Life at the 'Oil Patch Hotline'

The oil-and-gas industry has been in the news plenty lately. Even before Hurricane Katrina, crude-oil prices had risen enough over the past year to create another oil boom in Eastern Montana's Williston Basin.

It has stirred up memories of my time in the oil business during the early 1980s, which now seems like another lifetime.

Still a cub reporter, I followed my heart west to be closer to the man who would eventually become my husband. He was working for an oilfield company in Sidney, and I landed a job in Williston, N.D., at a tabloid publication called the Oil Patch Hotline.

I knew nothing about the oil industry, absolutely nothing. But when you're 24 and fearless, it didn't register that I might be in over my head.

After sitting through a three-hour meeting of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Commission my first day on the job, I did what any self-respecting reporter would never do - I called my boyfriend and cried.

"I (sob) don't (sob) know what the Red River formation is," I bawled. "I don't know if I can do this."

He enlightened me with a crash course in the geologic formations from which oil is drawn, and in short order I knew the difference between the Mission Canyon and Red River formations. I knew about drilling mud and swab tests. I knew what roughnecks and tool pushers were.

Before long I was scrambling onto drilling platforms to do a "Roughneck of the Month" feature. I traveled to remote county seats (one courthouse was literally in a two-story house) in Western North Dakota to gather up oil and gas permit information.

Women in the oil business were almost nonexistent 25 years ago, and invariably, I was the only female who sat through most oilfield meetings. I don't remember feeling intimidated. Maybe I was just naive.

I vividly remember what would become my most difficult assignment. An oil well had caught fire in the badlands near Killdeer, N.D. and my boss sent me out with a direct order: Don't come back without photos.

I bounced on the dusty backroads in my 1974 Plymouth Volare until I came to a roadblock. The oil company wasn't letting anyone into the site. I'd have to get there another way, so I grabbed my telephoto lens, sized up the rugged terrain and started off on foot. At one point I slipped on some rocks and tumbled down an incline, rolling over cacti and denting but not breaking my camera. I finally got close enough to get photos from afar, and it was spectacular.

Mission accomplished; I scored exclusive photos.

Later, I was allowed to get closer to the burning wellhead and got interviews with Boots Hansen and Coots Matthews, two famous oilwell firefighters who had earlier worked with another famous blowout specialist - Red Adair.

The Williston Basin was a wild and crazy place during the boom of the late '70s and early '80s. Louisiana-based oil companies flew up fresh shrimp for grand openings of their Montana and North Dakota offices. My husband worked for oil executives from Louisiana, people with names like Ferdinand Istre and Stubby Stubblefield. We got invited to a lot of catfish fries.

Money flowed as fast and heavy as the oil in those years. In the most shameless indulgence I can remember, everyone attending the company Christmas party one year left their pickup running in the parking lot for the entire evening because the temperature was below zero. Fifty or 60 pickups, idling for five or six hours - that's a lot of wasted gas.

The oil industry generally gets a bad rap for making huge profits while extracting finite quantities of natural resources. Some of the criticism is probably warranted. I don't like paying nearly $3 a gallon for gas any better than the next guy.

Oil companies were generous to the communities of the Williston Basin, though.

As I recall, Shell Oil Co. spent nearly a million dollars on a new state-of-the-art country school near our rural home. I suspect they contributed similar sums everywhere they did business.

The oil boom was over by the mid-1980s, gone as quickly as it had begun. Once oil prices sagged, companies pulled out overnight, abandoning posh office complexes and never looking back. Those of us who were part of the boom went on to shape new chapters of our lives, left with the colorful memories of a time when all of us truly lived high on the hog.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com