Two remarkable men with Aramco connections dating back some seven decades died two days apart late last month.
Bert Seal, a photographer, was a friend with whom I had the pleasure of covering many company reunions in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. He joined Aramco in 1955 and stayed five years before heading to Libya and winding up in San Diego, Calif., where he continued to ply his avocation.
He died Sept. 26 at age 93 in San Diego.
Kris Kristofferson was a friend of a friend. The singer/songwriter and actor, known for his country western music, gravelly voice and rugged good looks, spent the summer of 1958 in Dhahran, en route to taking up a Rhodes Scholarship in literature at Oxford after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona College in California. His dad, Henry, a Pan Am airline pilot and an Air Force brigadier general to boot, had navigated his way to Aramco in 1956 with his wife, Mary, their daughter, Karen, and second son, Kraig.
Kris Kristofferson died Sept. 28 at age 88 in Maui, Hawaii.
Kris Kristofferson
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I “met” Kristofferson through Steve Furman, who came to Dhahran as a six-year-old in 1945 with his mother, Claudine. Furman lives in Houston, but he still calls Dhahran “home.”
In Dhahran, he and his mom joined his dad, Steve, Sr., one of the famous “100 men” who ran the company in the kingdom during WWII.
Furman was home from his sophomore year at university the summer of 1958 when he palled around with Kristofferson. He was 20 and Kristofferson was 22.
“He brought his guitar … and the girls loved him,” said Furman, who was himself dancing Kristofferson’s sister off her feet on the Patio in Dhahran.
“That summer, the Saudi government would not allow returning students to work, so a lot of college kids stayed in the States for summer work,” Furman said. “Thus, I was the only one in camp even close to Kris’s age. We bonded over books and literature and spent a good deal of time at the Hobby Farm riding horses…
“He was a joy to be around, that’s for sure, and he did affect my life.”
Steve Furman, left, and his old friend Kris Kristofferson met after the singer-songwriter's performance in Houston in 2010. Photo by Jane Furman.
Both Furman and Kristofferson joined the military after university—Kristofferson the Army and Furman the Marines. Furman went on to work for a pipeline company in Brazil and Iran, finally joining Aramco in 1974 and staying until 1985.
Kristofferson became a musician and a movie star with a global audience, but not until after he’d piloted helicopters to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and worked as a janitor at Columbia Records, hoping to get a get a foot into the big-time music scene.
A photo of Kristofferson with his arm around Furman, both men sporting big smiles, appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah, along with a story about Kristofferson’s concert in Houston, which Furman and his wife, Jane—a former Aramco employee herself—attended.
The story said they talked for about 15 minutes after the concert, where Kristofferson shared a dual bill with Merle Haggard. Furman asked Kristofferson about his sister, only to find out she’d died.
He and his wife also heard Kristofferson sing at an Austin City Limits concert in the Texas capital in 1991.
“He was hosting a gig featuring a bunch of veteran singers, songwriters and musicians of the Vietnam War era,” Furman said. “We had a good chat.”
But the pair first reconnected in Houston in 1989—after a three-decade hiatus.
“It was a hilarious meet-up and what he said to me is not fit to print, but it doubled me over with laughter,” said Furman.
“He remembered me as soon as I moved in to meet him. He had a wicked sense of humor!”
Kristofferson displayed his touch for writing early on.
1957 May 15 Sun and Flare - Page 3
When he was a student at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., he won awards from both The Atlantic Monthly and Middlebury College in Vermont for his story, “The Rock,” according to a 1957 Sun and Flare story. The story ran a picture of a closely shaved, neatly coiffed Kristofferson—later known for his trademark tousled locks and beard.
The article quoted the director of Middlebury as saying Kristofferson’s story was “original, very competently written and extremely provocative.”
The same thing could be said about his lyrics over the years.
A Time magazine story in 1959 about Kristofferson’s time at Merton College at Oxford said he was struggling with a novel, as well as working “in a fair way to become wealthy as a teenagers’ guitar-thwonking singing idol.”
He’d answered an ad to perform live and launched his career in the U.K., Time reported, with lyrics like these, from “Ramblin’ Man”:
Left my home when I was 10
To see the world and learn
A little bit about the things I didn’t know.
Labor crews and gandy dancers
Taught me questions without answers;
I learn less the further I go on.
The words, Time said, were “suggested by the summers he spent working on Wake Island [in the Pacific], laboring with railroad crews and fire-fighting gangs.”
The Atlantic published a memorial story about Kristofferson Sept. 30 this year. Headlined “Country Music’s Philosopher King,” it called him “a thinker-poet who pushed country music in existentialist directions … built on the insight that music is philosophy.”
Furman’s favorite Kristofferson song is “Me and Bobby McGee,” famously recorded by Janis Joplin in 1970, just before she died. He also wrote top-trending songs like “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
He won three Grammy awards, including two with his second wife, Rita Coolidge, in the 1970s; the couple divorced in 1980 and he married once more. He also appeared on TV and in films, winning a Golden Globe for his co-starring role with Barbara Streisand in A Star is Born in 1976.
That title sums up Kristofferson’s career.
“All of his songs really resonate with me, not because of my knowing Kris but because of the words he used and how he was able to say strong things with very few words,” said Furman. “That’s talent, [along with] his skill at being able to put together images that last a lifetime.
“He was a creative genius, not just a celebrity of song and Hollywood.”
Bert Seal
Bert Seal at the Expatriates Reunion, Dimensions 2009
Bert ca. 1957 in Dhahran
Bert Seal and Kris Kristofferson likely crossed paths in Dhahran in 1958, when they were both there. Bert (I’ll call him by his first name since he became such a good friend) was a member of the four-man Public Relations Dept. Photo Unit and Kristofferson was on summer break between undergrad and graduate school. But Bert never mentioned meeting him.
Bert and I also probably crossed paths when he returned to Dhahran on a special assignment in 1982. He flew in from his home in San Diego, Calif., where he worked as a photographer for the local government, on a six-month project to shoot for the 50th anniversary of the start of exploration by the company in 1933.
I don’t remember meeting him then, even though I was writing about the anniversary. But that was Bert: He was a quiet photographer who did his job so well it did not even seem like he was there.
2018 Reunion, Bert Seal with the author, formal
Bert with friend in Hofuf at 2019 in-Kingdom reunion. © Arthur Clark
Bert Seal with Ali Baluchi at the 2018 Annuitants Reunion in Austin, Texas. Note Bert's 1955 badge. © Arthur Clark
Bert with Ali Baluchi at 2019 in-Kingdom reunion. © Arthur Clark
Bert at 2019 in-Kingdom reunion at Heritage Gallery. © Arthur Clark
Bert and his grandson, Sam Field, at 2019 in-Kingdom reunion, looking over his old Admin. Building photo. © Arthur Clark
I believe we finally met at the 2008 Annuitants Reunion in Las Vegas, which was hosted by Karen and Albert Fallon. It was the first reunion I covered for Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah at ASC in Houston, where I landed with my wife, Debbie, in 2003, after retiring early from Aramco in 2001.
Bert always carried his camera, and he and I quickly developed a rapport, telling jokes and capturing reunion highlights for Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah.
One of the things that was so endearing about Bert is that he worked for free; or, as he put it, shooting for Aramco wasn’t work at all.
Then, when I’d happened to be in Southern California doing jobs like oral history interviews, he’d come along with me to take pictures, or I would stop by his San Diego home.
© Bert Seal
© Bert Seal
© Bert Seal
© Bert Seal
Hofuf street scene in 1950s. © Bert Seal
Governor's palace entry © Bert Seal
© Bert Seal
© Bert Seal
Several years ago, he donated to the company a number of photos that he’d shot on his own time in the kingdom—of Bedouins south of Abqaiq and of people and places in al-Hasa, for example. His archive is also at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
At the 2019 Expatriates Reunion in Saudi Arabia—the last one of at least eight reunions we worked at together and which he attended with his grandson, Sam—I did a filmed interview with him at the “new” Photo Unit in Dhahran after he toured the site, his eyes sparkling at all that he saw. It was a far cry from the place he’d come to work 64 years before at age 24.
He and I could both recall the “original” Photo Lab, housed in an old stone building in the shadow of Jabal Dhahran, across the street behind the Admin. Building; at least it was “original” for me when I joined Aramco in 1980. Bert had worked there near the end of his tenure with the company in the late ‘50s, but before that he’d been based in the original U-shaped Admin. Building, and then in a portable just outside.
In the interview, Bert talked about the good times he’d had on the job. “The biggest break in my whole life … was getting hired by Aramco,” he said.
He was working as a locksmith in New York in 1955 when he spotted an ad for a photographer at the Arabian American Oil Company—which he’d never heard of before.
He’d been taking night classes in photography and shooting on his own, and had a decent portfolio of work which he took with him when he went for an interview with Ted Phillips at Aramco‘s offices at 505 Park Ave.
Bert was surprised (and pleased) when he got the post, calling it “the most important event in my life.”
A DeHavilland Beaver, known as the Aerial Workhorse of Aramco's Exploration Parties, flies over the Rub' Al-Khali in December 1956.
Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
Saudi Derrick Man Sa'ad Ibn Fahd secures a section of drilling pipe during Pipe-Pulling Operations Offshore, November 1957.
Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
Dr. Azmi Hanna (Left) and Dr. Roger Nichols, members of Aramco's Trachoma Research Team, take scraping from the eyelid of a Bedouin. Dhahran, October 1957. Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
Passengers on an Aramco International Flight leave the Flying Camel at Dhahran Airfield. August 1958. Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
An aerial of Al Khobar in 1959. Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
Dr. Charles D. Matthews records Tribal Language Variations from Tribesmen from the Dhufar Mountains Region. Photo by Bert Seal, Credited to Aramco
He called his assignments, which took him everywhere from the medical facilities in Dhahran to the Ras Taura Refinery, and from deep in the Rub‘ al-Khali to King Saud’s rose-colored palace in Riyadh, “an amazing job.”
“One of the best parts of the job was [being] loaned to King Saud quite often when he would come to Dhahran, but also I went over to his palace whenever he had foreign visitors, like … Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt and Haile Selassie and a few others,” he said.
“I don’t recall who handed out the assignments, but oh, it was fantastic.”
Tom Walters headed the Photo Unit and Bert worked alongside him and two Palestinian photographers, Khalil Rissas and Khalid Nasr. V. K. Anthony came onboard when one of the Palestinians departed.
“We did everything,” from shooting to developing film to printing pictures for the Sun and Flare and Aramco World, among other jobs, Bert said.
“Some people asked me, ‘What kind of work did you do?’” he noted. “And I’d say, ‘Well, I didn't work. I just took pictures and got paid for it.’”
When he returned to shoot for the 50th anniversary, he spent quite a bit of time in Yanbu‘, the site of new oil and gas facilities and new port, as well as in al-Khobar, where he bunked. The latter had “changed a lot,” he said.
Bert said he missed the old days “in some ways.”
“Some people kind of feel, say, oh, you had it tough back then,” he said. “Well, in some ways we had it easier than people do today” due to new security measures that made it harder to enter company sites. “The old days were kind of fun in a way.”
Bert said in his 2019 interview that he was doing “lots of traveling now and I always carry a camera with me.”
I like to picture Bert, wherever he is, still holding that camera with a big grin on his face, thinking about the next (free) photo he’ll shoot.