It was 1977. I was standing in the Dog House with the driller on an Oklahoma oil rig, about to start working as a roughneck, a job I knew nothing about. It was summer work during my junior year at Penn State. My ride, Chris, a guy I just met that morning, had driven me […]
A Different Drummer: My days in the oil fields
In the summer of 1977 I left State College, Pennsylvania on a Greyhound bus bound for Oklahoma City to work my junior-year summer as an oilfield roughneck. I was excited and looking forward to the money and the rough and tumble hardtack scramble of running a live western oil rig, slinging heavy equipment, getting dirty, […]