I was exposed to the oil business at an early age. When I was in the fourth grade, my sister and I walked from our house in the Whittier Hills down through an abandoned oil field to our elementary school. In high school I drove down to Huntington Beach to surf on a beach where hundreds of idle wooden derricks lined the coast highway.
For two summers while in college, I worked for General Petroleum — later known as Mobil Oil company, as part of a gang of roustabouts who took care of oilfield maintenance around Southern California. There I learned the oil business at the end of a shovel. We dug trenches, laid piping, cleaned oil storage tanks. Then, there was no protective breathing equipment, we just crawled in through a small hatch with a fire hose and washed out the accumulated sand and wax, breathing the fumes as we worked.
In the Santa Fe Springs oilfield, our most exciting job was pulling down old wooden derricks by attaching a steel cable halfway up and pulling them over with a truck. Coming back once from a hot day digging trenches in Placerita Canyon, we stopped at a dingy bar in Santa Fe Springs. I was seated to the left of our lead man, a guy named Ollie.