On my 11th birthday, in July 1946, I set out from southern Illinois with my mother and my younger brother and sister on the first stage of a journey by train, ship and two-propeller DC-3 to join my father halfway around the world in Saudi Arabia.

The year before, while World War II was still raging in the Pacific, Dad and almost 30 other men from Lawrenceville’s Texaco refinery had traveled to Arabia on a U.S. troop transport to work for the Arabian American Oil Company. Texaco was a partner in Aramco (today’s Saudi Aramco), and the company was building Saudi Arabia’s first oil refinery at Ras Tanura, a narrow, white-sand peninsula reaching into the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf.

When the men from Lawrenceville went to Ras Tanura, the kingdom was producing just 58,000 barrels of oil a day, half of one percent of world production. Today, Saudi Arabia’s production capacity is more than 10 million barrels a day, and its actual share of current global production is 12 percent.

I didn’t know it when we boarded the train and Mother handed our tickets to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad conductor, but it was the start of a childhood journey every bit as magical as the Arabian Nights. In those days, I was “Billy,” a small-town Middle Western boy beginning his lifelong connection with the lands and peoples of the Middle East and with their rich legacy of history, art, science, religion, and culture.

Over half a century later, in October 2003, I again traveled to Saudi Arabia, this time as a member of a group of former residents in the kingdom, invited back by the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce to update ourselves on recent developments there. We covered a lot of territory in only ten days, visiting cosmopolitan Jiddah on the Red Sea, the capital, Riyadh and the oil centers of the Eastern Province.

During our return trip, we saw many changes underway in the land where we’d lived or worked, both economic and social, but for me, one day stands out amid a flood of memories:  the day we visited Ras Tanura, the town where I grew up.

When our family first arrived there in 1946, “RT,” as everybody called it, was essentially a bachelor construction camp. “Main Camp,” located just outside the fenced refinery area, consisted of light industrial machine shops and garages, offices and bachelors’ barracks housing. The facilities included a Mess Hall and Rec Hall, an outdoor movie with wooden benches, a canteen, commissary and clinic -- all familiar terms to Americans living in the post-war period.

The new housing area for married expatriate employees (later called Najmah, the Arabic for “Star”) was then nicknamed “American City.” It was built a mile or so removed from Main Camp and consisted of only 30 pastel-colored houses laid out on a grid eight dwellings long and four deep along the white-sand beach. A low stone wall and sidewalk ran along the shore in front of the eight houses facing the Gulf, and the houses furthest from the water faced on broad Surf Avenue, the new area’s only real street.

Dad often told us how in the months before we arrived in Arabia he had taken part of each lunch hour to drive from the refinery area to the residential building site to urge construction crews to hurry up and finish the first houses so he could bring his family from Amreeka. When we first moved into House 3-C, the view from our living room window looked across our own bare yard of white beach sand and two other yards toward the turquoise Gulf.

The first signs of green to appear in the sand surrounding the house were the tiny spikes of palm shoots that sprang up like tiny stalagmites in the drip line below the eaves. Evidently, the construction workers, seated in the shade of the wall to eat their lunches, had dropped date pits in the sand beneath the overhanging roof where, later, the Gulf’s heavy humidity condensed each night and fell to water them.

The relatively few American families living in Ras Tanura, cut off by time and distance from the United States and the customary support of their extended families, developed bonds and kinships with one another that soon transformed neighbors and most members of the community into surrogate aunts and uncles. (Initially, Home Leaves to America came only after three years service. A basic holiday call by radio-telephone connection to Grandma and Grandpa back in Illinois had to be booked weeks in advance and consisted of a few shouted words interspersed with awkward gaps of transmission silence.)

The majority of American employees at the time were men and women (mostly nurses) who, even if married, were living temporarily on single status. These “bachelors and bachelorettes” took such vicarious joy in the children of their coworkers on family status that there was never a shortage of volunteers as coaches, scout leaders or mentors.

Our first school was a large room attached to the rambling wooden mess hall (later the “dining” hall). Our one teacher, Mr. Whipple, was a dynamo of energy and inspiration who managed a dozen or so children from grades one through eight, enlisting the help of the bigger kids to help the little ones learn.

The families were young, and now that the war in the Pacific was over, more were arriving by sea every month, so there were always “new kids” on the bus from American City to the one-room school in Main Camp. We welcomed them immediately into our growing circle, for in this booming oil town weren’t we all new kids? It wasn’t long before the school needed more than one classroom and teacher, and we moved into a portable building in Najmah, where houses had already begun to expand across Surf Avenue. The temporary Portable was trucked in and set down next to the site where a real brick school building was soon under construction -- and later, even an indoor, air-conditioned movie theater.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see why RT still holds such a special place in my heart. First, there was the Gulf and the desert, both offering adventures and discoveries. The nearby oasis villages and coastal towns offered other opportunities to explore. On family or school excursions, we sailed to Tarut Island, in the bay between the headland and the mainland, where donkey carts met the boats to haul us across the tidal flats to shore. We watched wiry, full-lunged pearl divers as they were pulled gasping to the surface, clinging to their baskets of oyster shells. We saw Arab farmers scramble up the trunks of date palms to harvest clusters of the ripened fruits. In sun-dappled covered souks, we boys bargained for old silver coins, hand-stitched sandals, or sharp-toothed saw-fish snouts. In general, the Saudi adults we encountered were permissive and indulgent with young children and spoiled us with attention.

Saudi Arabia, in the 1940s and ‘50s was still relatively undisturbed by the complexities of the industrialized world. Its new oil installations, such as Ras Tanura’s refinery and crude-export shipping piers, were only superficially off limits to curious youngsters. From our point of view, the company’s Security Department focused mostly on safety and traffic issues or dealing with minor disputes or trespassing. Major theft or sabotage were not part of anyone’s scenario in the kingdom’s quiet post-WWII days.

Children climbing under a fence to play in a store yard or their snorkeling between the two rock jetties that channeled cooling sea water to the refinery via the “low-lift pump house” was not unlike kids cutting through a neighbor’s backyard garden back home in America. When we encountered Saudi guards, such infractions rarely resulted in more than a mutually curious exchange in pigeon Arabic and English, ending with the gentle admonition for us to “Go home now. Here it is memnouah. Not allowed.”

In 2003, not surprisingly, when our study group toured the Ras Tanura refinery, we experienced the vastly increased level of security that reflects today’s global climate. Our bus was vigilantly stopped and inspected at multiple gates through multiple fences. Today, like all Saudi oil facilities and industrial complexes, Ras Tanura is guarded by government security forces as well as Saudi Aramco’s own guards. There were also photographic restrictions as our escort pointed out the newest additions to the refinery. With a nominal capacity of 325,000 barrels per day, Ras Tanura is not only the oldest but also the most versatile and up-to-date refinery of several operated by Saudi Aramco.

I remember the great community celebration on the RT beach in May 1947 when the company commemorated “100,000 Barrel Day,” then a new refining landmark. An article in what was then the company’s mimeographed weekly “newspaper,” The Sun and Flare, described the festivities. There were potato-sack races and a fat-men’s race, a pie-eating contest, a ladies’ hat contest, and a competition for the most beautiful pair of male legs. The specifically Arabian touch was donkey rides for the kids atop the unusually large breed of white animals, each decorated with its owner's orange-colored henna brand, which were imported for the day from the nearby Qatif oasis.

After our bus left the modern refinery, we passed a crude-oil tank farm on the shores of the Gulf. In the days just after WWII, this was the site of the “Italian Camp,” inhabited by skilled laborers and craftsmen hired from the defeated Italian colony in Eritrea, across the Red Sea from Arabia. In later years, when most of the men had been repatriated to their families in Italy, several of the camp’s larger wooden buildings were converted to stables for use as what was called the “Hobby Farm.” Perhaps because many of the American employees had roots in the oil patch of Texas and Oklahoma, there was a keen interest in Arabian horses. My family kept two at various times, and as teenagers we raced them in the coastal dunes and through the surf toward the refinery.

Today’s road parallels a number of thick pipelines stretching toward the Marine Terminal area, where both refined products and crude oil are loaded onto supertankers at two piers and an offshore artificial island. According to a recent report by the Associated Press, “The sprawling complex daily transfers 5 million barrels of oil to tankers, more than 6 percent of the 76 million barrels produced worldwide each day.”

As we drove onto the narrow headland (“Ras” means “head” in Arabic) the choppy waters of the Gulf on the left and the smooth surface of Tarut Bay on the right were the same sparkling, turquoise blue I carry in my memory. But today, a security fence stretches along the beach the length of the narrow-waisted peninsula from the refinery to the terminal.

We passed through another security gate and drove onto the old South Pier, in use since it was built in the 1940s. We admired the close-up view of the harbor dotted with sea-going tankers while our escort updated us on the latest export figures. Several aboard our bus had memories of weekend Thursdays spent fishing from the deepwater pier or of good times sailing and water skiing at the company’s Yacht Club, formerly located on the bay side of the peninsula. Today, the club is relocated closer to Najmah, another concession to security, and the Saudi Coast Guard uses its former small-craft pier.

I remember that there was one family house out at “the terminal” in the ‘40s, the home of my friend Myles Jones, whose father was the terminal manager. The Jones’ house was perched high on a dune overlooking the single pier, not far from what was called the “teakettle” refinery, a tiny plant that produced just enough gasoline for the company’s internal needs until the major post-war construction began at Ras Tanura’s Main Camp.