At the Top of Texas, Perryton Offers Lessons In Oil Bust Survival

[Sanguine]

How plunging oil prices are reversing fortunes across Texas. Read all the stories in this series.

PERRYTON — Nick Long was ready to party. For four months of 1987, he and some confidants had secretly prepared to uncork a celebration in this town at the top of the Texas Panhandle. Folks needed some revelry amid a yearslong oil glut that left a trail of shuttered banks, foreclosed homes and repossessed vehicles. They craved images of a rebound.

Long, the operations manager at the local radio station, had picked his party trigger: $20 per-barrel oil. He had stashed a few cases of sparkling juice (Ochiltree was a dry county, after all) in a closet at work and waited for West Texas crude to reach that low — but no longer soul-crushingly low — value on the market.

“The whole purpose was just to lift up the attitudes, and give us a moment,” Long, now 62 and living about three hours southwest in Floydada, recalled in an interview. “It was just a little bit of a milestone. We were out of the rock-bottom kind of stuff.”

Perryton’s town-wide bust bash of 1987 would lift its spirits — temporarily, at least. And it would ripple far beyond the community. People as far away as Saudi Arabia would read newspaper accounts overflowing with hopefulness from the oil-and-ag town that calls itself “America’s Wheatheart.”

Twenty-nine years later, the city of more than 9,000 residents has hit another rough patch. ...

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/21/top-texas-town-offers-lessons-oil-bust-survival/

[IsailedawayfromFR]

A saga that has been repeated many times.  At least this town will revive once prices go back up as the oil and gas isn't going anywhere.  Lots of towns just dry up when the oil runs out.

I happen to know someone from Perryton as he and I went through UT Austin at same time many many moons ago.  Must be a nice place, as he zoomed back to Perryton as soon as he could.