Interviewer(s): J. Christy. Morgan City, LA

Affiliation: University of Houston/History International

Vince Guzzetta was born in Berwick, Louisiana in 1936, a small town across the Atchafalaya Bay from Morgan City. After three years at Louisiana State University, he and his father, Vincent Sr., started a seafood business in Berwick called Deep South Seafoods. He was hired to pick shrimp. The company also received packaged, processed, and froze imported Mexican shrimp and put them in Deep South's freezers to send all over the United States. In the mid-1960's, when the oil companies moved to Morgan City in large numbers, Guzzetta and his father converted their seafood business into an oil field service company and renamed it Guzzetta Offshore. In general, they took seismic crews out and carried mud and pipe and other supplies to offshore rigs. They worked in Bahrain and the Middle East, South Africa, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and other sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The company dealt with Geophysical, Pennzoil, Texaco, Conoco, and others. A Guzzetta and GSI crew were seized in Somalia, causing Mr. Guzzetta to deal with the State Department, Rome and the Somalian government. The Guzzettas also owned Guzzetta Oil (distributorship for Conoco) and owned seven gas stations in Morgan City area. They phased out of both Guzzetta offshore and oil in 1990.