Interviewer: Tyler Priest

Affiliation: University of Houston

Marshall Cloyd studied engineering at both Berkeley and Southern Methodist University before finishing a master’s at Stanford and Harvard Business School. In 1959, Cloyd began working in Mississippi for Brown & Root. Before long he followed the firm into the early platform design efforts in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, engineering parts of the heavy drilling barges needed in the Arctic environment. Cloyd later returned to Gulf Coast work for offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, before transferring to California to manage the Santa Barbara platforms. There, he and other groups within Brown & Root helped in the clean-up after the 1969 well blowout and oil spill at Santa Barbara. Cloyd later saw work in the North Sea as well. Cloyd purchased a small boat service company in the early 1980s, and remains Chairman at the time of interview.