BIG PINEY – There was no work to speak of in 1952 for a brand-new graduate of Pinedale High School, so in 1953, Dick Wenz headed down to where the jobs were – South County.

It was a new kind of job then for Sublette County – drilling for oil and gas.

“When I first came here, it was still a cow town,” Wenz says of Big Piney.

But things were changing. The drilling rigs provided steady work, too, in all kinds of weather, at all hours.

“Some of the jobs I had were 24 hours a day and seven days a week,” Wenz recalled.

In years when work was sluggish in some areas of the economy, his employers always had work for him – especially after he worked his way up to being a driller.

“From the first well I was on down here, I knew I liked it,” Wenz said. “I think I was 21 when they put me drilling. That’s all I ever did after I came down here and started on the oil and gas rigs. I did it my whole life. It’s the only thing I knew.”

And the work didn’t ease up at all sometimes.

“The first well I worked for Mobil Oil up here, I worked 250 straight days without a day off.”

Wenz figures it was about 1955 when the first pipeline was built out of the Big Piney area. Georgia Wenz, Dick’s wife, says it was about that time that the community was figuring out that the oil and gas industry had come to stay.

“The businesses were probably the first to realize what a good thing it is for the economy,” she said.

It was good for Dick Wenz and his family in a way he hadn’t even anticipated. It gave them all a taste of adventure and far-off places as the company began moving him around to drill in other states. He was making $1,100 a month, a good wage at the time, when his company sent him to Oklahoma in 1966. The family came along.

“We’ve been a lot of places and enjoyed them all,” he said.

In 1968, his company even sent him to drill in Israel. He had the chance to drill in China but turned it down.

Of course the drilling took him into rough terrain and weather, where isolation is a factor – but more of a problem in Wyoming than other places. In January 1976, he and his crew were snowed in for two weeks, 20 miles from Big Piney. They kept drilling.

Eventually, Wenz tried his hand at consulting, too, for what seemed like a remarkable fee of $100 a day. Not anymore.

“Now, up in North Dakota, they pay a consultant $1,400 a day,” he said.

Working conditions are better for employees in the industry now. But Wenz says he wouldn’t change a thing about what he’s done.

“Even with a college education, I don’t think that I could have done any better,” he said.