Word: mesa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thing about T. Boone Pickens: nobody ever faulted him for thinking small. "We did not come to town on a load of watermelons," declared the chairman of Mesa Petroleum Co. of Amarillo, Texas (1981 sales: $408 million) from his 39th-floor suite atop New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Pickens, 54, had come to New York loaded not with watermelons but with money, $ 1 billion in bank credits to be exact. He intended to use the money to buy up a company nearly 20 times Mesa's size. His target: Cities Service Co. of Tulsa, the nation...
...that price, Pickens decided that it was time to go for outright majority control, and two weeks ago he made his move. In a telephone call from his Texas headquarters to Waidelich in Tulsa, Pickens proposed, as a "friendly offer," that Mesa pay $50 a share, or $1.8 billion, for 46% of Cities Service stock, plus $1.9 billion more in promissory notes and Mesa stock for the remaining 49% of Cities Service shares. The startled Waidelich, faced with the prospect of seeing his company disappear into a firm a fraction of its size, fought back the next day with...
Some were not so free to go. Walter Saunders, 47, had moved his family from Virginia and bought a $91,000 home in Battlement Mesa. The house has lost perhaps a quarter of its value overnight. "I really don't know what's happening," sighed Saunders last week. "I guess we somehow try to fall back and regroup...
Exxon had envisioned Battlement Mesa, which housed 1,800, as a bustling city for 25,000. Some 65 homes and apartments have been completed, and more than 250 are under construction. Two schools, a recreation complex, a golf course, a supermarket and a shopping center are also unfinished. Though Exxon has not yet decided what to do about Battlement Mesa, the townspeople fear that most of the buildings will never be completed. Said Ray Guerrie, president of the town's First National Bank: "I just hope we can weather this crisis." Last week his tiny bank was packed with...
...Parachute native who operates the town's Conoco gas station: "There'll be a boom again. You just wait till gasoline goes up a few more cents a gallon. Oh hell yes, they'll be back." Local people still hope that Parachute and Battlement Mesa will not become ghost towns like Silver City and Russell Gulch, which prospered only briefly during Colorado's gold and silver rushes...