Oil is produced in two ways. The first way is by natural forces: the pressure
 of either water from the bottom or natural gas from the top is relieved when
 you drill a hole, and the oil under that pressure is then forced up the hole
 and out. The second method is by pumping, where you have a pump that
 creates a suction that pulls the oil up. The amount of oil that is recovered
 by those means is not nearly all of the oil that is in the reservoir. Some
 reservoirs give up as little as 3 percent of their oil; some will give up to 75
 or 80 percent. This patented method started by my friend's father used CO2
 mixed with water which was injected into formations, which would then cause
 an increased recovery of oil. I was offered the job as a vice-president at
 $40,000 a year, which was a nice increase for me at that point. They told me
 that it was going wild on the American Stock Exchange--it had gone from two
 to over eighty--and it was getting written up in a lot of publications, so I went
 to work for them.

P: In Tulsa?

M: In Tulsa. I found out very shortly that you could not command the big
 companies to license your project. Within about a year I became the general
 manager of the company. Our resources that we had gained from the public
 offering of stock were flittering away, and we had some small operators who
 had licensed our project, but we never succeeded in getting a large company
 to license the project. I was working with a large research lab. We had
 about forty-five people working in the lab, which was located at the University
 of Oklahoma in Norman. We were producing oil by the patented process,
 and we had a sales activity--we were out trying to sell the patented process.

P: You were not involved in natural gas at all?

M: No. I got involved as the principal sales agent, and we worked up a number
 of road trips to go out and talk to various groups of engineers and companies
 about this. But it never did any good. Then my wife died. The company
 went into bankruptcy, and, as an aside, now most of the large oil companies
 are using the process, but they are not paying anybody for it.

P: Why did it go into bankruptcy?

M: Because they could not get anybody to license the process, thus providing a
 flow of income. The income that they had was inadequate to maintain a
 corporate structure.

P: Once again, it was a cash flow problem.
M: My first wife died in 1963. During the period of time in Tulsa before her
 death, I had been approached by a social friend whose father had started a
 company that was based on a patented method of secondary recovery of oil.
 Oil is produced in two ways. The first way is by natural forces: the pressure
 of either water from the bottom or natural gas from the top is relieved when

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