Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields (Personal Narratives of the West)

Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields (Personal Narratives of the West) by Lynch, Gerald. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780292770522.

Oil, the black gold of Texas, has given rise to many a myth. Oil could turn a man overnight into a millionaire—and did, for some. But these myths have obscured what life was really like in the oil patch, a place that was neither the El Dorado of legend nor quite the unredeemed den of sin and iniquity that some feared. In Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers, Gerald Lynch provides a much-needed insiders view of the oil industry, describing life in various oil fields in and around Texas. He also chronicles changes in drilling methods and oil-field technology and how these changes affected him and his fellow oil-field workers. No one else has written a working-class history of the oil fields as colorful and articulate as this one.