Some clouds. Low 79F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Some clouds. Low 79F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.

In an email I received back in 2004, Tarver Snedecor wrote about his first big job, when he was seventeen years old. He had walked to West Columbia, he said, estimating that this was about thirty miles away.

“They were hiring about everyone who came along for work in the oil field boom, “ Snedecor wrote.

He and his friend, J.K. Davis, had been told by “the old Superintendent” that the workers had to be twenty-one years old, but Snedecor remembered that both had claimed to be twenty-one, and although the person they had talked to “looked kind of annoyed, he told the two boys to go on up to the office and sign up.

“I think the oil field was discovered in 1916, he wrote in his email to me.

“It was a boom field, popping wide open in 1917, and from then on,” headed, describing it as “still a pretty live old oil field” in 1975.

Although he didn’t work on this well, Snedecor remembered that he was with a group “sitting around the mess hall and looking out over the field one evening, when we saw this drill stem come out through the derrick. “The cork was screwed way up into the sky and looked like it was red hot, but I found out later that (this was just caused by) particles of burning gas hanging onto it, “ causing the drill stem’s appearance with about thirty-six feet of the apparatus.

“It blew every bit of it out, and the well caught fire. You could read a newspaper by the light it created,” he wrote.

“It was a tremendous fire, and we worked about thirty-six-hours straight. They didn’t have the firefighting equipment they have now. He noted that, “If you told people in the oil field in the 1970s what it was like at that time, they probably wouldn’t believe you.”

On his first oilfield job, he said, he worked derricks. It was a time when “they never even had slips to put in the rotary to catch the pipe.

They had no break-out tongs, or anything. You had to break it out by hand or with a cat head.

He added that at that time, “You jiggled the elevators when they got down. As you were coming out of the hole, you hooked onto the elevators, using a fourble, “ which he defined as being “four sections of drill stem.”

When they got up, he said, “We put another pair of elevators on it. We sat it down on there and put backups on, broke the pipe out, and then set that pipe back.

“When the block reached back to the first floor, you just unhooked from those elevators and hooked onto the others. It was a very slow process. We worked ten hours a day, seven days a week.

Noting that he had worked there for three years without a vacation, he added that a lot of overtime work was involved, particularly at times such as when the well blew out and caught fire.

This was all without overtime pay, he pointed out, but added that he was told that he could go home for a few days without losing any time.

Sometime later, Snedecor started working for slips — wedge-shaped objects between the rotary and pipe, that kept things from falling into the well, break-out tongs, drill stem in sections and the like, all for pay of 50 cents per hour, which he “thought was a fabulous wage at that time — and it was.

After being promoted to work on the derrick, he said, he was paid sixty cents per hour -”and I was in high cotton, then.

During this era, he and his co-workers slept in a row of about thirty prefabricated shacks or bunkhouses, each of which housed about ten men, which he described as “really nice.

The men ate lunch in a large mess hall that contained both a kitchen and dining area, and he remembered that they had been fed “really well, at a cost of a dollar per day.”

At that time, he and the other workers were making $5 per day, and they paid $1 of that amount daily for their food and sleeping space.

“They didn’t take income tax or anything else out of the checks,” he said, noting that, “A lot of the workers were a transient bunch of roughnecks from all over the country, including Spindle, Burkburnett, Humble and Saratoga, who were there today and gone tomorrow.

“Still,” he added, “I thought it was real nice work and a good job. Since I worked on the derrick, I didn’t get too much of the mud. I was lucky.

He remembered that the workers had little in the way of entertainment, though, noting that “One boy had a mandolin and I had my old fiddle. Another fellow had a guitar, and would entertain at night.

There was also a “picture show that set up there in a tent. That thing was jammed, and you could hardly see the picture, it was such bad film. Later, they built a theater and a bank.”

According to Snedecor’s recollections, when he first went to West Columbia, a Jewish man named Levi had put up a store and had a large safe into which the local oilfield workers would put what was left from their checks after buying clothes from him.

At one time, he noted, Levi had over three hundred dollars of my money in there. Asked about who Levi was, he said he did not know whether this merchant was the same man or was related to the family with currently well-known Houston stores by that name.

“When things got kind of slack in the West Columbia field, and they were going to lay off a bunch of people, “ Snedecor said. “The field manager told me that if I wanted to stay with the Texas Company (Texaco), they had quite a bit of wildcat work going on in Freestone County.

“It was about twelve miles this side of Mexia, and we put in a couple of wildcat wells there.”

He said he stayed there for about a year and a half, and subsequently worked in oilfields throughout the Texas Gulf Coast.

Marie Beth Jones is a member and former chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission. Contact her at 979-849-5467 or marieb.jones32@gmail.com.

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