Humble Oil and Refining was based in Humble, Texas. It was anything but humble. It became Enco, then Esso, then Exxon, and then Exxon-Mobil, which now runs your life and determines your desires, feelings and political inclinations, whether or not you choose to accept it.
And, they still use the Tiger. Put a Tiger in Your Tank. It causes global warming; it’s melting the polar ice caps; but it will keep your car from turning gay on you right when you need it to man up.
Willa Cather wrote a story, The Sculptor’s Funeral, about Harvey Merrick, a famous artist who died relatively young from what seems to have been pneumonia. Before antibiotics. The coffin arrived on the train from New York, its occupant, honored with a golden palm leaf. The sculptor’s apprentice was attending. He had come to see his master home.
Merrick’s pupil expected to discover, in Sand City, Kansas, a delicate world of intense beauty, a warm seedbed for sensitive genius. Instead, he found a cruel cauldron of physical brutality and verbal aggression, a wild land where the artist had never quite managed to measure up. The watchers at the wake had no notion of the artistic stature their fallen homeboy. They wouldn’t have valued it, even if they had. Money and knavery. That’s what it was all about. Willa Cather’s understood. The Sculptor’s Funeral is a tribute to artistic madness. In Kansas, you had to be out of your mind if you were obsessed with beauty and truth.
All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose mind was to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions—so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its holiest secret; liberated it from the enchantment and restored it to its pristine loveliness. I suspect that’s how it went down for Buck Schiwetz in Texas. Cuero wasn’t far from Sand City, in that sense. In fact, the first cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, back in 1866, began in Dewitt County. Cuero is the county seat. Buck drew that courthouse, too.
And, yeah, he drew the Tiger. You won’t find that in the official biography. It was his Babylonian moment. Conscripted by imperial decree, the artist burned a pinch of incense on the altar of Humble Oil and Refining. To placate the fiery vortex at the heart of the Standard empire.