Interviewer(s): D. Austin. Covington, LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I met Joe Schouest at the divers' reunion on March 10, 2002. Several people told me I would have to meet and talk with Joe, and a couple told me the story of the diving accident in which he lost most of his right hand, before I actually got the chance to talk with him. He wore a blue leather glove on his right hand but did not say anything about his injury. He told me that he had saved over ten years' worth of diving logs from the 1970's and 1980's and that I was welcome to take them and read them. I told him I would certainly like to do so, and he gave me his phone number to contact him. I called a couple of days later and set up the meeting at his house. When I arrived, he met me at the door and invited me in to sit at the kitchen table. He had a stack of photos, magazines, and company materials on the table and began by talking about them. His wife and another woman, whom he later introduced as the wife of another diver who had passed away a couple of years earlier, were moving around in the background

Joe Schouest was born in 1929 in New Orleans, started working for Taylor Diving in 1960 and dove for Taylor for 28 years, the longest of any employee at the time he retired. He began work as a seaman in the Merchant Marine in 1946 and worked at sea for 10 years. He also worked at the Michou plant assembling tank engines for the Korean War. He began diving in the Mississippi River in 1957, moved to the Gulf of Mexico in 1960 with Taylor Diving, and then did his first job in the North Sea in 1967. In 1968, he was sent back to the North Sea where he remained until 1980. He married an English woman in 1970 and had two children. He returned to the Gulf in 1980 and worked there until his retirement in 1987.