At the same time, Walt Helmerich and Bill Payne continued to be on the lookout for new opportunities. One evening, an old flying friend happened to mention a story of old oil well explosions near his home town of Farmington, New Mexico. Someone in the group with drilling experience recognized the explosions as a sure sign of natural gas deposits. So they jumped in a car and headed for Farmington to check it out. Helmerich planned to spend some time there investigating the area, and then take a train to Tulsa to be with his wife when she gave birth.
While he was still in Farmington, a telegram informed him that his first child had already arrived, several weeks ahead of schedule. One of his friends drove him at breakneck speed to the railhead at Gallup, where he nearly missed the Santa Fe train for Oklahoma. To his despair, he found the train completely full, but he persuaded the conductor to let him ride in the lavatory, at least on the first leg of the trip.
When he arrived by his wife's side, Helmerich was expecting to find a beautiful young daughter. The telegram had said only that the new baby had black hair, which was Cadijah's color. He assumed that if it had been a boy, the hair would be blonde, true to his roots in medieval Britain and Germany. Guesswork genetics is an unreliable science. The black hair from Cadijah's side of the family turned out to belong to a new son - Walter Hugo Helmerich, III.

New Opportunities in Tulsa
Rates for drilling in north central Texas by now had dropped so low that the struggling Helmerich & Payne Company had difficulty making money in drilling operations. This fact, coupled with Helmerich's reluctance to be apart from his family, convinced the new young father to move two of the company's three rigs to the Greater Osage field west of Tulsa. His family would live in Tulsa near Cadijah's parents.
The rich reserves of Osage County had first been tapped in 1905, and the boom that hit the area generated a host of colorful stories. Most of the activity had been in the eastern part of the county. So Helmerich and his partners decided to help expand the field westward. He contracted to sink three holes near Shidler, just east of the Kay-Osage county line.
"Emancipation" had become the watchword of the young as the new decade brought with it popular revolt against the prewar mores of gentility. The Viennese waltz disappeared, along with corsets, and long skirts were cut scandalously short. And Prohibition gave birth to a new, national industry of gangsters.
Wall Street was becoming the world's money market, and Sears Roebuck was flooding farms and small towns with its catalogs. Henry Ford was selling Model Ts for only $350, stimulating demand for oil and its primary by-product, gasoline.