Collins, Ed

This is an oral history interview with Ed Collins conducted as part of the Houston History Project. One of three boys, Ed Collins was born in 1924 in Laurel, Mississippi. His father owned a plumbing business. While in high school he roughnecked a bit on a drilling rig and worked as a rod man on a survey crew. After graduating high school and serving during World War Two, he spent a semester at Mississippi State before studying petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University; he graduated with his degree in 1949. After graduating from LSU, he found himself in a saturated job market and was lucky to get a job was Magnolia Petroleum Company where he first worked as an engineer in Snyder, Texas. Two and a half years later he went to work for Wilshire Oil Company in Midland, Texas; several years later, when that company was bought out, he went to work for a year for Wilshire Oil Company of Texas. A year later in 1954, he moved to Wichita, Kansas, to work as assistant production manager for Vickers Petroleum Company; not long after he was made vice-president of production; in 1959, he moved with the company to Denver, Colorado. After a deal with Alco Oil and Gas Company, he went to work for Alco representing the Vickers interest; in 1962, Alco centralized itself in Lafayette. He lived a year in Lafayette, before he took a job with the Vickers as a consultant and started venturing out on his own as an independent; he became involved in buying and selling leases and royalties. In 1963 he started a sugar cane bagasse (product used in drilling mud) processing factory in Belle Rose, Louisiana; he did this for 12 years while still doing the other independent work. In the late 1970s, he sold the company to Venture Chemical Company; he was involved in Venture until they were sold in the early 1980s. He discusses why Alco Oil and Gas made the decision to centralize their company in Lafayette and not other cities, as well as the Lafayette community