[Annotator's Note: Nelson Constant worked for an oil company in Louisiana. He details the job.] Constant worried about the responsibilities of his job, even on his days off. Swamp jobs were something else. The equipment they carried on their backs was very heavy. Sometimes they would have to build their own ways across canals. The college boys would not do the job. They needed the locals to do the job and get the oil out.

Nelson Constant was born in December 1914 in Bayou Buff, Louisiana. He remembers a soldier that came back from World War 1. He was alright and lived next to them. Constant was amazed at how he held himself erect. He lived a long time. Constant was too young to know what he wanted to do. He went to a one-room school. His mother was a teacher who came from New York. His parents had relatives in New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] and sent him there to school. His father bought his grandfather's store and asked him to work with him for a year. After that year, he went to school again. He graduated high school. He used geometry the most. His father would lease land and Constant would go out and find out where property corners were in swamps. He liked surveying. He graduated high school in 1935 and was married in 1937. Constant had been going to dances. A girl was coming every Saturday and he said she was his girl. They started to get close but then he could not go much. He knew where she walked home, and he would go pick her up and take her home. Later he proposed. Her story is that they were dancing and her heel hooked on his cuff of his pants and broke. He fixed her shoe and she fell in love with him. He had gotten some money from a job, so he proposed, and they got married. They honeymooned in New Orleans. They then went to Mississippi. They lived with his parents. Shell Oil hired him to guard their dynamite storage. He went to work with Humble Oil in 1942. He worked with the surveyors translating the French the people spoke. He then got the surveyors job. [Annotator's Note: Constant goes into great detail about the job.]

Nelson Constant remembers Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. They had no electricity. His father had bought a generator for a radio. On certain nights, fights would be on the radio. His father would open up the store so people could come in and listen. He does not remember where he heard about Pearl Harbor. He might have heard about the attack from people on boats that delivered freight to them. Constant was drafted. He was working and married. He got a notice to get an examination. He went to New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] for that. It was the first time he ever had to walk naked around women. He told all of his relatives he was leaving. His boss told him he had been deferred. They did not tell him why, but it was to stay on that job. There were many days he wanted to quit, but he kept going. It had to have been the Humble Oil Company that requested the deferment. Constant did not. He felt bad that people would think that he was shirking his duty but he was tickled to death to be able to be home.

[Annotator's Note: Nelson Constant was working in oil exploration for the Humble Oil Company in Louisiana and had his draft deferred.] You could not buy lumber. There was an old two-story building that he bought with another man. They took the house down piece by piece. He started building his own home with the materials. His wife scrubbed all of the lumber clean while Constant worked in the swamps. His grandfather had built him a small house before that. His grandfather had taught him to swim. Constant bought the land from a farmer that he built his own house on. Sugar was rationed. They got stamps and his wife took care of all of that. [Annotator's Note: Constant asks his wife offscreen what was rationed during the war.] The boats did not make their regular trips. His father was able to get shoes and boots.

Nelson Constant's company [Annotator's Note: Humble Oil Company] hired 13 colored boys [Annotator's Note: African-Americans] for one job. A couple of them were drafted. They were not essential to the job, but it was not because they were colored. They ate together and worked together. They were good buddies. One of them was made a driller. To Constant, some of them carried a chip on their shoulder. One of them was like that for a while, but then he got him out of it. There were not that many colored people around there. Constant did not have any radios out in the field until way after the war was over. They had one radio on a generator, but they did not always work. Their boss would tell them news of the war. They were working at the mouth of the river. They did not bring their boats. A storm came up with 125 mile per hour winds. They could not leave, and they could not save their equipment. When the storm was over, nobody could get in touch with them. Two days later, they sent out a seaplane to find them. Their equipment had gone into the river and was stuck in logs. He does not know how they saved themselves. This was about 1949.

Nelson Constant was just out there working. It was like being locked up in a room. The trees did not talk. They were tickled when they got a radio to be able to talk to other people. [Annotator's Note: Someone offscreen asks Constant if he knew he was getting oil for the war effort.] They were only told to get as much as they could. Gasoline could not be bought. Their goal was to get as much oil as they could. You could not shirk. If someone came in that did not know anything about the swamps, they would stay with him to keep him out of trouble. The people stayed on the job. They would hire new people, but Constant and his crew had to know them first. He had two brothers and three sisters. One brother was a pilot in the Navy. Another brother was in Korea [Annotator's Note: Korean War, 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953]. The brother in the Navy was going to school in New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] and then went into the service. He came home once in a while. He worked for Eastern Airlines. He crashed once, got scared and quit. Nobody in the oil fields got hurt too much. One boy got bitten by a moccasin [Annotator's Note: the water moccasin, also known as the cottonmouth, is a venomous snake]. He was back to work two or three days later. That was the only person bitten in 25 years. May was the worst time, they [Annotator's Note: the water moccasins] were shedding their skins. They learned to smell where the snakes were. He and the men did not have much to drink. There was nothing easy about this work. He did not get a deferment because it was easy.