Interviewer: Preetam Prakash

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Robert Boles, whom Preetam had interviewed early on during fieldwork around the Meridian area, had originally attempted to put him in touch with Charles Odom. Mr. Odom had initially found Robert a job offshore and both men had worked for varying amounts of time at a local denim factory which was the dominant employer in the area. However, at the time Charles had said that he would not be interested in participating in the project. Preetam ran into Mr. Odom and his wife several weeks later at a charity event in Quitman, and Mr. Odom spoke at length about his experiences working offshore and agreed to meet with Preetam for an interview the following week. Charles related how when he was growing up in the 1950s-60s some people in the local area had already begun to go offshore. However, it was in the 1970s when offshore work really picked up as a work option for people in the local area. Mr. Odom had initially gone to work for a drilling contractor in the 1960s and had proceeded to work for a number of contractors before finally settling into a permanent position at Shell in 1967. In the early 1990s, when Shell, along with most other major oil companies, began offering early retirements he initially chose to continue working, although it entailed a considerable pay cut and a move to the production side of work. He mentioned the great increase in use of computers offshore in the 1980s and 90s as one of the main reasons he eventually retired. After retiring from Shell in the early 1990s, he then took a job with a contracting company but quit after a few months because of the inferior quality of rig equipment and a lack of adequate knowledge of rig operations among this company’s employees. One of the significant changes that Mr. Odom mentioned having witnessed during his time in the industry was the shift from the informal, often kin based networks which characterized hiring and recruitment processes in the industry in the early days when he started working to much greater formalization. Among the major impacts of this shift was a decrease in the amount of power and influence that drillers, toolpushers, and others in mid to high level positions on the rigs had over the recruitment of the workforce.