Ike Morris & Mike Ross

While taking a drive to an oil well in Upshur County, home to offices of Mike Ross Inc. and Ross & Wharton Gas Co., the relationship of the two men emerges as they point out pieces of land and businesses they own together, including one featuring stacks upon stacks of pipe to be fitted together to transport the energy products drilled from the leases the two own as the state continues to develop Marcellus shale natural gas and gears up for a potential Utica shale boom.

Driving by one property Ross is trying to sell, Morris, owner of Waco Oil & Gas in Glenville, asked, “How do you like old Mike’s sign? ‘For sale. Let’s talk.’”

And when asked how they met, Morris deadpanned, “He was hitchhiking one day.”

Replied Ross: “He picked me up.”

Then there is the topic of Morris’ well-known habit of dropping a Ulysses Grant or more each morning when he picks up everyone’s breakfast tab at the Cornerstone Cafe in Glenville, as he did on this Tuesday morning after rising at 4:30 a.m.

“When he goes to Florida, business drops off,” Ross cracked.

“It was $62 this morning,” Morris added.

And then upon returning to his office from the oil well field trip, Ross makes sure to drive through the parking lot where he keeps work trucks that he sent to Morris to be rigged.

In addition to returning to Buckhannon with the proper equipment, the vehicles also featured new lettering neatly painted on the doors, stating “Mike Ross, Brush Hog King.”

“We go brush hogging,” Ross admitted. “I have a tractor and he has a tractor, and we have all this land. We like taking big tractors and cut brush and high weeds. It makes good food plots for horses and cows. We let other people pasture their animals there, and we cut hay.

“Ike got in the cattle business but he didn’t stay there long.”

It’s not surprising that Morris would try a new venture. He’s one busy 77-year-old, and he has the energy — and the schedule — of a much younger man.

For instance, don’t try to reach him the week after Independence Day. He’ll be in Pocahontas County with a posse of friends, riding one of his Harley-Davidsons.

“We have about 20 motorcycle riders and we all get together the weekend following the Fourth of July,” Morris said. “I have a cabin and a bunk house and we go up and ride.”

Then there was the late July fundraiser Morris was organizing for Democratic gubernatorial candidate and owner of The Greenbrier, Jim Justice, at his 17,000-square-foot home off a two-lane road in Gilmer County.

A couple days before that, Morris made time to stop at a key client meeting for the new Leslie Equipment Co. facility in Fairmont, which will be selling John Deere tractors — the industrial kind, not the lawn and garden kind — which clearly fascinate the man who has moved some dirt in his day, both personally and professionally.

Ross, who also attended the John Deere event, himself is no stranger to a party, throwing a big one each year that he calls Coalton Days — after his hometown — along with a few sponsors, including Waco Oil & Gas, and attended by 2,000 of his closest friends and business associates.

This year’s special guests included WVU men’s basketball coach, Bob Huggins, and WVU President E. Gordon Gee.

In fact, the stories of both Ike Morris and his good friend, Mike Ross, mirror each other, from their age — Ross also is 77 — and their humble beginnings and strong work ethic to their gravitation toward the same line of work and then the generosity they have bestowed upon their communities.

Many institutions of higher learning have benefited from the men, from West Virginia University and West Virginia Wesleyan to Alderson Broaddus, Davis & Elkins and Glenville State College, where two years ago officials opened the doors of the $25 million Waco Center, featuring the school’s land management program and a sports arena, as well as a branch of the Minnie Hamilton Health System, with contributions from both Morris and Ross.

“It helped me get started,” Morris said when asked what motivated him to help fund the facility. The Glenville State College Foundation places Morris in its $10 million-plus donor category.

“The whole community in West Virginia helped me get started. It’s giving back.”

Same thing with breakfast on him at the Cornerstone Cafe.

“I just enjoy it. I can afford to enjoy it. It’s just something I can do and I do it.”

And Ross has an even more personal reason for his $1 million donation to WVU Children’s Hospital.

“I took my boy there in the 1960s,” Ross said. “I didn’t have the money to pay them. I’ll never forget what they did for me.”

His then-15-month-old son, Bill, with wife Joann, had a fractured skull. Bill recovered and grew up and his own daughter, Taylor, was born prematurely and also was treated at WVU Children’s Hospital.

“She was so small, I was afraid to hold her,” Ross said. “You should see her today. She’s 24 and she’s tall and she’s already graduated from the university.”

Of course, Morris did not meet Ross while he was hitchhiking. It’s actually a funnier story than that.

“I bought a compressor off Mike,” Morris said. “I bought it in Coalton and we moved it to Glenville. I hadn’t ever paid him for it, so he followed me down here to Glenville to see if I was going to pay him. That’s really one of the first times we met.”

That was in the 1970s as both men were getting ready to establish their own businesses. Eventually, they formed a few together as well, including LandAPlenty, Rossco LLC and Mike & Ike Oil Co.

“We started teaming up and buying property at sales,” Ross said. “Rather than compete against each other, we became partners on a lot of it. Over the years we’ve traveled and worked together and spent money together and made donations together. And we’re still at it.”

And they also have their own companies. And in spite of the name of Waco Oil & Gas, Ike Morris does not come from Texas. Instead, his southern drawl is more Oklahoma, where he was born, and southern Illinois, where he grew up, with a father in the oil and gas business.

“I got my start in southern Illinois working for my father,” he said. “I worked on the service rigs.”

Wanting to set up his own business, he arrived in West Virginia in 1962 and worked servicing rigs until he established Waco Oil & Gas in 1975.

His logic behind choosing the name Waco was simple, and it worked.

“Texas is known for oil,” Morris said. “When you are going to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, different places, when you mention Waco, everyone thinks of energy. It’s catchy and I could spell it. It’s been a good name. It’s been good to me.”

Plus, he asserted, no one gets confused in North Central West Virginia when someone mentions Waco.

“When you say ‘Waco’ here, people think of Ike Morris. They don’t think of Waco, Texas.”

While Morris exercised his wanderlust and moved several states away from where he grew up, by contrast, Mike Ross, the son of an Italian immigrant, Cesido Rossi, still lives in the same small town where he was born, Coalton, in Randolph County, population 250 or so, about a half hour’s drive from Buckhannon. He grew up the middle child of 14.

“I learned what competition was at an early age,” he said.

Ross did work in the mines but after graduating from high school, he borrowed money to move to Ohio and got a job, then went to heavy equipment school in North Carolina. He returned to West Virginia and attended Davis & Elkins College for a couple of years and then began working in the oil fields as a well tender.

In fact, he took a pay cut from making $3 an hour on a bulldozer to $1.25 an hour in a gas field because he thought the future would be better working for Waverly Oil Works in Pittsburgh.

“They made a lot of opportunities available,” he said, like taking him to dinner at the exclusive Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh.

“You didn’t walk into the Duquesne Club. Someone had to take you.”

They also gave him a brand new 1959 Ford four-wheel drive vehicle, the first year Ford manufactured them.

“I loved to hunt,” Ross said. “It was added incentive. It was an opportunity to learn something about a business. I didn’t know the difference between a maple tree and a gas well at that time. I learned a lot.”

He went to classes on fracturing and cementing and drilling and in the 1970s, he and Robert Wharton started Ross & Wharton Gas Co. and in the 1980s, after he had become a successful oil and gas man, he founded Mike Ross Inc.

Ross’s hard work began to pay off in the 1970s during an oil boom that took place after the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia renegotiated oil leases that led to an industry surge.

“So we had a coal boom and a gas boom from 1976 to 1983-’84,” Ross said. “Then it died down again and soured until 1992, and it got better. Then we didn’t get the Marcellus boom until 2010-2011. I’ve been through a few booms.”

Of course, the Marcellus shale has popularized a new form of gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing, in which gas is extracted through rock with a pressurized liquid.

Now Ross hopes the Utica shale leads to another boom so that he can lease his mineral rights to the larger companies that will come in and drill for natural gas.

“I think there will be additional drilling,” Ross said. “If demand increases, which it possibly will, it’s not going to be an immediate increase. But it could come back slowly. We’ll see if it’s as good as it was. We’ve got to get more of a demand for gas.”

And looking back, Ross punctuates how that $1.75-an-hour pay cut to go from heavy equipment to oil well tending paid off.

“Today I have my own bulldozer.”

The mid-1970s were a magic time for Morris as well, as he established Waco Oil & Gas in 1975 and began buying old oil wells, a move that especially has paid off in the past decade.

“It’s been, the word would be, unbelievable,” he said. “The last 10 years have been unbelievable. I was positioned well and my company I think has taken advantage of the Marcellus shale. It’s been fabulous and it’s been good for the state of West Virginia.”

Waco Oil & Gas actually employed 500 workers about 20 years ago and now has about 180 on the payroll, but that is because Morris took a different route as the oil business changed.

“These big companies can afford to dig these deep wells,” he said. “We’re talking deeper, more expensive drilling. My company couldn’t afford to venture out into that type of production and depth of wells. So we do lot of contract work for bigger companies.”

All throughout her husband’s rise in the oil business, Sue Morris, Ike’s wife, worked as an elementary school teacher for 32 years, and in tribute, it’s her name affixed to Glenville’s three-field facility, the Sue Morris Sports Complex.

In fact, sports is an abiding passion for both Morris and Ross, and Morris still keeps in touch by phone “probably weekly” with former WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez, who coached at Glenville State early in his career.

“Rod is like my second son,” he added.

His first and actual son, Doug, the vice president of his father’s company, helps lighten the load immensely these days. A receptionist answering the phone at Waco Oil & Gas imparts that Morris is “practically retired,” which he later protested with, “I’m only 77!”

But he does admit that Doug Morris’ list of duties continues to grow.

“He does everything I don’t want to do,” he said. “Every year, I do a little less and my son does a lot more.”

But retirement? That’s another story.

“I’ve always looked at it that I’ve got to live to be 108 to have enough money to pay everybody I owe.”

When asked if that is really true, he answered, “No, not really. But I tell everybody that.”

Or, as he noted while riding around Buckhannon, “My good friend Mike Ross says the only time you lose liability is when you go broke or die.” n