On Monday, October 11, 2010 from 7 - 8:30pm Bobby D. Weaver will be on hand to discuss and sign his newest book: Oilfield Trash: Life and Labor in the Oil Patch.
About Oilfield Trash:
This is the story (taken from more than 350 oral history interviews) of those oilfield hands in greasy overalls who made the boom towns boom. It begins with the recruitment of an essentially rural work force that entered the oil patch as “boll weevils” in search of good pay. It follows the changing character of those workers in trades like drilling, rig building, pipelining, tank building and others during the first six decades of the twentieth century. You will learn what they did, how they did it, and how they lived amid the general chaos of oil booms. During those years all of those trades changed and some of them even disappeared due to technological innovation. All oil booms were not created equal nor were the towns they spawned. Over time the nature of those towns also changed: sometimes due to geographical conditions and sometimes due to the changing technology and sometimes due to changing social and economic situations. But through it all the hard working, hard living, and innovative character of the workers earned them the dubious appellation of “oilfield trash” that was foisted off on them by outsiders who little understood them, but who usually profited from their labors.
About Bobby:
I grew up in Odessa, Texas, where I spent almost twenty years laboring in the oil patch before I finally figured out that I was not going to get rich wearing a pair of greasy overalls. So I decided to go to college. As it turned out attending school was so much easier than working for a living that I settled in for the long haul. Eventually the good folk down at Texas Tech University conferred a PhD on me which I strongly suspect was to get me out of their hair as much as anything else.
After that I put in another twenty-five years working in museums. I started at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, where over a period of years I built several oil-related exhibits and published a variety of articles on the history of the Texas oil and gas industry. Then I put in a long stretch at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City where the western lifestyle became the focus of my work.
More recently I have been lecturing widely on life, labor, and folklore of the West through the “Tales of the West” performances. “Tales of the West” is a storytelling event that explores the lighter side of the lives of those who live in that magical land west of the hundredth meridian. It is built around the contents of my two books being published in 2010 (“Hotter’N Pecos and Other West Texas Lies,” Texas Tech University Press, due out in April and “Oilfield Trash: Life and Labor in the Oil Patch,” Texas A&M University Press, due out in September).
To learn more stop by his website: http://bobbydweaver.com/home.html.
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