Just a story

[starmac]

Didn't know about Clint Walker.

I also understood that if you stiffed him when he staked you, you were going to have a hard row to hoe in the Permian basin.
Inever hired out of the café, but knew several that did, I never did any roughnecking in the Permian basin, but did do a little roustabouting there when I was younger.

[starmac]

Boaz, just to prove oilfield trash was serious about beer drinking, when the bars closed in Odessa, we could make a dash for the border and time zone change and get one more. lol

[Boaz]

Didn't know about Clint Walker.

I also understood that if you stiffed him when he staked you, you were going to have a hard row to hoe in the Permian basin.
Inever hired out of the café, but knew several that did, I never did any roughnecking in the Permian basin, but did do a little roustabouting there when I was younger.

In that time a man would know that , the café was a system and everyone had to be right . I would bet the ones that hired through there made sure he got what was owed him

[Boaz]

I hired out at the café the second day to muck BS out of tank batteries , heck of a nasty job . But had my name up for rig work , after bout a week Joe said a driller needed a floor hand and would be in that morning . Got on a treble rig floors , stayed till the well was completed . Motel and eating was costing too much so got my check and went back to the house . The rig didn't have another location . Went back to Wichita Falls and did hit and miss work till I got on a rig .

Every rig I worked on I remember the view from the derrick ...the basin was barren but you could see a long ways .

[Boaz]

Yup... crazy. I went to work for Baroid in Feb/'73 and my first day off was in late Mar/'74. Times I was covering 5 rigs over 450miles/day. Flat salary of $683/month to start and there were times that I had 3 uncashed pay checks in the glove compartment. Went two years without even owning a hardhat... I learned a lot about my craft back then but was a bit, we'll call it cranky, at the time. People living like that sometimes get a reputation of being somewhat 'trashy'. A lot of us were recently returned vets that society wasn't real proud of anyway, so we didn't worry much what some folks thought. Still don't.

Hauling mud was dang hard work 24 hours a day if need be . Hats off to you sir .

[lead-1]

Had a couple guys I went to school with get jobs on the rigs but it was about done at that time around here. Three of the guys went to work for a well logging company and was put on a crew together so basically they were unsupervised, smoking weed and drinking, but hey the job got done.
For laughs they would take the radioactive pill out of the container and toss it around like a hot potato, having fun saying look at us we're going to turn into little green men. Long story short they were in there early 20's and all dead within thirty years and all from agonizing deaths from cancer. I still believe it was from them playing with that pill all the time.

[lead-1]

Btw, I was a worm for a short time on the rigs, small company with ten rigs or so, mostly junk and as said, by the 80's the crews were a bunch of partiers and I was just waiting for some one not to make it home. Our driller did the hiring and firing on our shift and you played by his rules, if you wanted a job you met at his house each night and rode to work with him, four of us in a 1970 Wagoneer with very little heat and a plastic bag rear window.
Also it cost you ten bucks a day to ride with him so he made 210 bucks a week off us crew, you didn't pay, you didn't work, lol.
After about 5-6 months we shut down for Christmas and never went back to work, the rig I was on sat in the same spot for close to a year before it made it back to the company yard. I never went back to work on a rig.

[starmac]

One of my cousins was married to a roughneck, maybe still is, but one night he was headed back home to Stephenville and rolled his pickup scattering his whole crew among the rocks and throwing him off in a canyon of sorts.
The ambulance came and loaded all of the crew except him, apparently they were all unconscious and didn't tell them there were 5 people instead of four, leaveing him off in a ravine.
He came too sometime in the night and crawled up to the road before passing out again, he was found something like 2 in the morning, busted up pretty bad but survived.

[Boaz]

Back in the 60's and 70's there were no cell phones , a few rigs had a radio but they were pretty worthless in cold weather , bad weather or if the rig was in a low spot . You had to call the mobile operator , tell them who you were and they called pusher , company man , ambulance or whatever on the phone and verbally repeated the conversation to each party . but most rigs back then didn't have one .

If someone got hurt you loaded em up and hauled em to the closest hospital ..could be up to 80 miles off . You were on your own far as doing the best you could in emergencies of any kind . A hand named Jody , he was bout 40 years old , dang good guy but a bad drunk . went crazy on morning tire . He was talking to his self , started seeing big bugs coming to get us , talking about people in the next room had a lot of beer but the wouldn't give us any . We tried to talk to him but he didn't even know we were there , he was screaming and going crazy . We fought him and got him tied up with sash cord , carried him down the stairs and loaded him in the back seat of the drillers Buick .

We were drilling at Bug Scuffle , bout 20 miles south of Bowie Texas . I drove and a floor hand sat in the back with him bout 50 miles to Wichita Falls . Took him to the county hospital . He ended up at the State Hospital on the alcoholics unit . The driller and other floor hand kept the rig running till we got back .

[Boaz]

Good ending to that story was Jody got straightened out several years later and made tool pusher . We never talked about that night .