The petroleum industry in the 1980s experienced a wave of multi-billion-dollar mega-mergers and hostile takeovers driven by a global oil glut, falling crude oil prices, and undervalued stock reserves. DuPont acquired Conoco in 1981, U.S. Steel bought Marathon Oil in 1982, and Occidental acquired Cities Service in 1982 after corporate raider T. Boone Pickens and Gulf Oil made previous attempts. Gulf was then acquired by Standard Oil of California in 1984.

My father was caught up in that merger mania. Cities Service Gas had left Bartlesville in 1948, moving its operations to Wichita and its headquarters to Oklahoma City. Dad was a field engineer for Cities Service Gas from 1951 to 1955, operating out of Garden City and Wichita, and then moved to Oklahoma City in 1957 when the company’s operations and executive offices were combined. He worked his way up to become the Manager of Gas Measurement in 1979, overseeing 89 employees.

Cities Service Oil had remained in Bartlesville until 1968, but it then departed for Tulsa, leaving Phillips Petroleum as the dominant force in the community. T. Boone Pickens launched a hostile takeover attempt on Cities Service in June 1982, which was fended off only for Gulf Oil to make its own bid. Occidental acquired the company in August 1982, selling off the natural gas company to Northwest Energy in September 1982, which was then acquired by Williams a year later. Williams offered incentive retirements to all employees who were 55 years of age or older, and my father retired at the end of 1983 when he was 58 years old.

I was doing undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma when T. Boone Pickens launched another hostile takeover bid in December 1984 against Phillips Petroleum. The company took on immense debt to keep him at bay, only for Carl Icahn to launch his own bid in February 1985. While the company avoided being taken over, becoming “the company that stayed home”, it was burdened with an enormous debt, and its earnings plunged.

By the time I arrived in Bartlesville in August 1989, the company had downsized from 9,086 local employees in 1981 to about 5,300. That dropped to 2,400 by the year 2002, when Phillips merged with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips.

Conoco had been based in Ponca City until 1950, when its headquarters shifted to Houston. Now ConocoPhillips would be based in Houston, and while the company would maintain a sizable presence in Bartlesville, the information technology, finance, accounting, human resources, and legal services positions that remained did not command the top-tier executive salaries that shifted south.

Over the decades more Oklahoma petroleum companies left for Houston. Tulsa’s Citgo, a spinoff of the retail, marketing, and transportation assets of Cities Service, left the former Oil Capital of the World for the new one in 2004. Oklahoma City’s Kerr-McGee was acquired by Houston’s Anadarko in 2006, and both Devon and Chesapeake/Expand shifted from Oklahoma City to Houston in 2026.

I spent 37 years working in Bartlesville Public Schools from August 1989 through June 2026. So I witnessed firsthand the demographic changes in Bartlesville from a few years after the corporate raids through the merger and relocation as the city struggled to diversify its economy. I could share countless anecdotes about how much changed, as well as how much did not, in Bartlesville over those decades.

However, my retirement afforded me time to compile and interpret more objective data on how Bartlesville changed from 1980 through 2025, which I am sharing in the presentation below or which you can view here. I’m still happy to live in Bartlesville, which the MORE Agency says is the “Best Small City Retirement Option” in Oklahoma. However, I recognize the many challenges we face.