Red Adair earned a larger-than-life, macho image while making a career fighting oil well fires. But to a Lawrence woman and her daughter, he was simply a “fine gentleman.”

“He was a dear friend to my daughter and a dear friend to me,” said Cletis Converse, a 77-year-old Lawrence resident who met Adair in 1990 while visiting her daughter, Debra Guy, in Houston. She saw and talked to him about a half-dozen times after that when she traveled to Texas.

Paul N. “Red” Adair, 89, died Saturday after a long illness. He became famous for putting out oil well fires others wouldn’t touch, and his reputation inspired the 1968 John Wayne movie “Hellfighters.” The United States called on Adair to extinguish the burning oil wells Iraqis left in Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Adair also was a regular customer at Maribelle’s, a bar managed by Guy in a Houston suburb. Converse first met Adair, however, when she and Guy saw him at the South Shore Hotel bar in Clear Lake, Texas. Guy introduced her mother to him.

“She had me sit by him,” Converse recalled. “He had a few drinks, and I had a Coke, and we visited.”

Converse said she enjoyed talking with Adair. He gave her an autographed copy of his autobiography, “American Hero: The Red Adair Story.” Adair wrote an inscription to Converse that simply said, “Wish you all the best, Red Adair.”

“He was just a wonderful, colorful man,” Converse said.

Adair was known for tipping big, often shelling out $100 to those waiting on him at the bar, Converse said.

“The girls all fought to be the one to wait on him,” Converse said.

Adair often drank Scotch, Guy said in a telephone interview. But she insisted Adair wasn’t as wild as his reputation might indicate, at least in his later years. Adair’s visits to the bar grew more infrequent because of his illnesses the past few years, she said. It had been two years since she last saw him there.

Adair’s funeral is today in Houston. Guy said she and other bar employees who knew him weren’t sure they would attend because they didn’t want to get caught up in the expected media attention.

“He was just a fine gentleman,” she said.