Interviewer: Preetam Prakash

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Bobby Jones, the director of the Wayne County Vo-Tech Center, had initially recommended that Preetam speak with Larry Pickens. Bobby mentioned Larry as someone who was quite heavily involved with younger people in the area. Preetam and Larry arranged to meet at the latter’s house in Waynesboro. Larry had gone to college after high school and obtained a degree in education, and had then joined the US Army. While in the army he had been stationed in LA and had heard about the possibility of working in the offshore oil industry. He had been hired by Chevron as a roustabout on a production platform immediately after he had left the Army in 1984 and currently worked as an operations specialist. He mentioned that during the course of his time at Chevron, the company had undergone several mergers with other major oil companies, which resulted in increasing systematization of training procedures and safety standards. Larry also mentioned that obtaining a job offshore, especially on the production side, entailed increasingly high educational requirements which disqualified some local workers. He spoke favorably about the benefits of offshore work, especially the seven and seven schedule, which he claimed to have “fallen in love with” over the course of time.