Did anyone know the baws who ran Knight Oil Tools?

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s young men, Mark and Bryan idolized their father. Barely five-three in his steel-toed work boots, with a puff of brown hair and sharp blue eyes, Eddy Knight routinely held sales meetings at four o’clock in the morning and didn’t bat an eye when, during work trips in the early days, he was forced to sleep in the closet at his tiny satellite offices. Although Eddy threw on a suit during the week to oversee his company, he put on his boots to hunt duck and deer on the weekends. He flew to Las Vegas with clients, gambled and drank, got great tickets for Rat Pack concerts, and even employed a magician to entertain the group in a sprawling hotel suite. Eddy loved Blue Bell ice cream and would load industrial freezers onto his private jet and fly to Texas to stock up on the dessert, which was not yet available where they lived. One time, after visiting a mall in Atlanta, he couldn’t find his car in the vast parking lot; instead of locating it, he went to a local dealer, bought a new one, and drove home.

From 1975 to 1980, the total number of oil rigs in the United States tripled, and every big-name oil corporation needed equipment to extract the black gold. Lafayette had become Louisiana’s industry centerpiece, with nearly half of its economy coming from oil and gas and more than 500 oil-field-related businesses calling the city home. It even boasted the Petroleum Club, a members-only joint where local oilmen could drink whiskey, smoke cigars, shoot the breeze, and cut deals. Once a sleepy South Louisiana city, Lafayette became a place where, as one longtime resident put it, oilmen would take helicopters to go get hamburgers. In 1981, with one in 15 Lafayette families boasting a net worth of at least $1 million, the New York Times labeled it the city “of a thousand millionaires.”

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That’s just the oil-field life,” Bryan told me, adding that he grew up around this type of behavior. Eddy for years rewarded men who came off long stints on offshore rigs with an endless supply of hookers, liquor, and backroom gambling. “Me and all my customers, that’s just what we did.”

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