Interviewer: Preetam Prakash

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I had contacted Mr. Chapman after speaking with some of the staff members at the Waynesboro library about the project. They had mentioned Mr. Chapman as someone who might be willing to be interviewed. When I spoke with Mr. Chapman on the phone he readily agreed to meet with me at his house in Strengthford, cautioning that it was out in the country and that I might have a difficult time finding it. It turned out that the house was in fact a good distance from Waynesboro and somewhat difficult to find.

Mr. Chapman was born in Louisiana. His father had worked on land rigs while Mr. Chapman was growing up and his family had moved frequently in response to his father’s job, ending up in the area around Waynesboro, MS when Mr. Chapman was in high school. Mr. Chapman expressed never having thought about the possibility of working in the oil industry when he was a kid. It was getting married and having a child which had prompted him to ask his father to find him a job working offshore. He mentioned several times during the interview that there was very little else in the way of industry that someone who wanted to remain in the area could turn to for well paying work. Since beginning to work offshore Mr. Chapman had not worked in any other field. Both of his brothers had also spent considerable time working offshore. Mr. Chapman had started out working as a roustabout in the late 1970s and described liking the work right away. He had remained with the same company throughout his time in the industry. He had risen to the position of OIM working in the Gulf before heading overseas to Qatar in the mid 2000s. He had been forced to quit working offshore in the late 2000s because of health problems and expressed his desire to work in the industry again.

Notes: After I stopped recording, Mr. Chapman gave me the names of several people with offshore experience whom I could try to contact. None of them lived in central MS. He also mentioned that his oldest son was currently working as a welder offshore. He said that this son had tried to work in the local area doing masonry work and “some other stuff” but that “you just can’t make it around here”. He said that in the area a family where someone was not working offshore, both the husband and the wife would have to work to make ends meet. He mentioned that since the Deepwater Horizon explosion and resultant oil spill, government regulators were “really tightening their belts”. He attested that MMS had always done its job in the Gulf of Mexico and that his interactions with them had always been mostly positive.