Interviewer(s): T. McGuire. Galliano, LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Mr. Andrew "Pep" Williams, an "oldtimer," was referred to me by Harrison Cheramie. When I arrived for the interview, Pep and his wife, Bertha, were sitting around their back patio, and he was doing some watering. Their well-kept house has many visible patriotic displays, and Bertha dwelled on the "war" and the hardships it would pose for south Louisiana boys who might be called upon to fight in mountainous terrain.

Pep Williams, now 88, started with Texaco in 1945; his wife, 84, who dominated much of the conversation, was a "parade queen" two years ago. Pep started as a roughneck, worked up to a driller, then spent the last of his 33 years with the company as a "driller and production foreman," essentially the company man supervising operations on several fields around south Louisiana. He worked another year as a consultant for $300/day. As a company, Texaco was "like a family." Unlike other companies that had their own rigs and brought them, with their own crews, to south Louisiana (Texaco only had four rigs so much of their drilling was done by contractors), Texaco hired locally. Pep and his wife were both originally from Golden Meadow. She was raised in a house that had washed up in a storm from Leeville and was purchased and rebuilt by her father on the site of the present fire station in Golden Meadow.