formatting note

Some of you might know I'm very fussy about formatting; I just hate Times New Roman, for instance, and much prefer sans serif fonts. Likewise I abhor left-justified text, it looks messy and unfinished; I full-fustify everything I do. Well, in Blogger, I notice, if you cut'n'paste from an email or from Word, it brings its own formatting and throws off the layout. Oh well. I tried to make them sort of match in the last few posts, but whatever I did only made worse, so rather than spend too much time on what is essentially my own particular tic, as Becci would say, I'll just post away as I get them.

more oil patch stories

I'm glad I did that post because it brought out more oilfield stories; as Guinn notes in one I'll post below, it was our life, all of us, for years and years. Even myself, after Roy Lee died, I worked off and on in the oil patch for a good decade; Teresa and Randy did until recently, and Rodger still does. So our whole family history is tied up in the oil fields (does anyone else avidly watch the show "Black Gold?" I love it!). Anyway, here are a couple of emails from first Randall, who points out an error in the previous post, and Guinn, who adds a great deal more and promises to pull out photos (so watch for those!)

First, Randall:

Hello all. I was just reading the latest addition to the family blog and enjoyed it as much as I did when I wrote part of it. I just have one correction (and I'll let Guinn set us all right on the picture mentioned). If the picture Roy Dale references is the one I remember from visiting Guinn over the years is the one where George Lacy is the driller (the one operating the clutch handle and such). I also have always admired that picture -- in color and so well framed and such. I'm pretty sure it is from the time the Lacys were in Pinedale. George was driller for the daylight crew part of the time, although I seem to remember that the picture was taken at night. Roy Lee (Daddy) was drilling superintendent for El Paso Natural Gas Co. for that area of Wyoming. His main office was in Rock Springs even though all of the drilling activity was up at Pinedale and Big Piney. In those days the drilling continued throughout the year -- whatever the weather conditions. There are quite a few stories about those two or three years when at least seven holes were drilled down to deeper than 12000 feet looking for natural gas in sufficient quantities to warrant production. EPNG ultimately pulled out of the area because the cost of a pipeline to retrieve the gas was prohibitive at the time. Since then there has been a lot of activity in the area and continues today with Pinedale being something of a boom town during the summer months.

Roy Dale's rememberings of going to the rig really brought back memories for me since I had very similar experiences from about the time I was six or seven all the way through college age plus a couple even after I was married off and in the Air Force at our parents home for military leave and such. I accompanied Daddy to the rig often on weekends and much more often during the summer vacation periods. I would be allowed to wander more or less unfettered all day long as Daddy didn't have time to watch me all that closely. I usually had a twenty-two or a four-ten shotgun and some ammunition to shoot pretty much whatever I decided to shoot (as long as I didn't shoot toward the rig, of course). On most of those days I would have our dog Curly with me and I had some wonderful times. Much like Roy Dale, the experience of working as a rough neck in a couple of summers at Pinedale convinced me that the Air Force was a much better option for a life work! Although I must say that I never found the rig and its environs scary as Roy seemed to. It was probably not that I was fearless but rather that I was clueless! Anyway, I think maybe George would say that I tended to scare others more than being scared of the rig and its very many hazards. Now days I'm sure that some of the things I did around the rigs of the time would be completely against OSHA rules and I think that is too bad because current generations of kids don't have the opportunity to do the things that I took as a matter of fact.

I was going to deny that I found oil rigs scary but that's not true, they were and are scary places; just one misstep or one second's lack of attention and poof! You are dead or crippled or hurt. I'll add my story here to say why I left the oil patch for academia and never looked back: I was working on work-over rig south of Vernal, Utah, for Gudac Well Service. One day we had to hydro-test the well, which involved pumping high-pressure water down the hole for some reason. To do this we had to make a connection about 20 feet above the rig floor. I was standing on the floor when the derrick hand, whom I think was one of Gudac's sons, Mike, opened the elevators and a big piece of metal fell out of them and struck me on the back of the neck. I fell to the floor like I was pole-axed and I remember a vision of life in a wheelchair flashing through my brain. The others started to pick me up and I yelled "Don't Touch Me!" and then wiggled first my toes, then my fingers, then my arms and legs; then I stood up, very shaky; I went to the emergency room and found I had a hairline fracture in one of my vertebrae of my neck. The next day I went back to the rig and George Gudac told me I had to climb up into the derrick with a 5-gallon bucket of rig wash and scrub the rig, as we were waiting for something to happen and he couldn't abide idle hands. I picked up the bucket and pains shot through my neck and arms and I put it down and said "I can't do this." Gudac, being as he was, got in my face and screamed at me "Do you want this &!@#$% job or not!?!?" and I looked at him and said "No, I don't want this %#@%$^& job, so take me back to town." That's the last time I ever set foot on an oilfield location.

Now, Guinns:

I've thought for a long time that we should be getting some of the oil field stories. The oil field was our life from the time I was born until George retired. George is the only one left who remembers working with Daddy. Jimmy C would have stories but his memory is gone, or so Jo says, and he probably wouldn't be willing to talk about any of that stuff anyway. He didn't go to the oil field until after the war. Cagle would have stories too but who would go and talk to him? I haven't heard anything about him since Snickles died.

But back to the blog. The picture is from Monahans, I'm pretty sure. When I got it I blew it up and found Daddy and I'm pretty sure the one with the cigarette in decent clothes is Ray Moore, and the one, short and heavy set is Heavy. He worked derricks I think when we were in Monahans. The reason I think he was a derrick hand is that he always rode shotgun in that Mercury that Daddy called Joe Stalin. It's the car that Daddy hit the jack rabbit when he was going wide open coming home from the rig and it was thrown up into the grill. The car had a fine chrome grill and it was war time and no way could it be replaced. So it was driven with this big gap in the grill. Anyhow, I couldn't recognize anyone else. I think the third from the right was George Kelly.

Daddy once said he had the best of crews-the best floor hands and the best motor man and I asked why he didn't have the best derrick hand and he said that he had to run the rig.

George was also terribly vain about what a good derrick hand that he, George, was.

When a rig was down, usually it was the derrick hand who went out as a night watchman. Mother and I and Randall as a baby would often go to location with him when we were in Pyote. Bennie and Aunt Jack went a lot too. We would take supper and Bennie and I could play around the pipe and the ropes hanging, and Randall was right about OSHA. Some of the tales told about what went on at the rig would probably cause apoplexy for an OSHA hand.

It was hard, dirty work. And I don't think I appreciated it until I had to crawl into a car with the same people every morning and listen to the same old whines and I only worked 4 days a week. I cannot imagine never having a day off. And yet they did it. Because if they demanded a day off, there was always someone there needing a job to replace them.

Mom and I both learned to contend with "Greasers" as the clothes they wore were called. There were special tubs at all the laundromats, even the ones with wringer machines, to wash the greasy clothes. The guys brought alkali from the rig to wash them with until some enterprising person discovered that a bottle of Coca Cola worked very well. It was a nasty job that had to be done.

If any of you remember the tales Roy Lee told, start writing them down. I have a lot of pictures.

One story that George likes to tell...Daddy told him to throw his hard hat in the air and he could shoot it. So George did. When the hat hit the ground and was still, he shot it two or three times. We still have the hat. He was like that and can't you just see him laughing and slapping his knee when George fell for that one. George says until he went to work for Daddy, he had never been on a rig floor and the noise was deafening. He couldn't understand anything said to him and most of the time when he did hear he didn't have a clue what he was being sent to fetch. Daddy broke him in but good. And yet he had the utmost respect for Roy Lee and to this day thinks he was the finest man to ever walk on a rig floor.

OK, there they are, and great stories too! When I get some photos I'll post them as well. Thanks to everyone! I wish Rodge, who is a really good writer, had time to record some of his stories; he could fill his own blog. But Rodge and I worked together a little bit when we were younger, I'll try to remember some of those tales later.