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James Carl Anderson, known to all simply as J.C., established Anderson Exploration in the late 1960s. He died Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015, aged 84.Jeff McIntosh

J.C. Anderson, a transplanted Nebraskan who built one of Canada's largest independent oil and gas companies using a combination of sharp business acumen and homespun wit, died on Thursday. He was 84.

Mr. Anderson, one of the last of a colourful breed of wildcatting oilmen who had once personified the Calgary oil patch, died of congestive heart failure, his son, John Anderson, said on Friday.

"You will be missed by so many people whose lives you touched. Enjoy peace in the BIG gas field in the sky!" John wrote in a message posted on social media.

James Carl Anderson, known to all simply as J.C., established Anderson Exploration in the late 1960s after a stint with the U.S. Army in counterintelligence, then working as a chief engineer for Amoco Corp., the oil major that is now part of BP PLC. Among his company's biggest finds was the huge Dunvegan natural gas field in Alberta.

Mr. Anderson was known for a shoot-from-the-hip style. Even as Anderson Exploration grew into the country's sixth-largest oil and gas producer in the late 1990s, he resisted hiring communications staff to answer questions from the media, preferring to do the talking himself. "I am the PR department," he once said.

"You always knew where you stood with J.C., whether you liked what he thought or you didn't like what he thought," John Anderson said in an interview. "He was honest. He'd do a deal on a handshake and his word meant everything."

His company gained global attention in 1995 when it won a high-profile takeover battle for Home Oil, beating out his onetime employer Amoco and allowing Anderson Exploration to expand across Western Canada and into the Far North.

"I'm just a dirty-fingered, old engineer trying to run an oil company," he told The Globe and Mail after clinching the deal. "You betcha I'm going to see it through. I'm a lucky guy. I get to do something I like every day. I've got a lot of energy."

In September, 2001, Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corp. paid $5.3-billion to take it over. A year later, Mr. Anderson helped establish a new small producer, Anderson Energy Inc., run by his long-time protégé Brian Dau.

He never shied away from making his opinions known, often in witty fashion. He would describe someone he thought to be making a bad business decision of "wearing a Size 2 hat." He once said a colleague was "skinny as a road lizard."

Anderson Exploration annual meetings were must-attend events for the chairman's monologues, and his tradition of bringing in field staff to introduce to shareholders. In one famous presentation slide, aimed at showing that oil was cheap, he compared the price of a barrel of crude – then $26 (U.S.) – to barrels of everything from Coca-Cola ($78) to Jack Daniel's ($4,100).

With a file from reporter Brent Jang.

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BP-N
BP Plc ADR
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Devon Energy Corp
-0.31%47.47
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Coca-Cola Company
+0.42%60.13

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