another poor day.’ And there he was
offering me a dollar-ninety! I thought
I could work there a week, get my
money, and go on to Montana. Then
Bob said the killer thing: ‘Pat, you
won’t believe all the good-looking
girls out there!’ I worked there all
summer. Worked 96 hours the first
week — man, I’d never seen so much
money!” And that’s how Pat came
to be in North Central Texas and not
Montana.
For $2.50 an hour he followed
his brother to General Dynamics,
ultimately working on the flight line
as an aircraft electrician, five years in
all before getting the boot in 1971.
The GD workforce went from some
32,000 to 12,000, Pat said, “and the
jobs in Fort Worth were just gone.”
He did what he could to keep body
and soul together, a little of this and
a little of that, carpentry, electrical
work. Then, he landed a job build-
ing a shopping center in Hurst that
kept him in groceries for a while. The
planner behind the shopping center
liked Pat’s work and asked him to
be GM on another one he wanted
built in Dallas. Pat didn’t think he
had the chops for a GM position
and soon took employment with the
old sporting goods chain Cullum
and Boren, which Oshman’s bought
out about 2000. “I told them I knew
guns and that’s where they put me. I
was department head, then assistant
manager at the Northeast Mall store
in Hurst; then when they opened the
brand new store on Camp Bowie I
went over there as store manager.”
He opened the store, got it up and
running and stayed awhile, but op-
portunity came knocking again.
“My best friend Lonnie’s dad
had just died and after the funeral
he called me up and suggested we
go have a beer,” Pat remembered.
“It was a Sunday afternoon and we
went over on Berry Street and got
some of those really good little ol’
steaks about that big (his thumb and
forefinger parted about three-eighths
of an inch), those old cafe steaks,
you know. That’s all we could afford
anyway.”
Lonnie, who’d been laid off at the
same time as Pat, made his friend a
business proposition. His father-in-
law had a little machine shop that
58
King Boy Down by the Water (Pat Potts)
Lonnie thought he and Pat could take
over. “There I was on the fast track
with Cullum and Boren, making pret-
ty good money, and I went home and
told my wife, and by then we had a
little ol’ baby boy … she about died. I
took a 50-percent pay cut to do that,”
said Pat. “But it was the best decision
I ever made. We were blessed, but
we worked hard, and overall business
has been good. I’m still at it 44 years
later. I went to work this morning, for
a little while.”
He called the current business a
“highfalutin’ machine shop.”
“We make dies and tooling for the
forging industry,” he explained. “Air-
craft dies, oil field dies, military dies.
I think it was ’86 that we decided
to go to computerized machining. It
had never been done in our industry,
the die business. Everybody told us
how crazy we were, we couldn’t do
it, it can’t be done, not gonna hap-
pen. They were almost right, it almost
couldn’t be done — the learning
curve dang near broke us. But we did
it, and we were the first die shop in
the United States to go CNC (Com-
puter Numerical Control).”
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Pat and
his wife started buying and turning
houses. They’d live in one for a while;
then sell for a better one. In 1996,
they built a stone house on Highway
1886 five miles west of Highway 199
and Lakeside. “I welded every weld
and set every post,” he said looking
out over the 10-acre property and its
improvements.
It’s a nice spot with gently rolling
terrain and a small tank and stately
oaks. Some of it he cleared for grass
and construction sites. Now 69, Pat
enjoys sitting on his back porch of
an evening surveying the fruits of his
labors, and watching Cinco, Twister
and Concho (The Boys) munch grass.
Longhorns are a passion for Pat who
has raised them since 1984. At times,
he maintained larger herds on a ranch
he had out Barton Chapel way in Jack
County. He sold out completely but
couldn’t do without the critters and
bought them back in, in a small way.
“What’s the big to-do about these
cattle, Pat?” I put it to him, seeking a
rise. “They’re just bovines.”
“No! Noooo! Longhorns are