Interviewer: Jacob Campbell

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Mr. Eschete was referred by Paul, a ranger I spoke with at the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, west of Houma. Mr. Eschete has a farm near the Refuge, and volunteers there. Paul said that Lou was a Shell retiree who had worked overseas, and was very knowledgeable about the industry. Mr. Eschete was eager to participate, and invited me out to his farm for the interview, where he also showed me the grapes and oranges he was cultivating. I later returned for a photo interview, documenting his photographs from when he worked in Cameroon and Brazil.

Mr. Eschete was born in 1939, in Houma, on the Southdown sugar plantation, where his father was a foreman, as was his grandfather before him. Mr. Eschete went to LSU on a football scholarship, but left to study agriculture at McNeese College. In 1956 he started as roustabout for Jumbo Construction during the summer while in college. After farming for several years, he took a job with Shell in 1965 for the better pay. He spent two years in the office, and then went into the field as a production foreman, mostly working in the East Bay area of the Louisiana coast. In the late-70s he began working on a Shell project in Cameroon, taking the job because he was “ready for a change.” He also worked on a project near Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil, in 1982. He worked in Cameroon on and off until 1987, saying he was glad to be in Africa during the bust on the Gulf Coast. For the remainder of his career, until retiring in 1996, he worked out of Morgan City. Mr. Eschete has been married and divorced three times, and spends his time since retirement working on his farm and restoring old sugar mill machinery.