Riding the Fender

The Life of Wes Strotman, as told in his first interview — March 3, 2026

Wes Strotman's first memory of the world is a centipede crossing his chest.

He was three, maybe four years old, asleep on a bench swing on the front porch of the lease house in Fittstown, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma nights were too hot for indoor sleep, so the family spilled outside, the way oil field families did — porches instead of bedrooms, the creak of the swing instead of a lullaby. His mother would lean over him in the dark and whisper these two words: don't move. Only after did he understand why. A centipede, unhurried, making its way across a sleeping boy's chest. There were snakes too, out there in the grass past the porch light — course runs, his mother called them. But it's the centipede he remembers. It's the centipede that starts the story.

That's the thing about Wes — he doesn't reach for the big, expected moments first. He reaches for the true ones.

The Boy on the Fender

His father, C.W. Strotman, never finished high school. It didn't matter. By the time Wes was old enough to remember anything, C.W. was already running drilling operations for multiple companies across the Oklahoma oil fields — not just working them, but owning pieces of them, brokering deals that put twenty-five cents of every dollar in his own pocket. He was the kind of man whose stutter disappeared the moment he got angry, which tells you something about which version of him you didn't want to meet. He was built like the work he did — a hand that could deliver a "thump" to the head that Wes still remembers as something closer to a hammer blow than a spanking.

And from the time Wes could hold on, that man let him ride on the car's front fender.

Not inside the car. On it — one hand wrapped around the hood ornament, boots braced against steel, while his father drove the gravel roads between lease sites at whatever speed felt right that day. "We were going down the road sideways as much as straight ahead," Wes says now, and there's something in the way he tells it — not bragging, not apologizing, just remembering the wind and the danger and the trust it took to stay on. His mother did not know. When she found out, she did not approve.

That fender is as good a metaphor as any for Wes's whole childhood: exposed, thrilling, a little too close to the edge, and entirely his father's doing.

The Shotgun House and the Dangerous Yard

The oil companies housed their workers in identical company homes the families called "shotgun houses" — the joke being you could fire a shotgun through the front door and it would sail clean out the back. But don't mistake the joke for hardship. These were two-car garages, running water, two full bathrooms — comforts many of their Depression-era neighbors didn't have. While men across the country stood in bread lines, C.W. Strotman's crew was well paid, and the Strotman family had new cars and, later, extra gasoline stamps during wartime rationing. The Depression happened to other families. Wes grew up watching it from a distance.

But the oil field itself was not a soft place. From the time he was five, Wes sometimes rode along with his father to the sites, and what a five-year-old saw there was not sanitized for him. A man falling from a derrick. A worker's foot crushed under a drill pipe. Wes talks about it now with a strange, hard-won calm — not because it didn't matter, but because it was simply the world he was raised inside. "It was dangerous," he says. "I mean, some of them still have to work." That sentence — spoken by a man remembering something he watched happen as a small child — says more about his father's world than any timeline could.

Beverly, the Slush Pit, and the Rain Barrel

His sister Beverly was his constant shadow through those Oklahoma years, and two stories about her — and about him — sit at the emotional center of this interview.

The first: an abandoned slush pit near the lease house, crusted over on top but hiding four to six feet of drilling fluid underneath. Beverly walked out onto that crust the way children do, testing something they don't understand is dangerous, and it gave way. She sank to her neck. Wes — himself still a small boy — scooted out across that same treacherous crust and pulled his sister out by her hands. When they finally made it home, muddy and shaking, their mother's first reaction wasn't relief or fear for what had almost happened. It was frustration over Beverly's ruined dress. The magnitude of what Wes had actually done — saving his sister's life — seems to have passed by, unremarked, the way so much did in that unsupervised, physical childhood.

The second is his own near-drowning. He leaned too far over a wooden rain barrel, tipped forward, and went in headfirst — trapped, screaming, unable to right himself. It was pure chance that his father was close enough to hear him. "I wouldn't be telling you the story," Wes says, if C.W. hadn't been there. For this one, there was no whipping. Just more of those thumps to the head — which, given the size of his father's hands, was punishment enough.

Two children, two brushes with death, in the same stretch of Oklahoma dirt. Nobody hovering. The freedom was real. So was the risk.

A Boy Who Decided to Walk

Not every story from this stretch of his childhood is about danger. Some are just about a boy making up his mind. Wes rode the school bus exactly three times and decided that was enough — he didn't like it, couldn't entirely say why, and so one day he simply started walking. Five miles. His mother intercepted him partway, delivered him properly to school, lectured him, and "licked" him when he got home that afternoon. He still can't fully explain the decision. "Just didn't want to ride a bus," he says — which might be the most purely ten-year-old sentence in the entire interview.

December 7th, From a Kitchen Table

The family moved north to Kingsburg, Illinois, in 1941, chasing the next oil job the way they always had. Wes was ten years old that December when his mother heard something on the radio that sent her running for him, and sent him running out across the property to find his father, who was out working the water well.

He delivered the news himself — a ten-year-old, breathless, telling his father that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

C.W.'s reaction has survived, word for word, eighty-five years later: damn, damn, damn, damn. He was a Republican, no fan of Roosevelt, and whatever else passed through him in that moment came out as those four words, repeated, standing by a water well in rural Illinois. It's one thing to know Pearl Harbor happened. It's another to hear it arrive at a family's kitchen table — or in this case, a well site — through the mouth of a ten-year-old boy sent to fetch his father.

Airplanes Over the Water Tower

The war reshaped the landscape around Kingsburg in ways a teenage boy could actually watch happen. Not far off, the Evansville plant — where his older sister Eileen worked, and where she may have met the man who became her husband — was turning out P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes for the war effort. Test pilots flew them low over the Wabash River basin, and their flight path took them directly over the water tower on the hill where the Strotman lease house sat.

"They would be only about fifty feet above that thing," Wes remembers, "and you could see the guys up there waving at you."

For a thirteen-year-old, this was not background noise to a distant war. This was fighter planes close enough to see a pilot's hand lifted in a wave, roaring low over his own front yard, again and again, all through those years. Some memories fade with age. This one hasn't.

The Rodeo, the Bull, and the Hundred-Dollar Bill

Somewhere in this same stretch, C.W. took the family to a rodeo in southeastern Oklahoma — the kind where the prison let its inmates out to compete against livestock for entertainment and a little hope. Volunteers could try to snatch a hundred-dollar bill tied around a bull's neck. One man had heard a strategy somewhere — lay flat on the ground, and the bull will jump clean over you.

The bull did not jump over him. The bull sat on him.

He did not get the hundred dollars. Wes tells this one with the timing of a man who has told it more than once, and it lands exactly the way he wants it to — a flash of the strange, specific texture of a childhood spent moving through oil towns and rural fairgrounds in the years before the war ended.

What They Call Fracking Nowadays

Somewhere in the conversation, without prompting, Wes made a connection that spans nearly the whole of his lifetime. His father's crews used to pack nitroglycerin charges into wells to force more oil to the surface — brutal, dangerous, effective work.

"That's what they call fracking nowadays," Wes said. "And fracking came in after that, after they had the dynamite."

It's an offhand line, tossed off almost casually. But it's also the entire arc of an industry — and a family — compressed into two sentences. What his father did with nitroglycerin in the 1930s and 40s, an industry does today with different chemistry and better engineering, but the same basic idea: force the earth to give up what it's holding. Wes watched the beginning of that story as a boy on a fender. He spent his career, later, regulating what it became.

Expecting Korea, Getting France

By the time Wes was old enough for the Army, he didn't want oil field work, and he didn't want college yet either — so he enlisted. He trained as a surveyor at Fort Leonard Wood, and like most young men going in around that time, he expected to end up in Korea.

Instead, the Army sent him the other way entirely — south through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic to Spain, up along the Southern Triad into Frankfurt, and finally by what he calls a "cattle train" into France. Three years, an ocean and a continent away from the war he'd braced for, stationed instead in a Europe still putting itself back together. It's a chapter Judy plans to return to in more depth — what he actually did there, what it felt like to be a young Oklahoma-and-Illinois boy suddenly standing in postwar France — but even in outline, it's a hell of a detour from a survey course at Fort Leonard Wood.

From the Fender to Washington

He came home on the G.I. Bill and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study petroleum engineering, a field that, at the time, was supposed to be the best-paid in the country. "For some reason I passed," he says, with the particular modesty of a man who clearly did more than just pass.

Then the ground shifted under him the way it had shifted under his father's industry a generation earlier: by the time Wes graduated, petroleum engineering had gone from the highest-paying field to one with almost no jobs. He went to work in the oil fields anyway — until Jane, the woman who would become his wife, said simply that she'd like to see him more than once a week. Around the same time, letters had started arriving in the mail from the Federal Power Commission, recruiting him for Washington. He took the job.

He stayed twenty-eight years, working his way up to Branch Chief, watching the Federal Power Commission become the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission along the way — the very agency that would come to oversee the industry his father had run on nerve and a ninth-grade education. He retired in 1989 at fifty-eight, when the supervisory engineer positions above him froze solid, and hasn't looked back. Jane went on to work for Republican offices in Maryland for close to two decades after that, retiring herself around 2010.

So the boy who rode a car fender through the Oklahoma oil fields, who watched his father run drilling crews with a stutter that vanished in anger, who pulled his sister out of a slush pit and got thumped for a rain barrel — that boy went on to survey postwar Europe, marry a woman who wanted more of his time than the oil patch would give her, and spend twenty-eight years in Washington, D.C., helping regulate the very industry that raised him.

What He Knows Now

Near the end of the interview, Wes said something that Judy noted carefully. He's at an age, he said, where most of the people he'd be talking about are gone now — and can't dispute him.

He said it lightly. But there was something underneath it too — a kind of freedom, and a kind of grief, arriving in the same breath. It's the honesty of a man who knows exactly how rare this kind of telling is, and how little time is left to do it in.

Three generations of Strotmans have oil running through their story — C.W. built a life on it with nothing but nerve and a ninth-grade education; Wes was raised inside it, studied it formally, and spent a career watching over it from the other side of the table. It's the spine of everything else in this family's history.

This was only the first hour. There's Beverly's version of the slush pit still to hear. There's Jane, and how they met. There's what those three years in postwar France were really like, beyond the route that got him there. There's C.W. himself — what made him tick, what he was like behind the thumps and the stutter and the twenty-five percent cuts of every well he touched.

But this much is already clear: Wes Strotman remembers his life in scenes, not summaries. And eighty-five years after a centipede crossed his chest on a porch in Fittstown, Oklahoma, he can still put you right there beside him.

Based on Interview #1, conducted by Judy Birchler, March 3, 2026 (~58 minutes). Story compiled from interview analysis prepared by Woody, March 4, 2026.