Payday: The Dan Hughes Story

Dan Hughes biography-chapter 9_Layout 1 2/16/2016 10:59 AM Page 85
period. Dan offered the estate $500 for the boat rig and the offer
was accepted. During several winter months, he, along with
neighbor Gordon Noble, sanded, varnished, and repaired the
cruiser. That spring, he towed the boat to Rockport and began a
long fishing hobby in the bays between Matagorda and Padre
Islands. This was the beginning of his love for boating and fishing
in the Gulf of Mexico.
The ranches around Beeville had some of the best quail hunting
in the United States, and Dan was invited to hunt on many of his
friends ranches. About that time, he became friends with L. D.
Hunter, who owned a petroleum retail business that supplied
gasoline and diesel to drilling rigs and filling stations. He was
considered a master quail hunter and maintained a kennel of about
40 bird dogs. They hunted together with clients and friends for the
next 40 years. One advantage of living in Beeville was that a person
could work until about 3 p.m. in the afternoon and still have time
to get in an excellent quail hunt before sundown.
Dan’s career at the UPC office was taking off and he found
himself quite busy. The Fashing Gas Field which produced from the
Edwards Limestone was discovered in the mid-1950s, and the UPC
management became interested in the Cretaceous trend which he
was working. The company leased about 150,000 acres along the
trend, mostly based on Dan’s ideas, and began seismic surveys
evaluating the acreage.
A 45,000-acre block of leases was acquired in Lee County around
the town of Giddings in an area in which practically no wells had
been drilled. These were one-eighth royalty leases with a ten-year
term, and acquired for approximately $2 per acre. The company
completed a seismic survey over the block and found only a
flattening of regional dip with some minor faulting near the City of
Giddings. Even though it was a weak structure on a large lease block
in a wildcat area, the company decided to drill a deep Lower
Cretaceous well on it.
A large drilling rig was moved onto the structure and the UPC #1
Prieuss was spudded in early 1959. Dan was the geologist on the well
and was on it for several weeks, watching the mud log and samples.
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