MH: Alright, so, my uncle King. Where is he, he's here somewhere…

King! (Holds up a photograph of M. King Hubbert.) My uncle King.

I of course knew King from the time I was a little child, and he was always a fairly delightful experience, I can tell you. He came from a family of seven siblings, born in San Saba, Texas. His father was born in, and my father also, was born in San Saba, Texas. My father was King's younger brother, that's how it was. Their father was born in San Saba, Texas, and his father was born in San Saba, Texas, and King's, my great, great grandfather, King's great grandfather Matthew Hubbert, came to San Saba, Texas in the 1840s where he sired the remainder of his totaling 15 children, raised a family, and built the first church there, and et cetera, et cetera. His name is emblazoned on the corner stones of the old, stone buildings in this little place that's really in the outback of Texas. It's not on anybody's beaten path, but it's where there were four generations of Hubberts.

It was a wild sort of a place, it's famous for me because it's where three generations or more of my family came from. It's a hundred and some-odd miles north of San Antonio, Texas, in the western hill country of Texas, a very beautiful part of Texas, and that's where King was born in 1903.

These were very, sort of, enterprising, kind of capable people. Pioneer stock. Matthew Hubbert, his great grandfather, was born in Tennessee and blazed a atrail all the way across the United States and was actually buried at the end of the 19th century while, when he died he was residing in San Diego, California. So, he'd really seen some countryside.

Matthew Hubbert named all of his kids that were born in Texas after local heroes. King's grandfather, my great grandfather who I never met, was named David Crockett Hubbert. He had a brother named Andrew Jackson Hubbert, and I think there was a Benjamin Franklin Hubbert. I have pictures of Andrew Jackson Hubbert and Benjamin Franklin Hubbert but not of my great grandfather. However, I did know King's dad, my grandfather, I knew him quite well and he was a wonderful old character, an old cowboy. He relocated from Texas in the late 1940s.

This is a picture that was taken before they moved, this is on a trip west, though, when my grandfather W. B. Hubbert, William B. Hubbert, and my grandmother Cora Virginia Lee Hubbert (my daughter, by the way, is named Cora after her) came out to visit their oldest daughter, Aunt Nell. Aunt Nell died in 1998 at the age of 100. And so this is in Santa Barbara. So anyway, this is King's father, mother, and older sister.

King was the second born to a family of seven siblings. I think that the two most incredible people of that generation were King and his older sister Nell. Both amazing, amazingly wonderful people.

I'm a musician and an instrument maker, and King has always supported everything that I've pursued. He didn't have a one track mind, he sort of saw the world in a big way and he figured that anything that was really interesting was worth doing, and that would include, as far as he was concerned, theater, music, science, literature, any number of things. On the other hand, if I had been a major in business, as one of my cousins was, probably more than one of my cousins, King would have had bad words to say about that. He figured that a business major was a waste of an education. He figured Why study business, off all things?

Why? I think that King felt that the state of business being based upon a capitalistic monetary economic system was, in fact, the wrong direction. He thought that capitalism was flawed, fatally flawed, and the monetary system was flawed. This kind of goes on with his, in line with some of his thinking about oil, and so on.

King was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. He always said that it was a great way to be educated. He said, you weren't striated into little factions based upon age and supposed grade. And everybody had to, kind of, work with one another.

I do know that King amazed his teachers and the adults around him with his little mathematical games that he would play, because he could solve little problems, you know, in his head. People thought, this is uncanny. How does he do this? I'm sure the one room schoolhouse, the kind of little house on the prairie sort of existence, I'm sure it had a profound effect on him. He would have been a different man had he grown up in the 1990s in Los Angeles or Orange County, right? I mean, it just wouldn't have added up to the same sort of thing.

He went to a very small two year college, I didn't even know they had such things but apparently they did at that time. A junior college, this would have been in 1918-1919, around those years. He went to a little place, I think it was called Weatherford College, he graduated with great honors, and then decided he wanted to go to University of Chicago. He didn't have any money to do that, and his father, I don't think, really put a huge stock in the whole idea of education, his mother thought it was a grand idea but his father wasn't about to cut loose with cash nor did he even have enough money to finance such a venture, so King followed the wheat harvest. And following the wheat harvest means getting into boxcars, like a hobo, except that they were designed for migrant workers that the harvest depended on. And those boxcars would let the workers out at some farm, or other, and then they might move on to the next one via boxcar, which took him to Chicago, he followed it in that direction. He arrived there with enough money in his pocket to start school and vowed he would never do that sort of thing again.

He got there and they enrolled him. They completely discredited any previous college that he'd had, this Weatherford College thing, and he started as a freshman. I gather, from talking with other people and bits that I've read and references that I've come across that Chicago University at that time, in the teens and the 20s, was an incredible place.

Now King was interested in geology, right? King would always say he wasn't a geologist, and when he got there they tried to make him declare a major within the first year of him being there, and he basically said "I don't want a major, I want an education!"

He befriended some of his instructors because they immediately recognized in him a great talent by the way he wrote papers as an undergraduate that are still studied today in courses, in geophysics. King, ultimately, they were ready, after he was there for a few years, they were ready to boot him out. They called him a sophomore even though, like I said, discounting the Weatherford College credits… They called him a sophomore and they were ready to boot him out of school unless he declared a major.

He was taken aside by a man who, if my memory serves me right, was named Frank Melmon, who was one of his instructors. And, years later, by the way, I met this guy's son, his name was Mark, and I met him because he played Irish bagpipes and he came to me looking for help with reedmaking. Interesting thing, he said "You wouldn't be related to King Hubbert?" I said, yeah, my uncle! And it was an incredible thing, meeting this guy.

So this guy, Frank Melmon, said "Hey look, I read the book, there's nowhere that says you can't take more than one major, which might suit you. And this had never been done. And he took a triple major, the first multiple major in the history of that University. He took physics, mathematics and geology. And that was an interesting thing because his work, throughout the years, seemed to want to tie together extreme disciplines, things that were quite different. He felt that it was important to do that, that you would have a bigger picture of how to find answers that were actually relevant to our life.

I don't think it was really oil that interested him, I believe that it was he was just fascinated with geologic stuff probably from the time he was a kid. Rocks and cliffs and there was plenty of that around to look at. I couldn't tell you exactly, he was interested in a lot of things, art, music, theater, folk music, he loved folk music, and so on. I don't really know what caused that particular focus.

I do know one little anecdote of that time, and this is a pretty significant thing, actually, he was presented, as all students of "geology" were presented, a basic law created by a Frenchman named Darcy, and it was known as Darcy's law and it has to do with fluid motion through rock. And King, as an undergraduate, looked at this work, he went and studied this. It was given to him and they said we want you to study this, this is what it's about, and he was told what it meant. And King decided, on his own, that Darcy may very well have been right, but that everybody was giving him an interpretation of Darcy's law that was absolutely wrong, absolutely opposite of what Darcy meant.

So King proposed that they had it wrong. Well, I'm sure that he caused some real uproar and had people that were fairly upset with him about that. But he was finally vindicated. Now it's basically his interpretation of Darcy's law that is studied and used.

Basically King, the nature of King was that he wanted to get people thinking. He wanted to break up the, sort of, status quo on any number of subjects and really make the wheels of thought, on a larger scale, go into motion. That's what King was all about. He liked to pose problems, he liked to pose questions. He liked to question the way things were accepted as being.

He started teaching at Colombia University in 1930, or approximately thereabouts. Prior to that, for a few years after having left Chicago, he had been doing work with some small oil company, but he'd also been doing field work for the USGS, so he was known by the USGS.

Colombia offered him a position based upon some papers he'd written as an undergraduate. He accepted that. They never gave him full professorship because he didn't have a PhD. So they kind of had him, I think, under their thumb, a little bit. He wanted to require his students to study a multiple discipline kind of scenario. He figured if you wanted to be a geology student, you really needed math and you needed physics because otherwise, you had nothing, you had no science, no real science. And so, they didn't like that. But he campaigned for that throughout, and recommended highly that that be a requirement. Ultimately, it has become so.

King's idea was that, I mean, in talking with King, he said 'Well, you know, they say that they fired me because of this and this and this', what I was talking about, the idea of being a maverick and wanting to require multiple, a certain course of studies, 'but they really fired me because I was living in sin with some woman who later turned out to be your aunt Miriam.'

And Miriam was quite a wonderful person. They never had any kids, by the way, I don't know if you know that. And that was largely based on their choice, because they were espousing zero population growth, in the 1930s. King saw, very early on in his life, he saw unlimited population growth as being a threat to the wellbeing of the planet and the human race and the whole picture as being heavily threatened and stretched, the system being very much stressed by population growth. He saw that the whole idea of unlimited growth, in other words, this is what he saw as being the problem with capitalism. You know, it's based upon everything has to keep growing, growing, growing, growing. Well, what do you end up with? You end up with the world looking like WalMart. It's incredible.

Like I said, King was a kind of a… He had a lot of math going on in his head, from the time he was a little kid. And he'd look at the world and he would think about things like, Okay, so if the population was estimated to be this, then and this much now, how much, what was… So in 100 years it expanded x, gee, it took 5000 years for that to expand… He extrapolated to the next logical step. And he just started seeing systems, and the unlimited growth concept being, systems being very stressed out by that. He recognized that very early on.

He thought that the depression was a real crime against mankind that was perpetrated by capitalists gone wild, which, in fact, it was. It didn't have to be. He said there was resources galore, there was potentially work galore, why did we do it? A bunch of idiots! He would have much more precise things to say about that.

A lot of King's family ended up going to California for one reason or another around that time, to get away from whatever was collapsing around them. Living in a more agriculturally based, rural economy that suffered very badly. By that time, King had carved out a niche for himself, and I'm sure he weathered through quite well, but he had huge sympathy for those that didn't, and he had real disdain for the people that caused it to come down the way it did.

I don't know that he was an activist. King was a pretty busy guy. He was certainly an activist in the sense of, in the 1950s, with the civil rights movement. King and Miriam were very much… They lived in Houston. Houston was a pretty rough town in terms of race relationships going on in Houston. And they would attend different events that some of the schools around were doing and they became aware of a young woman that was an actress and she was up in the high school, and they became kind of fascinated with this person that showed so much huge talent in theater. They befriended her, and ultimately they financed her going off to drama school in New York City where she was accepted, and so on, and they were lifelong friends. And she was from the black community.

Well, they also did things like go to the opera house. They loved to go to the opera house. But the Houston Opera House had never had an AfroAmerican person in it other than to sweep the floor. So King and Mariam bought tickets for the very best seats in the house and waited until the house was full and then walked down the aisle with their friends who were the wrong color.

So in that respect, I would say that they were activists. I was going to tell one story that I told earlier. To me it's a significant story because it's something about King that struck me at a fairly early age. I was 16 years old and went up to Stanford University to visit King. I took a guitar because I was a big fan of the guitar at that time, I played the guitar all the time. Aunt Miriam picked me up at the airport, the San Francisco Airport, brought me back. Now this is when he was doing seminars, graduate seminar, lecturing one quarter a year, for several years running at Stanford.

So we got back to their apartment and King said that he assumed by the shape of the box that I was carrying that it had a guitar in it, and said that he'd be right about that. And he thereupon instructed me to get it out and sing him a song. And I did, and at the time, Joan Baez's first album had made quite an impression on me and I sang a song that I'd learned off from that, which I knew absolutely nothing about the song other than that I liked it and that it was probably an old song and it must be from the British Isles somewhere and it was either Henry Martin or John Riley. So I sang the song and King listened intensely with his eyes closed as he always would even if you were talking to him, and he would often just close his eyes and concentrate on the sound of your voice. And he opened his eyes when I finished and he told me that it was lovely and that he was sure, in fact he knew, that I would find probably several versions of that song in a set of volumes by a man named Sir Francis James Child. And he told me about this man that wrote these books.

Well, I later discovered that Child ballad, that's what that meant, and that King was telling me about the definitive work, past and present, on Scottish and English balladry. So, I thought that was really interesting. Here's a guy, a scientist, who's probably a pretty busy man doing what he does, and he's telling me about something that, later on, became a great reference for me because I had huge interest in that kind of music.

It's interesting. I'm sure that everybody in the family was always proud of King, you know. It was always, King's… We have a famous uncle. I mean, he was kind of famous, in a way. The curiosity about it all is that King didn't really go out of his way to socialize a lot or communicate a lot with a lot of the family members, and that had primarily to do with the fact that he couldn't really chit chat about a lot of the things on his mind with a lot of the people, although he certainly had familial bonds and he was very close with my Aunt Nell, who was the oldest.

You know, he would go out of his way to just clear the air. He's say, look, I'm an Atheist, I want you to know that, write it down, do whatever you have to do, but I'm an Atheist, now you know. And he just wanted to keep it real straight with people. But he didn't think along certain lines that maybe they thought he should think along, but he was very up front about it. He showed up at all my Granddad's birthday parties, which went on for a long time because my Granddad went on for a long time, living to almost 100 years old, and he was always there.

Sometimes I think people have, sort of, evolved in weird ways. I think of the song, I wonder if they make people quite the way they used to. King came from some very old mold, just him, his character. It fits well with my Granddad, my Grandma, my Aunt Nell, and the older people I knew of that generation. They were these sturdy, surviving kind of people who were basically ready to take care of business.

So much of the work that King did was useful to the oil industry, but, then again, a lot of the work that he did was not for the oil industry nor even sponsored by the oil industry. He did spend a bunch of time in the 1920s, I think, alternately working for the USGS or going out and doing field exploration for some oil company or other that was thinking of drilling. But to him, going and exploring was just going out and exploring.

I don't think that… He just saw it as an opportunity to go do work that he really liked doing, and I don't think he completely formulated his ideas along the lines yet of Peak Oil and so on, but later on he did work in fracturing that lead to this thing of injecting old wells. He didn't really do that for the exploration, for revitalizing oils, he was interested, he was a theoretical guy. He was doing work that he was just keenly interested in. What's going on with all these physical… The shape of the earth, the physical properties of the structure of the earth.

And so Shell Oil approached King in, I gather, it was the late 1940s, around 1949, 1950. He already had already gained a lot of stature for his work and they basically offered to build a laboratory for him in Houston, Texas. I don't know if he had a real choice about that, but… Would you be interested in doing your work in a lab that we sponsor, we're going to sponsor you. And I don't think they put any restrictions on him. If they had put restrictions on him he certainly wouldn't have come out in 1957 with his Peak Oil and made that public. That was not to their best interest.

He didn't ever seem to let backdrop stop him in any number of different subjects, arenas, be it his outspokenness for civil rights, or be it zero population growth, or cohabitating with his girlfriend for ten years in New York City. Once thing after another, King was kind of an outrageous guy, really. You look at him and you think he looks like this severe scientist, you get this intellectual curmudgeon, or whatever the word was he used. He was so broad-minded in the sense of really seeing the world from so many different angles and so many different kinds of experience.

There's a lot of little, great stories about him. King went in the late 1950s, it might have been in 1956 or 1957, he went to Germany to do a lecture tour. His wife and he decided that they wanted to buy a Mercedes Benz. They'd never had one, they always thought this was a great piece of engineering. And he thought, Oh, this'll be great. I'll call up Mercedes, I'm going to order my car, tell them when I'm going to be there, can it, if it will work out, can I do that, yeah…

So he arranges the whole thing. He's got this fixed date that he's got to be for a week in some town in Germany, and then he goes to, wherever it was, Stuttgart, I guess, and he gets there, he goes there first and they tell him, we're sorry, your car's not ready. So he says, Oh, I'll come back after my lecture. So he comes back, the car's still not ready.

He was going to go off on holiday for two weeks or more in Europe in this Mercendes Benz, he was going to drive it all over Europe. He goes down the road and he finds a youth hostel. The first day, night that he's there, or the only night, actually, he meets this guy, a college student and it was vacation time, and he had a motorcycle. And they get to talking and they really like each other.

Now King, you realize that at that time King was in his 50s, so he's not a young guy, and this kind of goes against the old curmudgeon theory, right, they fall in together and they get this great idea and King spends the next two weeks riding on the back of this guy's motorcycle touring all over Europe. It just seems so King, you know…