Oil Book Review! (Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields)

I recently finished the workplace memoir "Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields" by Gerald Lynch.  This book is many things, but it's mostly a firsthand historical account of one man's career working in the oil fields from the mid-1920s until the late-1950s.  This book had personal significance to me, as my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and many uncles and cousins have worked in the oil industry.  I was raised listening to stories of oil drilling misadventures, never truly knowing what terms used meant (B.O.P., crown block, rat hole, casing, tool pusher, etc.).  This book forced me to do my research as I read, googling each term, lest I was not able to appreciate the litany of colorful stories in this charming book. 

The book itself follows Gerald Lynch who, as a young man, gets an opportunity through family to work at the lowest levels on an oil derrick in northeast Texas.  Over the years he grows from a wild, girl-crazy kid to lifelong professional, scratching his way from roughneck (general labor) to driller (skilled hand who controls the drill), and tool pusher (general supervisor of multiple oil derricks).  He gets into trouble, makes relationships, gets married, endures extraordinary hardships, climbs the professional ladder, loses loved ones, moves constantly, and survives to tell wild tales.  

The narrative itself essentially follows Gerald from drill site to drill site, as his life involved never staying in any one town for more than a few months at most.  He must have maintained a extensive journal to list each site, how difficult the job was in each location, the wild stories that arose from complications relating to staff, corporate demands, local personalities, and personal hardships.  To evaluate this as a first hand historical document, it's worth organizing my takeaways in a systematic way.  Let's go through historical themes and talk about what's dug up over the course of Gerald's working life.

Labor history

One of the first and most obvious ways to look at this book is to see it as a piece of Labor history.  Gerald was an uneducated worker who openly referred to himself and his kind as "oilfield trash".  He is subject to dangerous demands by his employers, expected to move multiple times each year to keep his job, and never provided basic protections we would expect for most workers in today's world.

This is particularly true at the beginning of his career.  Gerald starts out taking working gigs as they arise, jumping from job to job, employer to employer, always avoiding being kept "on the grass" (his term for not having work available).  His employers vary substantially, some that are honest and reliable, others that expect him to work in highly dangerous situations without guarantee that they will be compensated for their work.  It reads like the workplace wild west at times: for one job, Gerald and his coworker have to go to the home of their employer and demand their paycheck while he's eating dinner, ultimately being the only ones who get paid for weeks of hard work.  

Even as Gerald moves up to work for a single dedicated drilling company (who are contracted by oil companies to perform the actual drilling to find oil deposits), the one prevailing theme is pressure.  Pressure to not lose a single hour, much less a day, setting up, moving, and drilling.  Any delay is lost money and the expectations in terms of hours, shifts, and outcomes are at times almost unthinkably difficult.  The book itself presents a moment where Gerald believes he's having a heart attack on the job and decides that all he can do is his best, because, he recounts, if you die the company will just move on without you (a situation that arises several times during the course of the book).

Human History

This book is also a human history.  It's about Gerald.  It's about being a young kid from Corsicana, Texas with a can-do attitude who ingratiates himself in the oil industry.  He runs wild and fools around with girls until he finds a nice divorcee who cannot have children.  They marry.  They move and remake their lives over and over.  They experience tragedy, such as a violent car accident in north Texas that sends his wife through their windshield and an oilfield blowout that nearly tears half of Gerald's face off.  They experience fear, such as his wife's ongoing health and anxiety issues.  They stay married to each other and to their employer, despite his recurring questions about whether it was best for them.  They visit family from time to time, and they make, lose and rediscover friendships.  

He ends the story by describing his wife's death after his retirement, his second marriage, which he was able to enjoy with some travel and leisure.  He ends by describing the shocking, premature death of his second wife and his return to loneliness.  Gerald's life was full and it was tough.

Personal work history

An extension of this human history is a personal work history.  Much of the book is about the people Gerald has to hire (such as the young man who he hired but was later institutionalized for prior crimes), fire (such as the drunk whose child Gerald is forced to look over), and deal with.  Gerald spills significant ink describing his successes and innovations.  He's proud of the technological adaptations he incorporates into his work and he's proud of the good teams he puts together who work quickly without issue.  He loves to talk about the weird issues they encounter and overcome (countless stories of drill bits being stuck and later unstuck).

He also talks about the frustrations dealing with senior management.  Throughout he describes decisions made from the top-down that put his staff in danger or cause extraordinary delays and inefficiencies.  At one point, he discusses forcing a "company man" to stand with them as they drill because he wanted him to understand the dangerous situation they were being put under.  Among the best stories in the book, it results in the "company man" ruining his pants.

Toward the end of the book, the issues evolve as Gerald becomes more of a supervisor and boss than employee.  His frustrations are equally pointed at difficult junior employees and bosses.  He also becomes accountable for tragic events as well, as he's tasked to inform a young wife that her husband was killed when a faulty part fell on his neck.  His takeaway from the encounter sounds tone deaf ("she took it well"), but this is Gerald's life and trauma, not mine.

Business History

The book also stands as an interesting piece of business history.  We start seeing wildcatting small derrick owners and their informal practices.  We move onto a medium sized drilling company with some staff loyalty.  Finally the medium-sized drilling company becomes wed to one major oil company that contracts them exclusively.  As a result, you get exposure to different personalities from the smallest to biggest companies involved in oil production.  You see the power dynamics and priorities for each.

You also see the development of technology, language, and processes as the industry grows up.  By the end of the book, there's a greater sense that the oilfield had become an established vocation with professional geologists, engineers, and highly experienced hands executing operations.  Even in the beginning you're given folksy histories of terms used in the oilfield, often hilariously so.  For example, a work shift is called a tour but pronounced "tower" because illiteracy permeated the lower ranks and it was assumed "tour" would be pronounced like "sour".

You also see the lives of staff as they respond to business cycles.  At times staff quit the industry, accept lower paying roles, move to distant locales, perform more difficult jobs, or retire.  The fear of losing work is imbued throughout the book, whether it be from being fired (being drunk on the job, making major mistakes), being laid off (lack of wells being contracted by oil companies due to market conditions), or injury.

Geological History

The last layer of note is the endlessly fascinating geological details described in the book.  The fact is that Gerald spent over thirty years working with teams of men drilling more or less 10,000 feet into the ground to find oil.  This means pushing a drill millions of years into the past.  They dug up massive shells that locked up their drill bit, they found beautiful cuts of igneous rock from ancient volcanic eruptions, and they found cuts of rocks that split in their hands to show ancient fossils perfectly preserved.

They also found water reservoirs in the desert and had accidents and spills on private lands (fortunately in this case with highly sulfurous water that helped one rancher's land bloom).  Their work was the violent act of shoving metal straws through layers of earth to find liquid hydrocarbons and the constant uncertainties of what the earth would give back in return.

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In summary, the book was a valuable slice of life in learning more about energy economics, energy history, and the oil field in particular.  My father, a man who spent his career drilling for oil, is now reading the book and I hope to record our discussion on the matter.  Hoping to share that in a future post.