The Greatest Obit. Ever.

Coots Matthews, Cantankerous Hellfighter, Dies at 86

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/us/08matthews.html?src=me&ref=us

Highlights:
He was 86. He had respiratory problems, she said, that might have been related to his breathing carcinogens for 54 years and his penchant for good cigars.

His daughter characterized him as a “barroom brawler” and “hell on wheels,” who “too often let his fists do the talking.”

In 1942, he joined the Army Air Forces and became a tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress. His plane was shot down on his first mission, but he went on to fly many more.

After the war, Mr. Matthews opened a beer joint in Houston called Cabin in the Pines. It was fun, but not profitable. So he took a job working in oil field services for Halliburton, an industry giant. After 10 years, he was fired for crashing seven company cars.

Mr. Matthews and Mr. Hansen later stuck to Mr. Adair’s tradition of hiring mainly oil-patch roughnecks and roustabouts. No engineers, thank you.

“An engineer’s not going to put his hands on a fire, but he thinks he’s so much smarter than us,” Mr. Matthews said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1991. “And if they ever get a computer to cap a goddang oil well, I guess I’ll be out of business. But I ain’t shakin’ in my boots over it.”

Mr. Matthews was married four times to two women.

Perhaps Mr. Matthews’s most harrowing experience was when a piece of a crane fell on his leg, pinning him, while a poisonous gas well was spewing, his daughter recalled. Mr. Adair grabbed an ax to whack off Mr. Matthews’s leg. At the last moment, though, Mr. Matthews summoned his strength and jerked his leg free.

He later asked Mr. Adair if he would really have done it. Mr. Adair replied, “A one-legged Coots is better than no Coots at all.”