Interviewer: Preetam Prakash

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I had conducted oral history interviews with Mr. Brown’s father and brother-in-law earlier on in the week. I returned to the Economic Development Agency in Waynesboro to speak with his mother and to pick up a consent form from the earlier interviews. I told her that I was interested in carrying out more interviews during my time in the area and asked her to please let me know if she thought of anyone else in the local area who would might be willing to do an interview. She mentioned that her son also worked offshore and that he was in the area at the moment and might be up for speaking with me. She called him and Mr. Brown agreed to meet with me in the Agency building.

Mr. Brown had been born in Laurel, MS but had grown up in Waynesboro. Since his father had worked in both the onshore and offshore oil industries, Mr. Brown had gotten an early introduction to work in the oil fields, and recalled going out with his father to land rigs when he was a child. He described the timber and oil industries as the two major options for people in the local area when he was growing up. Mr. Brown had started working offshore immediately after he got out of high school. After working offshore for a year and had gone to work onshore, but had soon gone to work again working offshore. Mr. Brown had also worked construction at different points in his career and expressed preferring this to offshore work, and said that he had stuck with the latter because it was better for his family. He also described what he saw as general changes in the attitudes of workers since he started working offshore, specifically with regards to moving between companies in search of better jobs. Mr. Brown said that while offshore jobs had been easy to come by when he started out, they had become increasingly scarce in recent years and people hung on to what they had. Mr. Brown had worked as a roughneck for the majority of his time in the oil industry and stated that he desired to remain in this position.