Paw Strikes It Rich

In the half-century since he moved from Ontario to a scrubby homestead near Alberta's Bon Accord, life for weather-lined Bill Mulligan, 62, had been hard-pressed. Old Bill and his wife Florence were a local Maw & Paw (The Egg and I) Kettle. They lived in an unpainted shack with their eleven kids. Through the hard winters they had to rip up the floor for firewood. The family's income fell so low that the boys would hire out to neighbors, then borrow the neighbors' farm machinery in lieu of wages to work their own land.

Then, last April, Alberta's great oil bonanza dumped a derrick on Bill Mulligan's 320 acres smack behind the tumbledown Mulligan shack. Unlike 99% of Alberta's farmers, Paw Mulligan held mineral rights to his land.* By last week his windfall had reached $40,000 or $50,000--he hadn't bothered to figure it out exactly. Besides, most of it had already been spent on a whale of a good time.

The older boys bought two tractors and a three-ton truck. Maw & Paw picked out a new Chrysler sedan with white wall tires, then "upped and went travelin'." They covered 7,500 miles in Canada and the U.S. Later, back home, they dented a fender in a collision with a truck. Explained one of the kids: "It happened one night when we were going to a fire down the road."

Last week inside the Mulligan shack, for the benefit of visiting newsmen, Maw proudly started up the gasoline engine of a new washing machine. Its chuffy exhaust billowed dust through the room. Cautioned Paw: "Now mom, don't do that. These city fellows don't like getting dust on them." Then he added: "My wife's naturally mechanical."

Later in the week Paw struggled through a maze of financial paper work. Oil company agents had persuaded him to engage a trust company to handle his royalties, which might reach $800 a week. "The wife and the boys," said Paw, "can do what they want with the money. They stuck with me when we had nothing to keep us alive but the milk from our five cows. I'm 62 now so I don't need it. They can buy anything they want."

-In 1897, the Dominion government took over all prairie mineral rights not then privately owned, turned them over to the provinces in 1930. Almost all the royalties from the current Alberta oil boom have gone to the province, some to the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Hudson's Bay Company.

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