Interviewer(s): D. Austin; Andrew Gardner, Colleen O'Donnell. Morgan City,LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

A couple of different people pointed me in Jake Giroir's direction. Jimmy Hebert in New Iberia suggested I catch up with him, as did Lou Trosclair. Jake also participated in our last project in the region, so he was familiar with the team. He eats breakfast every morning at Manny's, and I bumped into him there. We made an appointment to meet for an interview at his house. Jake met me at the door, explaining that his wife was sick, so we could meet out back on the covered patio. We started talking, and continued until the tape ran out. I returned later for a follow-up interview based upon a set of photographs he shared with me. We talked for quite a while about the tasks and duties involved in his various positions, and he told a couple of great stories about the incompetence of some of the company engineers with no real experience. Near the end of the tape, Jake starts to talk about some of the changes to the community and environment in the Morgan City area. The third interview was conducted as part of the study of the links between WWII and the offshore industry.

Jake started work in the 1930's in the area around Morgan City, working for Shell. The company hired him and a bunch of friends to help lead the survey crews around the swamps in the area. His knowledge of the swamps was drawn from hunting and trapping there, and he was a success as a Shell employee. Then he started drilling the Gibson field as part of a crew there, and eventually moved to roughnecking at the West Lake Verret field. He worked a couple of other places, including White Castle and Galveston Bay. Then war was declared, and he joined the Navy. When he got back, he started in production at Weeks Island. He moved up quickly through the ranks.

There's a variety of valuable information in this interview, all magnified by Jake's penchant for detailed and witty storytelling. Note that the follow-up interview contains more than just a description of the photographs - we went on to talk about some of the questions we missed in that first interview.