Jerry was born in the Merkel, TX hospital on July 17, 1941. He was the son of Clem and Dema Clemmer Watts. His single sibling, an older brother of almost 14 years, was Raymond Keith. After four years of living on farms in the Merkel area, the family moved to the Hamby community NE of Abilene. Jerry attended Hamby's elementary school through grade six. The 1-3 grades were in one room and the 4-6 grades in another room. During his teen-age years, Jerry often drove a grain truck in the fields where Clem combined wheat or milo. He often drove a farm tractor pulling a "one-way" plowing fields and a cultivator set-up on cotton and milo to help Clem in farming.
Hamby students were bussed to Abilene to attend junior high grades 7-9. That was a culture shock after attending a small country school. Abilene High was the next step with a graduation in the spring of 1959. Beginning that summer Jerry began working for the nearby City of Abilene Sewage Treatment plant and farm full-time in the summers and part-time during his four college years. He was a jack-of-all trades from driving farm-tractors, working on water-pumps, and working in the on-site chemistry lab to test the water. He said the job at the sewage-treatment plant and farm wasn't so bad as he received "presents" from everyone.
Jerry started his higher education at Hardin-Simmons University on September 1959 to acquire a major in Geology and a minor in Chemistry. To afford the cost of college, he borrowed money from the U.S. Defense Fund which he paid back in later years. While at H-SU, Jerry also enrolled for the duration in the Army's R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corp).
On December 16, 1962, one Sunday night, while sitting in his usual spot on a back pew in the Hamby Baptist Church, he noticed a beautiful young lady with an eye-catching smile and dimples. That gal was Jane Caton. He invited Jane and his cousin Betty Carl Brady to ride to Abilene to get soft-drinks at one of the drive-in eateries. That was the beginning of a dating spree with Jane that led to a proposal of marriage on March 20, 1963.
Up on graduating from H-SU in the spring of '63 with degrees in Geology and Chemistry, that summer he attended an Army R.O.T.C. summer camp at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for six-weeks. There he received his official commission as a 2nd Lieutenant. The rest of the summer was working for the City of Abilene.
He and Jane married in the Hamby Baptist Church the night of September 28, and the honeymoon began by driving a '57 ford pulling a U-Haul trailer loaded with wedding-shower gifts, They struck out for Ft. Belvoir, Virginia just south of Washington, D.C. so Jerry could attend the Army's combat Engineer school. There he began active duty and entered the Army as a combat Engineer on October 28, 1963. While at Ft. Belvoir, John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. Jerry went though the Capital's rotunda when JFK's body lay-in-state there.
Upon completing combat Engineer school in February 1964, they drove pulling another U-Haul trailer to his next military assignment at Ft. Hood north of Austin. There he was assigned to the 17th Engineer Battalion of the 2nd Armored Division, one of General George S. Patton's old units. Jane taught one year of junior high math in next-door Killeen. While at Ft. Hood he was a platoon leader and promoted to 1st Lieutenant's rank until his honorable discharge in August 1965. Vietnam had not yet become a full-fledged military effort, or Jerry's time in the Army would probably have been extended.
Again pulling a U-Haul trailer the next step was to Odessa where Jane was to teach junior high math. Another reason for locating to Odessa was for Jerry to find an oil-field job as a geologist. Problem was the oil-field was in slump with veteran geologists being laid-off. No one wanted a rookie with no experience. Jerry checked with the Odessa school system for a teaching job, but he was told he needed a degree in Biology, and the Education courses needed to obtain a teaching certificate. So his first year in Odessa was attending Odessa Junior College taking Biology and Education classes and working nights for Cabells stores which later became 7-11.
Odessa did not have a four-year university at the time so the next three summers involved taking the remainder of Biology and Education classes at ACC in Abilene. Usually having the afternoons free from classes, he and Jane caught a lot of white bass on Ft. Phantom Hill lake where they lived in Clem and Dema's lake house.
In the fall of 1966, Odessa school system contacted and hired him on an emergency teaching certificate to teach Biology at Permian High School. After two years, a Chemistry teaching job came open and he took it now having a full teaching certificate. For the next twelve years at Permian High he taught Chemistry, and enjoyed attending football games played by the famous Permian Panthers. He and Jane often went bass-fishing at various lakes between Odessa and Abilene on the weekends and during summer vacations.
In that interval on February 10, 1972, their son Jerrell was born. Jerry often said, "If I'm to have a legacy, Jerrell is it." Jerry, as Jane also, were often amazed at Jerrell's ability beyond his age to solve all sorts of problems and to explain and convey ideas often by using analogies. Jerry said one of the most memorable moments in his life was when Jerrell was announced as the Valedictorian at Permian's High School's graduation in 1990.
During the last two years in the 70's at night and during the summers, Jerry went to Odessa's newly established UTPB, the University of Texas at the Permian Basin. There he took administrative education courses when enabled him to obtain an Educational Administrative Certificate. However, after having taught for fourteen years, Jerry wanted to do something different other than education and turned in his resignation two days before school started in 1980. He at the time thought there's no way Odessa school system would ever give him a job again because of the short time of resignation notice which made it difficult to find a replacement Chemistry teacher.
Within a week he got a job as a geologist with a new start-up oilfield company named Petroleum Concepts Incorporated. PCI was trying out a new type of synthetic diamond drill bit and Jerry's job was to determine the correct formations in which to utilize the drill-bits. It turned out he was so good at selling drill bits that he also became the Sales Manager in addition to approving the formations in which to drill with bits sold by other salesmen.
The problem with PCI was a high-rolling CEO who spent too much money on excesses such as two company airplanes. Jerry was in the air quite often traveling to sell PCI's drill bits in the oil-field cities of Texas, Lousiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, and to St. Johns Newfoundland, and twice to Venezuela. Another major problem was a couple of bit-design engineers that could not agree on bit design which was not performing well enough.
Jerry told the company executive staff in a meeting that he could sell diamond drill-bits to almost any company, but getting them to use the next one was the problem because of inferior bit performance of the first bit used. Finally investors gave up and the company filed for bankruptcy early in 1983.
Jerry and two other PCI employees applied to the receivership, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and was approved to pay a quarter on the dollar for one million dollars worth of equipment needed to build diamond drill-bits. One partner had an idea for the bit design and Jerry was to sell them. The name chosen for the new company was SynTech, an abbreviation for synthetic technology. And Jerry was selected to be SynTech's President.
SynTech had a very good drill bit that was taking notice in America's oil-fields. The company even had salesmen selling big SynTech drill-bits for off-shore drilling in the North Sea. But in the Spring of 1986, middle-east OPEC dropped the price of oil below $10 a barrel. Drilling world-wide came to a screeching halt. The big four American drill-bit companies had very large inventories of drill-bits on the shelf and could sell below costs to get cash flow for paying bills. Syntech could not afford to lose money so they closed the door to the sale of drill-bits. The remaining partners continued to do regular machine-shop work.
Jerry sold his part of the company to the partners and then wondered if Odessa would take him back as a teacher since six years before he had quit 2-days before school started. Not only did they hire him back to teach at Permian High school in the fall of 1986, but he eventually got his Chemistry classes and old classroom also.
The next 12 years were teaching Chemistry in Odessa until he and Jane as a math teacher retired together in the spring of 1998. They found a contractor that summer to build their dream-house in San Angelo and moved in when it was completed in February 1999. He was contacted by a deer-hunting outfitter that summer and began to guide deer hunts and spring turkey hunts for the next 20 plus years. San Angelo was prime territory for hunting and fishing of which he did both as often as possible.
Also for the San Angelo Standard Times newspaper, Jerry wrote a hunting and fishing column every other Sunday for almost three years from June 2004 until April 2007. He said he quit that endeavor, "When my well ran dry".
Jerry was well known as being a little bit wild as a teenager. He often said that two things that kept him from dying young and/or being jailed was the influence of "the love of his life, Jane", and the discipline fostered by his stint in the US Army.
Jerry was long a believer in God and had accepted Jesus Christ as Savior, but being a back-slider in church attendance, he had never been Baptized. He decided on his 78th birthday that he needed to do that to confirm his faith. So on September 12, 2019 with Jane as a witness, he had a fellow deer-guide, who also was a preacher, to Baptize him in the waters of Twin Buttes lake near San Angelo.
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