Times Have Changed in County Once Ruled by Oil Companies : Industry: With hundreds of layoffs and firms moving to Bakersfield, some say the business that built Ventura is in its ‘last phases.’

Forty years ago, oil ruled Ventura County.

Candidates backed by the industry were assured election. Hundreds of fans turned out to watch company-sponsored baseball teams. The glare of oil field lights lit up the city of Ventura at night.

Today, it is a different story.

The industry has fallen on hard times. Talks of layoffs often edge into conversations, and oil workers throughout the county--in the fields, in the management offices and in the supply companies--are worried about the decline of the business that built Ventura.

“The majority of people in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Ventura County worked for some sort of oil business,” said Alan Stetler, 39, a Texaco employee who followed his father and grandfather into the business 15 years ago. “Now, it’s unstable. Oil reserves on shore are depleting, and we’re probably in our last phases.”

Stetler, who makes safety inspections on Texaco’s offshore Platform Harvest, said he would not recommend that his children follow in the family footsteps.

“My father was secure and content,” said Stetler, who thinks Texaco’s losses in Ventura may force his transfer to Bakersfield. “It’s hard to be that way now. Times have really changed.”

Ventura fields, both onshore and off, produced nearly 15 million barrels of oil in 1988, according to the most recent data available from the state Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil and Gas.

That’s a steep plunge from 1958, when county wells produced 46.7 million barrels.

In 1984, 3,400 residents of Ventura County worked for firms extracting and producing gas and oil and mining different minerals, according to state statistics. By 1989, the number was down to 2,400.

Back in the 1950s, it was a time of prosperity, a time when the giants--Shell, Getty, Standard, Union, Mobil and Continental--ruled the county. Now Getty is part of Texaco, Union is Unocal, Continental is Conoco and Mobil is gone. Standard Oil is now Chevron and plans to lay off or transfer half the company’s 200 Ventura employees.

Shell once employed 275 people in Ventura. Forty-eight remain. Division headquarters that commanded holdings in California and Alaska were in Ventura. Now, they are in Bakersfield.

Employees at the Division of Oil and Gas used to spend their days overseeing drilling operations at county fields.

“Now we’re looking more at the abandonment of oil fields,” said operations engineer Steven A. Fields. “That’s what keeps us busy.”

Bill Hewston, 43, said the decline in the offshore production has “created a major problem” for supply and service companies as well.

His company, Measurement and Control Engineering, which tests oil and gas wells, employed 85 people in 1985. By the end of 1986, only 23 remained.

During the boom days of the past, Vetco Gray, which sells items such as drill parts, had 1,380 employees. By the end of April, that number will have dropped to five.

“We were all living in a dream world,” said retired Vetco sales representative Russell L. Coziar. “We never figured it could get down to where it is now.”

Coziar speaks almost wistfully of the early 1980s, the last big oil boom in Ventura, when prices skyrocketed after the Arab oil embargo and OPEC price increase of the 1970s.

Young men eager to make good money called to ask Coziar’s advice about getting into the lucrative business of selling drill parts to oil companies.

He made time for them when he wasn’t wining and dining the foreign customers who had traveled across continents to visit Vetco.

“Everybody was partying all the time,” Coziar said. “Go out to lunch and have a few, go out to dinner and have a few. Everybody was entertaining customers a lot.”

But most of the oil workers in Ventura remember back further when they trade stories about the good old days.

Nostalgia pulls them back to the 1940s and ‘50s, when the Ventura Avenue field, one of the state’s major producers, was being heavily developed and milked.

In those days, every other person in the county worked for an oil company or a service that catered to the business. Oil men sat on most government boards and councils.

And residents who lived along Ventura Avenue did not need porch lights because of the glare thrown from the electric lights that perched on the 50 drilling rigs, which stood like trees on the field.

Don Stetler, Alan’s father, began as a roustabout in the Ventura field, digging ditches and pulling weeds when he was 20.

“The oil business was everybody’s life,” said Don Stetler, 62, whose father, uncles and brother-in-law all flocked to the business.

“It was a good way to get started in life, and I never missed a paycheck,” he said.

But working for an oil company meant more than a steady salary. It was a whole lifestyle. Barbecues, clubs and sports revolved around the business.

Most companies sponsored baseball teams that traveled the state playing others.

Sometimes afternoon games at E. P. Foster Elementary School on Ventura Avenue would bring out more than 300 spectators, said Don Stetler, who played second base for Associated Oil until he was 42.

“Years ago, they used to hire you if you were a good ballplayer,” he said.

The men who still work in Texaco’s Ventura Avenue oil field remain close friends. Many live in the same neighborhoods and get together during off hours to play baseball.

But the lifestyle and the workplace are different, Alan Stetler said. “When I was a kid back 20 or 30 years ago, it used to be that, if you worked for an oil company, you were admired,” Alan Stetler said.

“Once, there wasn’t the stigma attached to it. We weren’t the dirty oilies that we are today,” Bill Hewston said. “Now, we’re not considered a good corporate neighbor.”

Oil workers contend that bad publicity from last year’s Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the Huntington Beach spill in February have fostered community reaction against the companies.

Even so, people would be more likely to make concessions to the companies if the county still depended on oil money as it once did, Earl (Andy) Anderson said.

The 89-year-old came to Ventura in 1954 as a production area superintendent for Tidewater Oil, now Texaco. He said that during the boom years in Ventura, the community ignored the oil that three streams regularly carried out to the beach.

“In the early days, when this was booming and people liked oil money, they loved it,” Anderson said. “Everybody in the county loved it.”

Of course, during those years, the oil industry provided 50% of the county’s personal property tax dollars. Today, it generates about 5%, oil industry officials said.

Buffeted by negative reactions against their profession, many people in Ventura’s oil business these days seem eager to point out that they are not horrible people.

“We’re definitely not dishonest, and we’re not crooked,” said Paul Roden, a production foreman at Shell’s Ventura Avenue field. “We don’t lie, cheat or steal. None of the companies do. They’re loaded with honest, well-educated people.”

The response of the industry is sometimes anger.

“You may not like us, but I don’t see you riding your horse down here and wearing only cotton clothes,” Hewston said. “You use every product we make and then tell us you don’t want us.”

Indeed, it is impossible to escape reminders of the oil industry’s role in shaping the county. Remnants of the past linger everywhere.

The oil that Chumash Indians once used to waterproof canoes and stick spearheads onto shafts continues to seep to the surface along county beaches.

Unocal has preserved its first Union Oil office building on Santa Paula’s 10th Street as a museum memorial to its 100-year history--which included California’s first gusher and the importation of 200 Chinese immigrant laborers to tap mountain oil deposits.

Some oil companies remain hopeful that they can go back to old oil fields and tap into deeper reservoirs of black gold.

Texaco and Shell are flooding their fields on Ventura Avenue with water, hoping to pump out the 75% of oil untapped by primary recovery means in the 1950s. At the same time, Unocal is expanding its Ventura holdings.

Other companies have looked toward the ocean for its riches.

But offshore oil production--once the hope of the future--faces sharp criticism by environmentalists and is increasingly unpopular among politicians.

The stumbling blocks confronting offshore drilling are perhaps best characterized by the delays that have plagued production start-up at the Point Arguello project run by Chevron and Texaco off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Chevron owns two of the three offshore oil platforms that sit on what may be the largest offshore oil and natural gas deposit found in the United States. Texaco owns Harvest, the middle platform. The platforms were scheduled to begin shipping oil through a pipeline to Chevron’s processing plant at Gaviota in February, 1989.

Permit problems first arose when Santa Barbara County officials found the gas to have too high a content of toxic hydrogen sulfide to be piped to Gaviota. Once a compromise had been worked out on the pipeline, the county and companies reached an impasse on whether tankers should be used to transport crude oil to Chevron and Texaco’s refineries in Los Angeles.

Santa Barbara County is expected to decide later this year on Chevron’s latest proposal to ship the oil by tankers.

Meanwhile, the companies lose money. Chevron and Texaco have about $2.2 billion tied up in the project. Texaco and its partners have about $440 million invested in Platform Harvest.

Texaco estimated that it had lost $42 million by February, 1990. The company will never recover the money it spent, said Roger Johnson, an offshore production engineer for Texaco, who bluntly warns, “If delays go too long, we’ll mothball the platform and reduce manpower.” That thought is a major concern for the workers who sometimes work 17-hour shifts at facilities such as Platform Harvest.

“It just gets discouraging,” said Michael Hanlon, 37, a control systems operator. “We’ll probably all be let go and shipped back to wherever.”