Richard Randall the Scamp
By Jon Horton

Richard Randall was one of the founders of Pac West/Mile Hi/Norpac/etc, etc, etc. He was famous for his practical jokes and when I was working for him in Cody during 1982 and 1983 he told me dozens of stories about tricks he had played on people over the years. However, my favorite was the one he played on David Newsom when Dave first started out in seismic.

It must have been in 1977 or '78 and they were working somewhere in central Colorado. Newsom had been fired from the Forest Service for being a hippie with environmentalist leanings and showed up on the crew looking for work. Richard thought he'd be perfect as a the guy to permit the governmental agencies, especially the USFS, so he hired him.

Now, Newsom knew all about paperwork but Richard saw he was technologically deficient in the extreme so one day Randall handed Dave a company credit card and sent him into the nearest town's Radio Shack to buy a "Fallopian tube" for the doghouse, and do it in a hurry because the crew was shut down! Newsom took off in his truck, going like a bat out of hell, as Richard picked up the phone and called the store. He told the owner what was going on and asked him to tell Newsom he was out of Fallopian tubes but he was pretty sure they had some in Durango. The Durango store owner sent David to Grand Junction...you get the picture.

Of course, in the meantime Randall had told everyone in the company what was going on and all the managers were kept up to date on David's progress around the state. When Newsom got back to Oak Creek, or wherever he'd started out from, it took a long time to live down the story. However, it did not keep him from eventually rising to the position of Vice President of Grant-Norpac. Shows you what it took to be upper management material back then.