Diehard road runner collector took life at a furious clip
....By Bill Whitaker
After the oil boom went kaput, his health began to fail and
the last of his four wives walked out, E.G. "Jiggs"
Allison resolved to keep everything in perspective.
He told friends he intended to marry at least twice more before
life's end, so all his ex-wives could serve as proper pallbearers
at his funeral.
"Jiggs" Allison was one of the most loveable rascals
I ever met. I interviewed him twice over the years but never quite
figured out how to fit him in the paper. Not only was this one-time
bull-riding, truck-driving, oil patch denizen larger than life,
he also proved a bit too salty for print.
Now at age 79, Jiggs is gone forever. It's time to remember.
Jiggs was pretty hard to define. One moment he could be a dashing
old gent, ambling into some auction hall on a Saturday morning
and distributing flowers to each and every lady in the place.
The next moment he might be talking about turning his junk-strewn,
sun-baked, oil-field equipment yard, just north of Abilene, into
a whorehouse. The joke went further than that, but again it wouldn't
do here.
Former partner and longtime pal Sammy Davis tells me Jiggs once
got into an argument with an Odessa repairman over a drilling
contractor's truck he was responsible for. In the end, Jiggs simply
drove the truck through a back wall.
"He was as gruff as they come, but he could turn around and
joke with you and laugh, too," recalled Gary Garrett, 41,
who worked for Jiggs' oil-field supply business in the early 1970s,
when Gary was 17. "When you became one of his employees,
he took care of you like you were one of his friends."
TWO IN THE BUSH
Jiggs' collection of road runners was especially intriguing.
Anything that glorified the road runner he owned - road runner
paintings, road runner belt buckles, stuffed road runners, road
runner signs, newspaper clippings about road runners, road runner
pens, road runner caps, road runner wind chimes, road runners
sculpted from barbed wire - road runner you-name-it.
Problem was, Jiggs admired the old bird in part because it was
a Don Juan. During one of his days in the oil patch, he happened
upon a male road runner slyly trading a freshly caught lizard
for what Jiggs called "romance."
Jiggs also admired the bird's cocky pride. He recalled one road
runner that strolled up to the old metal building he owned near
Pride Refinery. The bird became so captivated by its own reflection
in the window it refused to leave.
"His eyes were so big," Jiggs said, "he looked
at himself like he'd been to a danged beauty shop!"
One of Jiggs' prized possessions was a stuffed road runner he
kept in his tiny, cluttered office. He told me it had come from
a geologist friend of his.
"He ran over it in Kansas and took it to have it stuffed,"
Jiggs said. "And they wouldn't stuff it because it was the
state bird. So he said, 'Will you stuff a duck?' And they said,
'Well ... sure.' And so they just called it a duck and stuffed
it.
"I even got a letter somewhere saying it's a duck."
Jiggs also prided himself on his collection of canes, some fairly
ornate.
COMIC CHARACTER
The youngest of 13 kids, he won the nickname "Jiggs"
during his farming family's trip into Jayton one weekend. Then
a tubby little toddler, he toddled up to a group of men smoking
cigars and talking on a street corner.
"He picked one of those cigars off the street and put it
in his mouth," daughter Patricia Mallory said, "and
with that fat stomach and bald head, he looked just like 'Jiggs'
in the funny papers. The name's stuck ever since."
Jiggs was proud to be a chip off the old block - the son of a
man who at one point capitalized on Ranger's famous oil boom by
managing a team of horses and wagons to transport equipment and
supplies to and from drilling sites.
He kept his dad's photo on the wall, framed in an old-timey horse
collar.
No one seems to have a full tally on all Jiggs did. His family
says he joined the horse cavalry at age 15. He reportedly told
the Army he was 21.
Jiggs felt the ups and downs of the oil business. For 25 years
he pushed tools. He was on hand for the first wells drilled in
Stonewall and Kent counties in the 1940s. As proprietor of his
own oil-field equipment company, he attained a fair measure of
wealth.
And he prided himself on being an early bird.
"He told me he made as much money at the Dixie Pig at 5 o'clock
in the morning as he did the rest of the day," Gary said.
"A lot of people in the oil-field business would be there
then and somebody would always need some piece of equipment he
just happened to have."
By the time I met him, Jiggs was out of the business. Plummeting
oil prices, expensive divorces and a troublesome lawsuit over
oil-field equipment threatened to lay his spirits low. His health
suffered, but somehow his spirits raced along as usual.
"Really and truly, I've spent so much time at it, I'm glad
to be out of it," he told me. "I made a ton of money
in it and I also lost a lot of money. Nowadays, the lawsuits will
get you if you even talk to somebody wrong."
A DESK JOB
I never knew much about Jiggs' private life, except he said
he'd been married four times - something he blamed on life in
the oil business. For a while, he had a lady friend who ran a
traveling barbecue business, but in the end he was pretty much
alone.
During my visits, only a terrier mutt named Misty shared the office
with him. He lived in a trailer home out back.
Jiggs' final years were spent buying odds and ends at auctions
and trying to resell them. I was amazed at the hundreds of school
desks he always had scattered about, ready to sell.
Johnny Kincaid, who's known Jiggs a decade now (and is auctioning
off much of his property this weekend), recalls how Jiggs would
buy up school desks, "drill holes in 'em, then call 'em 'inkwell
desks.' They weren't really inkwell desks, of course, but he sure
sold 'em as inkwell desks.
"I'll bet he bought 10,000 desks before it was all over."
The other day I dropped by Jiggs' place one last time. Most of
his road runner collection was gone. Only one stuffed road runner
stood guard over the office. As usual, the bird looked quite confident
of the future.
"After he died, everybody that came by his place left with
a cane and a road runner," Jiggs' daughter said. "I
think he would've liked that."
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1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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