Interviewer(s): Diane Austin; Rylan Higgins; Betsy Plumb. Morgan City, LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I was referred to Dewey Wilson by Captain Carl Moore at the Young Memorial Campus of the Louisiana Technical College. Dewey retired from the technical college in the summer of 2001 and was very well liked and respected by the marine instructors there. As he and I talked, I came to realize that my early impression that Dewey had a long history with Young Memorial was wrong; he only began at Young in April 1999 when the school was expanding its marine operations program. However, what also became clear was that Dewey was among the first, if not the first, maritime educators working among the mariners of southern Louisiana when they began facing new Coast Guard requirements for licenses. The second interview was conducted as part of the study of the links between WWII and the offshore industry.

Dewey is a very humble man, but his pride and pleasure in his work shines through when he talks about his life and those with whom he has worked. His father was a merchant marine, and Dewey wanted to follow in his father's footsteps. At one point, he and his father were the only two in southern Louisiana with ocean licenses. When Dewey graduated from Patterson High School in 1944, he went to the South Pacific on a cargo ship. His ship was hit, and he ended up transporting corpses for the Graves Registration department until two months after the war ended. After returning home, Dewey went back to school and sailed on steamships for a couple of years. The shipping business was slow, so he and his brother bought a shrimp boat. When his father died in 1959, he looked for something that would allow him to stay home and be near his mother. At the time, the Gulf Area Vocational School of Abbeville was trying to organize a school in Morgan City. Dewey got involved with the school in 1960. He was contacted by people from South Lafourche and began teaching in Golden Meadow on weekends. In 1964, the State of Louisiana ran into financial problems and cut back the marine program, so Dewey went to work for Tidewater as a boat captain. He also found himself teaching classes for Tidewater. After an incident overseas while he was doing classified work for the Navy, he left Tidewater. After a series of mergers, he found himself back working for Tidewater.