Hellfighters: Red Adair & Houston's Oil-Fire Legend on Film

Paul 'Red' Adair was born in Houston in 1915 and grew up to become the most famous oil-well firefighter in the world — the man teams called in when a wellhead was blazing out of control anywhere on the planet. In 1968 Hollywood turned his life into Hellfighters, a big-budget adventure starring John Wayne as a Houston-based fire boss loosely modeled on Adair, with Red himself and his partners Boots and Coots serving as technical advisers on the fire scenes. This drive follows the Houston story behind that movie: the city that raised him, the archive that preserves his papers, the oil-industry world he came out of, and the cemetery where he rests. Because there is no historical marker to Adair in our data, every stop here is a curated real public place, and we're honest about where the record is firm and where it's approximate. It's a tour about a genuine Texas legend and the film that made a myth of him — a Houston kid who spent fifty years walking into fires no one else would touch.