Keep Rudolph The Red-Nose Pumping Unit In Lufkin
There is a petition going around that has some 1,500 signatures to keep Rudolph the Red Nose Pumping Unit at the Lufkin Mall, hereafter mentioned as just Rudolph. I agree that it was nice to see Rudolph while I was blazing around the loop at the... uh "posted speed limit of 55 MPH.' It was a beacon for our town. This year it was placed downtown at the City Of Lufkin Municipal Court House. I actually like it there, and it is still that beacon.
Now more than ever Rudolph is ours. More than when it was owned by Lufkin Industries, GE or Baker Hughes. There was a time when the fate of Rudolph was uncertain, with Lufkin Industries gone, 50 years of tradition hung in the balance. Luckily back then someone petitioned on our behalf to keep Rudolph, and he stayed.
The City of Lufkin still gets help from Baker Hughes, as I understand it, to make this happen. This article by THE East Texas Historian Bob Bowman, from 2007 even named the Lufkin Mall as it's permanent home.
Rudolph The Red-Nosed Pumping Unit
By Bob Bowman
If you drive through Lufkin during the holidays, be sure to take notice of one of East Texas’ most unusual Christmas decorations.
For decades, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Pumping Unit,” the creation of Lufkin Industries, Inc., the inventor of the balance-type oilfield pumping unit, has helped East Texas celebrate the season.
Rudolph, named for the reindeer made famous by the Gene Autry song, is a fully-operational pumping unit standing about 45 feet high.
For about four days before Thanksgiving, an electrician installs 1,000 seven-watt light on a selected unit. Another work crew spends another two and a half days putting Rudolph together at his holiday home on the parking lot of Lufkin Mall beside Loop 287 and U.S. 59.
Rudolph is actually a fully-operational Lufkin Mark 640 oilfield pump painted red for the season. At his holiday home, he is pulling a 38-foot dump trailer, also made by Lufkin Industries, carrying Santa Claus and a pile of Christmas gifts.
Rudolph, naturally, sports lighted antlers and a red nose.
On each Saturday before Thanksgiving, East Texans gather by the thousands at the mall, Santa Claus arrives, a local band and choir fills the air with Christmas music, and cookies and milk are passed out to the children on hand.
Lufkin Industries selects a person or group each year to be the official lighter of Rudolph. The crowd shouts out a countdown, a button is pushed, and Rudolph comes to life.
The origin of Rudolph goes back to the days when Guy Croom, a Lufkin Industries employee, heard the Gene Autry song and decided to decorate a small pumping unit with a red electric light bulb and a red ribbon around his neck.
The Christmas decoration was placed at the back entrance of a company machine shop where people driving down Raguet and Angelina streets in downtown Lufkin could see Rudolph bobbing up and down.
The site of Rudolph was often changed each year until it found a permanent home beside Loop 287 in south Lufkin.
At the end of each holiday season, Rudolph is dismantled, repainted and sold to an oil producing customer somewhere in the world. The trailer is also sold to a customer to carry goods across America.
The same will happen to Rudolph this year and it’s not unlikely that he could be placed in a foreign country where Christmas, as we know it, is not celebrated.
Great story, but now things have changed, and some do not agree with the placement. I implore you to go downtown, and see what has been done for Lufkinites and all of our surrounding area. I think it is above and beyond anything we had before. No one was having picnics at the base of Rudolph when it was at the Mall. Park at the courthouse after 5pm and see everything all lit up, before you sign that petition. It changed my mind for sure. I'm just glad that we have Rudolph. It could have turned out much worse.