. Accurately described. Entertaining.