Coots Matthews, Cantankerous Hellfighter,...

...Dies at 86. It's hard to improve on that headline in today's Times. But there's more, much more:

A joke has it that St. Peter was showing a Texan around heaven, with the Texan claiming that everything he saw was better in Texas. St. Peter tired of the routine and pointed to the fire of hell. “Do you have anything like that in Texas?” he asked. The Texan said no, then added, “But there are a couple good old boys in Houston who can put it out for you.”

Those good old boys would have been Boots Hansen and Coots Matthews, who worked with the celebrated oilfield firefighter Red Adair, then started their own company, Boots & Coots, to become legends themselves in the business of fighting oil well fires. All three were technical advisers and inspirations for characters in the 1968 movie “Hellfighters.”John Wayne portrayed Mr. Adair.

Mr. Matthews, like his colleagues, was an expert in the perilous art of detonating dynamite in oil well infernos to starve the fire of oxygen, thereby killing it. Real hellfighters insist on the word “kill” over wimpier alternatives like “extinguish.”

Awesome!

Among thousands of calamities, Mr. Matthews survived the simultaneous blowout of 14 wells in the North Sea; 700 oil well fires in Iraq in 1991; and a broken leg, which made him an inch shorter on the left side. He and Boots, or Asger Hansen, helped Mr. Adair put out one of the most famous oil well fires in history. The blaze, in Algeria in 1962, came to be called the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter.

Cool!

Mr. Matthews’s daughter said her father had never denied fear.

“You respect the things you fear,” he would say, “and that respect can save your life.”

But fear was not something Coots Matthews often displayed. His daughter characterized him as a “barroom brawler” and “hell on wheels,” who “too often let his fists do the talking.”

That's probably how people will describe me after I die.

In 1942, he joined the Army Air Forces and became a tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress. His plane was shot down on his first mission, but he went on to fly many more.

Of course he did!

After the war, Mr. Matthews opened a beer joint in Houston called Cabin in the Pines. It was fun, but not profitable. So he took a job working in oil field services for Halliburton, an industry giant. After 10 years, he was fired for crashing seven company cars.

Seven? Wouldn't you say something to him after two or three?

Mr. Matthews was married four times to two women. “I’ll let you figure it out,” his daughter said with a laugh.

And finally,

Perhaps Mr. Matthews’s most harrowing experience was when a piece of a crane fell on his leg, pinning him, while a poisonous gas well was spewing, his daughter recalled. Mr. Adair grabbed an ax to whack off Mr. Matthews’s leg. At the last moment, though, Mr. Matthews summoned his strength and jerked his leg free.

He later asked Mr. Adair if he would really have done it. Mr. Adair replied, “A one-legged Coots is better than no Coots at all.”