Sunday, June 25, 2000

Devoted club member helps preserve past

Martha Thielhorn, 76, has missed only one meeting in her 28-year membership with the Desk and Derrick Club of Corpus Christi.
   That blip in an otherwise perfect record occurred in 1996, the year she suffered a heart attack and required immediate bypass surgery. But remarkably, not even a medical crisis of that magnitude kept Thielhorn from her faithful devotion to Desk and Derrick, an international educational organization for owners and employees of oil/gas companies and related businesses.
   "As soon as I could get back, I did," said Thielhorn, who has collected club-related materials ever since joining the local chapter in 1972 during her employment with Sun Oil. "I remember taking my heart pillow with me to meetings. It's hard to explain, but there's this intense loyalty that you feel."
   Transferring collection
   It's that kind of devotion that is paying off enormously for the club, which on Monday celebrates the transfer of Desk and Derrick papers to the special collections department of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi with a 5:30 p.m. reception. Because of efforts by Thielhorn and others who preserved club mementos, like correspondence and keynote speeches, the club has been able to compile from individual collections a stockpile of material documenting the evolution of this once all-women's club.
   "This is our first collection dealing with women in a profession, and these are precisely the kinds of materials we're looking for, materials that document the undocumented," said Thomas H. Kreneck, special collections librarian and archivist at the university.
   The organization started with a club founded in 1949 by a New Orleans female employee of Humble Oil and Refining Co. Similar clubs followed and by 1951, they became a formal association dedicated to fostering the professional development of women in the industry. The local club was founded in 1952, dropping its for-women-only membership in the early 1980s when organization bylaws changed.
   Development of women
   The local club, through its tale of historical evolution, offers valuable insight about and helps document the development of women in the Coastal Bend, said Cecilia Venable, a former club member. It was Venable, while researching the topic of women in the oil industry for a college course paper, who thought the group's materials should be included in her university's repository of local history. Venable pursued communication between the entities and eventually made it happen.
   Donated materials include one-of-a-kind scrapbooks, presented to each outgoing club president, filled with memorabilia documenting that individual's term of leadership.
   "Most of what we know of the industry has been written or seen through the men's perspective," said Venable, who worked in the industry for 15 years. "The mass exodus of oil companies from the area in the '80s meant a lot of the records went to Houston and elsewhere. Luckily, D&D records tell us much about what the women were doing, what they considered important, how they dealt with family and work."
  
 

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