By Jack Money
The Oklahoman
OKLAHOMA CITY — “Just because you’ve done wrong in the past doesn’t mean you have to keep doing wrong.”
Those are more than just words for roughneck Phil Blankenship.
To Blankenship, 38, and three other men who’ve built rigs for Nomac Drilling Corp. at its Oklahoma City yard, they represent a way of life.
The men started working with the company the past several years. They came to Nomac after months and, in some cases, years in prison for drug offenses.
At Nomac, they learned how to build state-of-art drilling rigs. Along the way, they also rebuilt their lives.
Second chances Chris Cantrell wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Every day for weeks during the summer of 2004, he took a lengthy walk from the Carver Correctional Center, a halfway house in Oklahoma City for convicts from the prison system, to Nomac’s yard on the south side of Interstate 40, just east of Portland Avenue.
Each time, he filled out an employment application at the yard and was turned away.
Cantrell, 36, of Ardmore, already had been in prison for his drug offense. He needed a job and he had a family to support. He didn’t give up.
In July 2004, supervisors at Nomac gave him a chance to work as a yard helper, assisting welders and doing cleanup work around the business.
Before long, he’d made an impression on his new employer - a positive one.
Today, Cantrell is a yard foreman for Nomac.
“I just needed a chance,” he said. “You’ve got to want it for yourself before you can do anything. Then you can do what you need to do for your family.
“I had my mind made up. I just used the skills that I had and lived a clean and sober life to get to where I am now, for both me and my family.
“If it wasn’t for my attitude toward my family and stuff, I probably wouldn’t have cared. That had a lot to do with me making it.”
New thinking Based on their experiences with Cantrell, Nomac supervisors decided to recruit other employees from the Carver Center.
In September 2005, they went looking for inmates with oilfield experience who were about to complete their terms of incarceration.
Among those men who showed up for interviews were 44-year-old Fern Hicks of Oklahoma City and 37-year-old Robert Hurst, originally of Woodward.
Hurst, who had the requisite experience, had to wait his turn to talk to recruiters as Hicks made his case to be given an opportunity.
Hicks knew he lacked the experience Nomac was looking for, but the man, who was working a minimum wage job with no benefits at a local restaurant, convinced his soon-to-be employers he would be an asset to the company, that he would make both them and himself proud, if only given a shot.
Hurst, who witnessed Hicks’ discussion with Nomac Safety Coordinator Joe Kennedy, remembered being moved by what he heard.
Hicks, he recalled, just wouldn’t end the interview until he had a job.
Hurst and Hicks were hired as yard helpers. Today, both are rig hands, helping to assemble drilling rigs.
Like Cantrell, they both earned respect from the men they worked with. And they earned so much of it that supervisors started talking about them with others in their business.
One of those discussions led a Chesapeake Energy Corp. employee - Nomac is a Chesapeake subsidiary - to recruit yet another former inmate to Nomac: Blankenship.
The Oklahoma City man, who also had done time for drug offenses, had been working in a machine shop about a year after getting out of prison when he heard in March 2006 there was an opportunity at the drilling company.
He, too, started as a yard helper for Nomac, then worked his way up to rig hand.
Today, he roughnecks on a Nomac rig, helping crews as they drill for natural gas.
Sharing experience The four men now are referred to as success stories. They’ve been written about in Chesapeake’s newsletter, and are featured in a video presentation Chesapeake made to Forbes Magazine touting the company as a great place to work.
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Hicks said in the film.
“I give the company 110 percent,” Blankenship said in the film. “They’ve really changed my life around.”
The men also aren’t shy about sharing their experiences with others.
Their supervisor, yard foreman Mike Hall, once asked Hicks and Blankenship to visit with one of his son’s friends who was having some difficulties. The boy constantly was fighting and getting into scrapes with the law.
After that discussion, the young man got a steady job, bought himself a car and helped his family financially after his father was hurt in a car wreck and couldn’t work for months, Hall said Wednesday.
“He was fixing to go down a bad road, so they came over and spoke with him,” Hall said.
Hicks said: “We told him it would be the other way around if he went to the county jail; told him to listen to someone who knows and to not make the same mistakes we did. We just kind of laid it out there, and it worked.”
Hall said the men are some of the best workers he’s ever been around.
“These guys have just been great,” Hall said. “They have had their ups and downs, but I am so proud of them for coming out and sticking with it and not falling back into the bad stuff. And they are really good people - just a great bunch of guys.”
Hurst, meanwhile, said his and the other former convicts’ stories can’t be told enough.
“The only reason I have agreed to participate in this public display of my past - whereas other people with similar backgrounds might not - is the simple fact that other people are out there in similar situations.
“Those people need to see it is pretty easy to turn things around if you stop doing the things that make your life difficult. All you really need to do is make good decisions.”
The future Blankenship already is working as a roughneck. Hurst, Hicks and Cantrell might do that, or may head to other yards to build new rigs.
Earlier this month, they proudly showed off the latest rig they’ve built, Rig No. 51, which is headed to a drilling location in western Oklahoma once its testing is done.
As they walked the rig, they spoke about the respect they get from their employer and from their families.
They also spoke of respect for each other - no problem is too big that it can’t be shared among themselves.
“We’re here for each other,” Hicks simply said.
Copyright 2008 The Oklahoman