Eddie Chiles: Oil Executive and Texas Rangers Owner (1910–1993)

Harrell Edmonds “Eddie” Chiles, oil executive, Texas Rangers owner, and conservative commentator, was born to Harsh Edmonds Chiles, a cotton farmer, and Jewell (Files) Chiles on May 11, 1910, in Itasca, Texas. After he graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, in 1928, Chiles logged time in the United States Merchant Marine. Back on dry land he got a ground-floor look at the oil industry by working as a roustabout and roughneck in Texas oilfields before hitchhiking to the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a degree in petroleum engineering and pledged to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

Professional Career and Civic Life

After graduating in 1934 Chiles worked for the Reed Roller Bit Company, based in Houston. In 1939 in Seagraves, Texas, he and Robert L. Wood started Western, Incorporated (later the Western Company of North America), which provided technical services to the oil and gas industry. Specializing in acidizing, fracturing, and cementing, and later expanding into offshore drilling, the company eventually grew from three employees to more than 5,000, with revenues surpassing $700 million per year. In 1947 Chiles purchased Wood’s interest, and the following year he moved the company’s headquarters to Midland. In 1959 Chiles relocated himself and his business to Fort Worth. In 1979 he opened the Western Company Museum, a petroleum industry museum, on the first floor of the company’s headquarters building. On April 29, 1980, Chiles bought the Texas Rangers baseball team from Brad Corbett, a Fort Worth businessman who also serviced the oil industry, in his case by manufacturing PVC (polyvinyl chloride) piping.

Chiles was active in numerous professional and civic organizations. He was a vice-president of the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association and a member of the American Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors; the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers; the American Petroleum Institute; the Independent Petroleum Association of America; the Interstate Oil Compact Commission; and the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. He served as president of the Young Presidents’ Organization and as a director of the Wentworth Military Academy, the National Ocean Industry Association in New York, the Prairie Producing Company in Houston, and the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation in Dallas. Chiles served on the chambers of commerce of both Midland and Fort Worth and on the Midland City Council. In Fort Worth he was president of the Shady Oaks Country Club and a member of the Fort Worth Petroleum Club, the Exchange Club of Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Club, and Calvary Independent Presbyterian Church. He was also a member of Sigma Tau, an honorary engineering fraternity; Sigma Iota Epsilon, an honorary and professional management fraternity; and Pi Epsilon Tau, an engineering fraternity. In 1979 Governor Bill Clements appointed him to the board of regents of North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas).

Chiles was a major political donor. As a conservative Democrat, he identified with the Allan Shivers wing of the Texas Democratic party, and he served as the finance chair for the Texas Democrats for Eisenhower in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. He was a close ally of Governor John Connally, and like Connally, Chiles joined the Republican party in the 1970s.

Mad Eddie

At the time he purchased the Rangers, Chiles was already becoming something of a regional celebrity thanks to a unique media campaign that he had launched in 1977. On radio stations throughout the Southwest, he could be heard ranting about his pet peeves, most of which concerned the size and scope of the federal government. A typical episode started with an announcer asking, “What are you mad about today, Eddie?” The response was, “I’m Eddie Chiles, chief executive officer of the Western Company, and I am mad.” The object of his disenchantment immediately followed. At their peak, the commercials ran on 650 radio stations in fourteen states; 210,000 “I’m Mad Too, Eddie” stickers were distributed.

Chiles’s “Mad Eddie” persona was not without precedent. One was fictional anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, in the 1976 film Network. With evangelistic zeal, “the mad prophet of the airwaves” exhorted his viewers to open their windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Another was businessman Howard Jarvis, who spearheaded the 1978 California Proposition 13 ballot initiative capping property taxes. Like Paddy Chayefsky (who wrote the Network screenplay) and Howard Jarvis, Chiles had tapped into widespread public discontent, as record high inflation rates (11.35 percent in 1979) and thirty-year mortgage interest rates (12.9 percent in 1979) continued to rise in 1980. These issues, among others, led to Ronald Reagan soundly defeating incumbent president Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. It would be impossible to determine how big a part Chiles’s radio messages played in the election, but Carter’s percentage of the Texas vote plummeted from 51.14 percent in 1976 to 41.42 percent in 1980.

While Chiles’s radio spots offered no specific products or services of interest to the general public, they did serve to keep the Western Company and its CEO in the public’s mind. Some of his critics opined that his political messaging was so overt that radio stations should have offered equal time for opposing views under the “fairness doctrine” that was Federal Communications Commission policy until 1987. Others questioned whether he should be allowed to deduct the cost of producing and airing his political messages from his corporate taxes. Fort Worth Congressman Jim Wright, House majority leader from 1977 to 1987 and speaker of the House from 1987 to 1989, was his bête noire.

Franchise Disappointments, Oil Industry Downturn, and Sale of the Rangers

If Chiles was mad at the start of the 1980s, the play of his baseball team did nothing to allay his wrath. For the most part, the Rangers were disappointing during the 1980s, as the team went 637–760 during Chiles’s tenure from 1980 through 1988. The high points were 1981 and 1986 when the team finished second in the American League West. The rapid escalation in player salaries, thanks to inflation as well as the rise of free agency, was also a sore subject with Chiles. Perhaps his most significant action as owner was the signing of Houston Astros player Nolan Ryan in late 1988.

Chiles had bought the Rangers when oil prices were peaking. From March 1979 to March 1981, the first purchase price for crude oil skyrocketed from $9.83 per barrel to $34.59 per barrel, along with a concomitant rise in rig counts and drilling permits. By the late 1980s, however, oil prices had nosedived. Domestic exploration and the number of drilling rigs were drastically reduced, and the demand for the services offered by the Western Company contracted. In 1987 Chiles stepped down as chief executive officer, and the following year the company filed for bankruptcy and underwent restructuring. Thanks to the downturn in the oil and gas industry, he was also forced to sell the Rangers.

In April 1989 Chiles sold the team to a group headed by Dallas businessman Rusty Rose and future Texas governor and U.S president George W. Bush, whose father, George H. W. Bush, had been sworn in as president a few months prior. Rose and Bush, however, were not Chiles’s first choice. He had previously offered the team to Frank Morsani of Tampa Bay, who likely would have moved the team to Florida, and then to minority owner Edward L. Gaylord. Gaylord was an Oklahoma media magnate whose Gaylord Broadcasting held the rights to Texas Ranger broadcasts through his Dallas-Fort Worth station, KTVT. American League owners nixed the deal because they were afraid KTVT would join the ranks of superstations—such as WTBS in Atlanta, WGN in Chicago, and WOR in New York—that, it was argued, were distracting attention from local teams in other markets.

In 1990 the Western Company moved from Fort Worth to Houston. Exhibits and artifacts from the company museum had been donated in 1987 to help form the Texas Energy Museum in Beaumont. Two years after Chiles’s death, the Western Company was sold to BJ Services.

Honors, Family, and Death

Chiles was twice named Engineer of the Year by chapters of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers—by the Permian Basin chapter for 1952 and by the Fort Worth chapter for 1976. In 1979 he was awarded the George Washington Medal by the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge. In 1980 he received a Hall of Fame Award from the Young Americans for Freedom, the Top Hand Award from the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, and the Spirit of Enterprise Award from the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. In 1981 he was granted the Distinguished Business Leader Award from the College of Business Administration at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Americanism Award by the Houston Jaycees. He was named Salesman of the Year by the Sales and Marketing Executives of Fort Worth in 1982 and was honored with the United States Air Force’s American Spirit Award in 1983, the American Baseball Coaches’ Association’s Award of Honor in 1984, and the Fort Worth Exchange Club’s Golden Deeds Award in 1986.

Chiles married his first wife, Wilma Fernanda Klein, on October 12, 1935. The couple had a son, Jerry Edmond Chiles, and a daughter, Carol Ann Chiles Ballard, before divorcing in 1974. Chiles married his second wife, Leah Frances “Fran” Hafer, on October 30, 1974. Like her husband, she was highly involved in Republican party politics. She served as a Republican National Committee Woman for the state of Texas, among other endeavors.

Chiles’s niece, Lois Cleveland Chiles, born in 1947, was the daughter of his brother, Marion Clay Chiles. Beginning in 1972, she had a lengthy career in movies and television, including a recurring role on the popular Dallas television series from 1982 to 1983. In 2005 she married stockbroker Richard Gilder, who had been a member of the Rose-Bush team that bought the Rangers from Chiles.

After Chiles died at his home in Westover Hills, Texas, on August 22, 1993, the Rangers lowered the flag to half-staff at Arlington Stadium and wore the initials H.E.C. on uniform jerseys through the remainder of the 1993 season. Chiles’s wife Fran died in 2021 and is interred with him at Greenwood Memorial Park in Fort Worth.