I worked as a teenage grunt roustabout in the Texas Panhandle during the summers of 1969-1971. These are my memories of the oil patch.
It was early June of 1969, I was 16 years old, and it was my first day as a roustabout. I found myself in the middle of a remote Texas Panhandle oilfield.
I wore heavy cotton gloves, jeans, a blue cotton work shirt, a silver hard hat and steel-toed boots. I was handed my first oilfield tool, a four-foot-long steel pipe wrench. A pipe wrench is an adjustable tool featuring two serrated, hardened-steel jaws designed to grip, turn, or hold threaded pipes…