Borger, Texas: All-American City, 1969. Partial article

Look Magazine, March, 1970.

Borger, Texas. Oil and Gas created a boomtown in the Texas Panhandle in 1926. Borger’s two leading industrial firms out did other Texas corporations in complying with the state’s 1967 clean-air law, spending millions of dollars on filtering equipment that rid Borger’s skies of Carbon Black by 1969.

Borger, Texas; From Bust to Birth Pangs in the Panhandle.

Sometimes the concern of a whole nation can be found in the palm of a man’s hand. Warren Acker, manager of the world’s largest carbon-black plant, stands at a conference table holding a small glass vial containing powdery black pellets. He unscrews the cap, drops one pellet on a clean white sheet of paper and carefully closes the vial. “This is carbon, or furnace black,” he explains. “It’s extracted from boiling petroleum gas and used in making rubber.” With one index finger, Acker crushes the pellet and spreads a black film across the paper and the palm of his other hand. “When you realize we produce over 300 million pounds of these pellets a year, you see the job we face keeping our plant and Borger clean.”

     There was a time when no such demonstration of industrial dirtiness would have been necessary in Borger, a rowdy town that popped up on the north Texas plains as soon as oil and gas were discovered in 1926. Once, 16 carbon-black plants, in addition to oil and gas refineries there, were belching black fumes and rotten odors. “I just couldn’t believe the dirt that rained down on the streets and windowsills and cars,” says Mrs. Charles Cooley, who came here in 1943 and is now the peppy Women’s Division president of the Chamber of Commerce. “No one dared buy a white rug. 940 and another boom during World War II, Borger faced automation at its refineries, gas works and carbon black plants. Population slowly declined from 20,000, schools had to be closed, old buildings were left to rot and small businesses began failing. Borger decided not to die. Over 900 citizens helped revamp the school system. Businessmen began clearing away unsightly shacks and hustled three new industries into town.

     Although Phillips Petroleum and J. M. Huber Corp., the two largest producers, were working on pollution control in the 1950’s, their officials admit the big push to remove “those last few percentage points” did not come until Texas passed a clean-air law in 1967. “When the legal maximums of 125 to 175 micrograms per cubic meter came out, and our first tests showed 4,000 micrograms,” says Acker, “we thought it was the end of the world.” But by establishing Texas first air-control zone and spending millions of dollars on glass filter bags, the companies cleared Borger’s skies. Just complying with the regulations may not seem very All-America—until you compare it with the foot-dragging elsewhere in Texas and the U. S. “ After all,” explains Acker quietly, “We live here too.

     Far more important in recent years has been the civic cleanup by the citizens of Borger, a town whose attitude used to be reflected in the story of the barber who complained to a client about the dirty air, “If you don’t like carbon money,” said the man in the chair, “get out of town.”

     Borger boomed in the 1920s,sagged during the Depression, went bankrupt in 1940, boomed again with wartime industry, and in 1964, when automation appeared began another period of declining population. “We faced unique problems,” says Mayor Ed Lewis. “Unused Federal housing, declining school enrollment, a townful of empty shacks and storefronts. Paradoxically, income remained high and unemployment low, since people who lost jobs just picked up and left. What made you blue was the felling that Borger was still not here to stay.”

     Borger decided to shrug off the past. Over 900 citizens attended meetings to revamp the school system, assigning unneeded buildings to imaginative projects like a senior citizens’ center in the midst of the community. Women’s groups started a day-care in empty FHA apartments. Whole on strike, laborers helped remodel a ranch house for homeless girls. Businessmen joined the city in removing over 250 deteriorated buildings and have attracted three new industries.

Today Borger has a downtown shopping mall, where once stood flophouses, poolrooms and bars.