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Roughnecks from the '80s boom had own code
of honor
By BILL WHITAKER
Longtime Abilenian Earl Mackey is one of the 5,000 roughnecks
who largely vanished from Texas oil fields toward the end of the
big boom.
Now he wonders what all this renewed activity in the oil patch
truly means.
"I worry about the new corporate approach to things,"
he told me the other day, on the eve of going out on a drilling
job about 40 miles west of here. "They want the old oil-field
experience and ways, but it seems they also want to control the
men and equipment a lot more.
"Only thing is, most corporate types know little about
actually working on a rig. They're not out there."
Earl rang me after reading several stories in Sunday's "Reporter-News"
about changing times and attitudes in the oil patch. He read how
many of the roughnecks he worked alongside years ago have left
that rugged lifestyle forever, preferring to rely on more stable
jobs.
Granted, the former roughnecks may not make as much, but with
families to support and homes to pay for, they need something
they can count on.
For some, counting on the oil patch has always been a bit too
much like panning for gold.
EVIL TO PAY
Earl Mackey has been more inventive than many a roughneck leaving
the oil patch. After the boom of the late 1970s and early '80s
played out, he tackled a number of projects, including marketing
a fancifully decorated army of "cactus-patch dolls"
and inventing something called a "screamer bullet."
The "bullet," when triggered and loaded into a firearm,
lets off an ear-piercing shriek if a child picks it up.
When I dropped by his house the other day, Earl was sitting
in what passes for his office, his desk top covered with dozens
of little potted cactus plants, most of them sporting eyeballs
and mustaches and ready for shipping.
But the call of the oil field is strong. Some resist it, such
as former oil-field denizen Tony Summers, 38, a burly fellow whose
father and grandfather labored in the oil patch. Today, Tony is
happy working in Clyde's city maintenance department, toiling
more or less regular hours and receiving a regular paycheck.
As a father and husband, such things are important.
"I began working in the oil patch my senior year at Wylie
High," Tony told me when I ran into him a week ago. "I
was really raised in it. Done it all my life. But it got pretty
crazy. Once I worked 117 hours in a seven-day period. You're not
home very much."
Although Earl, 42, has a wife and kids, he has never completely
left the oil patch. Now, though, he worries about the grimy oil-field
hierarchy falling away, as more and more of the veteran drillers
and roughnecks pursue other fields.
"In the oil-field business," Earl said, "the
driller on any rig is God, the derrick man is Jesus Christ, because
he's up there on the derrick, on the cross, and your floor hands
are just witnesses."
And if companies running things forget who's in charge at a
rig, he says, there'll be the devil to pay."
WORMS AND WEEVILS
Earl likens the old oil-field hierarchy one must have at an
oil rig to the chain of command in the military. But today he
fears a trend of penny-pinching companies will hire ill-prepared
hands and inexperienced drillers to work ever-dangerous rigs.
"You can tell the old hands by what you ask them,"
he said. "I mean, this term they use now for the green hands
- 'worms' - that term is seldom used by the old hands. They called
'em 'weevils' back then, probably always will. Plus, the driller
always did the hiring.
"He was the type of guy who could walk up to you, look
you straight in the eye and ask what kind of experience you had
in the oil patch. And if your eyes went to watering, he could
tell whether you were lying or telling the truth."
Earl talks about a code of honor among the best of the roughnecks:
"Everybody thinks of roughnecks as trashy. They think of
us raising hell in restaurants and bars. But a lot of times that
was just to let the pressure off. When I was driller on the rig
itself, I was just the opposite. You had to be."
Nevertheless, Earl admits the oil boom saw lots of chaos. For
one thing, money was good, so inexperienced hands flocked to the
field, looking for quick cash and often finding it. For another,
some oil companies were fly-by-night operations, leaving roughnecks
uncertain as to their next paycheck.
FRITO BANDITO
But then some roughnecks were just as unreliable.
"They've got this saying in the oil patch: 'Quit me right.'
That is, don't quit or not show up when your shift is on. Once,
when some really hard work came up at this one desolate spot,
a whole crew quit just after they showed up to relieve us. They
saw it was gonna be a hard-work day, so they quit right there
and then, which meant we had to work two 12-hour shifts.
"Funny thing is, their car broke down as they were leaving
the location," Earl said, smiling. "We pushed 'em off
the site, but we also left 'em to walk back to town, all 20 miles
and all on their own!
"One of 'em was my half-brother," he added. "I
wanted him to learn the oil patch right."
I told Earl that was pretty severe.
"Well, he shaped up later," Earl assured me. "He
broke out good, learned his trade. But when the boom went bust,
so did he. He's driving a Frito-Lay truck today. You know, I called
him the other day and said, 'Hey, are you ready to go back to
the patch? The boom's on.'
"He said, 'No thanks, I'm happy with the Fritos!' "
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Copyright ©1996 or
1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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