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then set them loose downtown to scare
the daylights out of the horses and the citizens milling about.
In later times it was hard not to get caught up in the frivolity of
those great practical jokers, the Wilson brothers, whose professional standing as doctors didn't mean they were above grabbing unsuspecting townsfolk into the barbershop and shaving
their heads.
    By 1900, Odessa had only 381 residents. By 1910 the population had increased to 1,178. Most of those inhabitants depended
on ranching, but various droughts made survival almost impossible because of the lack of grazing land for cattle. The ranchers
became so poor they could not afford to buy feed, and many
cattle were just rounded up and shot to death so the stronger
ones could have what little grass was left.

    Nothing about living in Odessa was easy. Finding a scrubby
tree that could barely serve as a Christmas tree took two days.
Even dealings with cattle rustlers and horse thieves had to be
compromised; they were shot instead of hanged because there
weren't any trees tall enough from which to let them swing.
    A flu epidemic hit in 1919, filling up the only funeral home
in town, which was part of' the hardware store. It so severely
overran the town that there weren't enough men well enough
to dig the graves of those who had died. Medical care was at
best a kind of potluck affair. The one doctor who settled in
Odessa during this period, Emmet V. Headlee, used the dining
room of his home as an operating room. He performed the
operations while his wife administered the anesthetic.
    By 1920 the population had dropped back down to 760, and
it was hard to believe that Odessa would survive. But ironically, the Zanesville elite was right in its fanciful prediction that
Odessa was bubbling with a bounty of riches.
    Unknown to anyone when it was founded, the town was sitting in the midst of the Permian Basin, a geologic formation so
lush it would ultimately produce roughly 20 percent of the nation's oil and gas. With major oil discoveries in West Texas in
the early and mid-twenties, the boom was on, and Odessa was
only too eager to embrace the characteristics that distinguished
other Texas boom towns of the period: wild overcrowding, lawlessness, prostitution, chronic diarrhea, bad water, streets that
were so deep in mud that teams of oxen had to be called in to
pull the oil field machinery, and a rat problem so severe that
the local theater put out a rat bounty and would let you in free
if you produced twelve rat tails.
    Odessa established itself as a distribution point for oil field
equipment and experienced more growth in a month than it
had in ten years, inundated by men who were called simply
boomers. They came into town once a week, their skin scummy
and stinking and blackened from oil and caked-on dirt, to get
a bath and a shave at the barbershop. Young children ogled at them when they appeared because it was unimaginable, even
by the standards of children, to find anyone as dirty as these
men were.

    From 1926 on, Odessa became forever enmeshed in the cycles
of the boom-and-bust oil town. It made for a unique kind of
schizophrenia, the highs of the boom years like a drug-induced
euphoria followed by the lows of the bust and the realization
that everything you had made during the boom had just been
lost, followed again by the euphoria of boom years, followed
again by the depression of another bust, followed by another
boom and yet another bust, followed by a special prayer to the
Lord, which eventually showed up on bumper stickers of pickups in the eighties, for one more boom with a vow "not to piss
this one away."
    There was a small nucleus of people who settled here and
worked here and cared about the future of the town, who
thought about convention centers and pleasant downtown shopping and all the other traditional American mainstays. But basically it became a transient town, a place to come to and make
money when