Born a native son of the great state of California, and named Steve Ward by my loving parents, I was fortunate enough to live in Orange County, CA, during my pre-teen years, when it was vastly agricultural, unlike the mega urban sprawl of today. Irvine was mostly farm land, John Wayne International was a county airport serving only small private planes, and Dana Point still had live tobacco plants surviving at the foot of the cliffs of the beach growing wild from seeds dropped from bails of tobacco, in the 1700’s, when the Spanish made deliveries of supplies with three masted ships to San Juan Capistrano Mission, while hauling everything up and over the cliffs by rope at the point, replaced today by the Dana Point Marina/beach.
My parents divorced when I was two years old. At age twelve, I given the option and I moved to live with my father and step-mother in the burbs between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. During those years I would work for/with my Dad doing various construction jobs. My Dad lives by a very strong work ethic, so I learned the construction trade the right way, on the fast track, and often whether I liked it or not.
Not long after graduating from High School, Dad and I eventually were both employed as Construction Superintendents for the largest custom home builder in Ohio, each of us having our own territories within Northeastern quadrant of the state. However, after a few months, Dad boldly quit and started his own construction business and a few months later, during the Carter years, the economy took a major dive and I was laid off. Dad did alright picking up construction contracts here and there, but I moved South, where I perceived the economy to be a bit stronger and found work in the oil patch at the top of the panhandle in Perryton, Texas.
I have got to say that life, as I knew it, changed profoundly!
The turn over rate in the oil field service industry is generally pretty high, in Perryton I was told at the time it was 120%, but I think that estimate is, or was at the time, a conservative one. New hires were brought in every couple of weeks and put up in a hotel at the company’s expense for up to a month during orientation and only one or two in ten would last three months, if that long.
Say good bye to weekends and holidays… the work schedule was hard, typically seven days on, two off, seven on, two off, seven on, three off, then start over. Your days off may or may not include a Saturday or Sunday, depending on the schedule. All hourly employees were guaranteed 55 hours per week in pay, but the average was around 75 hours and many weeks were 120+ hours, on the clock, away from home, and usually in the middle of nowhere. A 55 hour week would have seemed like a vacation and welcomed. Work in the oil field goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so if you had a holiday off, it was luck or you were on vacation.
Stay tuned for part two.