Everybody who ever worked, or ‘sweated,’ a 24-hour rotary drilling operation heard this admonition from the crew leaving after their eight-hour shift:
“Keep her turning to the right.“ ‘Her’ was the rotary table that spun the pipe in the hole.
For the record I was a ‘sweater,’ an observer watching the four men–sometimes five–send drill pipe down the hole to spin the drilling bit. Sometimes I visited the drilling rig to sell the drilling mud pumped down the drill pipe to send ‘cuttings’ to the ‘mud pit.’ Several times, I invested with others to drill a ‘dry hole.’
Before that I wrote oil news for the Abilene Reporter-News. Corresponded for Time magazine, even wired New York office about the first hydraulic ‘frack’ treatment in our Central West Texas area. And then for two years, emceed a live television show called “Oil Country.”
All above to tell you that when I closed my 30 minute program spotting oil rigs on a wall map, I urged viewers to “keep her spinning…”
As I walked off the set, I spun the spinner on the knee-high board I had copied from the American Petroleum Institute (API). I didn’t look back. I left a camera to watch the spinner circle symbols of seven dry holes and one producing rig. The symbols matched statistics reported by the API.
Since 1954 was a year when Abilene TV viewers had only one channel to watch, I often heard afterword from viewers. But on one Monday morning during my trip to the post office and then to the coffee shop, I heard:
“You hit one. You found oil. About time. Congratulations.”
The spinner had stopped on the ‘producer.’ Like the TV Beverly Hillbillies, I finally found oil.
Image by Anita Starzycka from Pixabay
