Louisiana: Morgan City: Rig Museum, Part 2: Cookies and a Joke

View from Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

I'm a hit-or-miss museum liker.

View from Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home of Rembrandts and Vermeers, uh huh, it was nice.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Now, the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska - hoo wee, it's fine!

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

This is Part 2 of Louisiana: Morgan City: Rig Museum. Part 1 is here.

The Rig Museum in Morgan City is a good "museum" and tour. Know that the rig called "Mr. Charlie" is not (to my knowledge) accessible to folks in a wheelchair or people with other mobility issues. It'd probably be outside of the "readily achievable" standard required to make it accessible unless the owners were to do some remodeling for other reasons. Also, it's not child-proof; it's a working training facility. Littl'uns could get into all kinds of trouble here. It's the nature of the place.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

 The tour guide was congenial and endlessly patient in answering questions.

We walked through living quarters, the lounge, and the kitchen. The rig's chef had just made cookies! We tourists could have at them, fresh from the oven.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

 We poked our heads into the sleeping quarters.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

 While in the lounge, the tour guide told this joke:

• Guys working on an oil rig spend weeks at a time together. 
• A new guy joined an oil rig crew; it was his first gig. 
• Every night, all the guys would hang out in the lounge and talk and laugh. 
• The new guy noticed that one man would call out a number, like  - "349!" - and all the others would laugh like crazy. They'd spend hours doing this. One man would yell out a number and all the others would roar with laughter. 
• Finally, the new guy asked: "What's happening here? What's so funny about a number?" 
• An old-timer explained: "Son, we've worked together for so long, we know all the jokes that are possible to tell. Finally, we started numbering them to save time." 
• The new guy nodded, understanding, and asked, "Say, can I try one?" 
• The old-timer said, "Sure!" 
• The new guy said: "274!" 
• Silence. 
• The new guy asked: "What happened? Why didn't anyone laugh?" 
• The old-timer replied: "Some people just don't know how to tell a joke." 

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Mr. Charlie, Rig Museum, Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Various articles on life aboard a rig: 

From 2000: Life on Board a Gulf of Mexico Oil Drilling Platform
From 2014: Up Close and Personal With a 40-Story Oil Rig in the Gulf
From 2016: Life On an Oil Rig


A 2017 update:

Here's a good video by Maybe Tomorrow, an RV couple who took the Mr. Charlie tour, including a sweet surprise ending:

I also like their road views at the beginning of the movie.


Other stories related to Morgan City are here. 

Louisiana: Morgan City: Rig Museum, Part 1: Yellow Wheel Study

Confession: Many (most?) archeological ruins don't excite me all that much. They should, but they don't.

Modern-era rust, decay, deterioration. That attracts me.

In March 2014, family members came calling, and we went to the International Rig Museum in Morgan City, a grand name for an old pug called Mister Charlie, an oil rig used for training new hands and to give public tours.

More on the tour later. Preview: There were freshly-baked cookies and a very funny joke.

In the meantime, these yellow wheel things.

Mister Charlie, Rig Museum. Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Mister Charlie, Rig Museum. Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Mister Charlie, Rig Museum. Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Mister Charlie, Rig Museum. Morgan City, Louisiana. March 2014.

Oil and Louisiana, Part 1: The Louisiana Story

The Louisiana Story

I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which oil has figured into Louisiana's story until I got here.

I reckon it has had as much influence on the shaping of south Louisiana as have the waves of people who've made Louisiana their home, by choice or by force.

The 1948 movie, Louisiana Story, possibly captured the historic moment when two tribes - the bayou dwellers and the oilmen - intersected, both with interests in the same territory.  

You can watch the "documentary" in its entirety below.

I say "documentary" because Standard Oil funded the making of  Louisiana Story. Some call it "docufiction" or more kindly, a docudrama, but I think watching the movie in current times, knowing what we now know about the environmental effects of some enterprises, transforms the movie into a more authentic documentary experience.

The scene where the oilmen's speedboat swamps the Cajun boy's pirogue, plunging him into the bayou, is a pretty good metaphor for the cultural/ecological changes to come for southern Louisianans.

There's also an oil-rig explosion in the movie, with an unconquerable fire, which I think is a big ol' waving flag that oil in the bayou is not going to come without a cost.

But let me go on the record to say how creepy it is to watch the looks between the oilman and the Cajun boy. In these times, they come off like the prelude to sexual molestation. I'm trying hard to believe that back in the day, these nonverbal exchanges between boy and man were as innocent as the interactions between Timmy and Lassie, but I dunno.

Louisiana Story. Source: The Film Foundation

Here's what Robert Flaherty, the film director, said about The Louisiana Story's origin:

.... a note came from a friend of a friend of mine in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. .... Would I be interested in making a film which would project the difficulties and risk of getting oil out of the ground - admittedly an industrial film, yet one which would have enough story and entertainment value to play in standard motion picture houses at an admission-price?

....  a series of luncheon conference.... The upshot of it was that I agreed to spend three months finding out whether I thought I could make an interesting picture about oil.

Mrs. Flaherty and I set out in our car for the southwest. We drove thousands of miles. ....
In the course of our wanderings we came to the bayou country of Louisiana. 

We were enchanted by the gentle, gay and picturesque people of French descent who inhabit this little-known section of the United States; a people who have managed to preserve the individual flavor of their culture. We were delighted with their customs, their superstitions, their folk-tales of werewolves and mermaids, handed down from generation to generation. 

But we weren't getting any closer to a film about oil.

Then one day we stopped the car for lunch near the edge of a bayou. Suddenly, over the heads of the marsh grass, an oil-derrick came into our view. It was moving up the bayou, towed by a launch. In motion, this familiar structure suddenly became poetry, its slim lines rising clean and taut above the unending flatness of the marshes.

I looked at Frances. She looked at me. We knew then that we had our picture.

Almost immediately a story began to take shape in our minds. It was a story built around that derrick which moved so silently, so majestically into the wilderness; probed for oil beneath the watery ooze, and then moved on again, leaving the land as untouched as before it came. [emphasis added]

But we had to translate our thesis - the impact of science on a simple, rural community - into terms of people. For our hero, we dreamed up a half-wild Cajun boy of the woods and bayous. To personalize the impact of industry, we developed the character of a driller who would become a friend to the boy, eventually overcoming his shyness and reticence. ...

Source: Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, by Paul Rotha. 

Revisiting The Louisiana Story

In 2006, a group of students at Louisiana State University created short films revisiting the people and places of documentary maker Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story. Through short film and essay, "Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story" examines both the legacy of Flaherty's 1948 film and the experience of these student filmmakers in southern Louisiana. Suchy and Catano explore reflexivity in documentary filmmaking, depictions of the oil industry and the environment in south Louisiana, and the role of documentary images in making Louisianan identities.  

Source: Southern Spaces: Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story.

The movie the students made is right here. 

The students' essays are here should you have an interest in a close, holistic examination of The Louisiana Story.

An excerpt from the Introduction essay (by James Catano):

The [Cajun] culture was primarily rural and under significant economic stress. While Flaherty romanticizes living conditions in Acadiana and the arrival of big oil, residents were not unaware of what oil drilling could mean for them economically. In Cajun Country, Felix Richard makes that clear in responding to a question by Lomax about the impact of oil: "Oh my god that's it. If it hadn't been for that we'd be starving just like they're doing in Mississippi right now." But if Richard recognizes that impact, he also notices in hindsight that it doesn't come without a price. As he says, the coming of big oil "kind of destroyed some of that [culture]."

Louisiana: Doodlebugs

"Exploring for Oil in Mississippi Delta. Doodlebug crew in swamp setting shot line." Credit: Chevron Retired Workers

I have a feeling that as I learn some Louisiana terminology, I'll get myself into trouble sometimes, but that's part of the learning curve.

To say that oil is a big part of the Louisiana economy is an understatement. Its exploration, harvest, processing, and transportation permeate the Louisiana culture. 

So, doodlebug. The word isn't so much Louisiana-specific as it is oil-industry-specific.

(In one context, a doodlebug is what we in the Midwest call a rolypoly, you know, that bug that curls up when you touch it.)

But a doodlebug is also: 

.... oilfield workers know this term as describing a person who is in the oil exploration business. Mainly seismic crews.

"Some doodlebugs use dynamite to find oil and others use vibrators". "Those damn doodlebuggers tore up my cottonfield with their trucks again"

Related to oil exploration, a doodlebug is a device (as a divining rod) used in attempting to locate underground gas, water, oil, or ores. 

Doodlebug Days. Credit: Amazon

From the book Doodlebug Days: An American Family's Ups and Downs as Middle-Class Migrants, written about the Depression-era oil exploration industry: 

Between 1900 and 1936 California led the nation in petroleum production. Oil companies, certain that great reserves of oil still laid hidden, sent exploration crews - called doodlebug parties - out to find them ... 

Doodlebug (tanker) 1935. Credit: Chevron Retired Workers

 
Here's a song about a doodlebug who used a divining rod to find oil:

Doodlebugs.