Bill Rintoul; Journalist Covered State’s Oil and Gas Industry

Bill Rintoul, a journalist and author who was an authority on the California oil and gas industry, has died. He was 79.

A longtime columnist for the Bakersfield Californian as well as a freelance contributor to leading oil and gas industry journals, Rintoul died Tuesday in Bakersfield of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Among oil industry officials and other journalists covering the beat, Rintoul was widely respected for his smart, savvy work. To many leaders in the state’s oil and gas industry, Rintoul’s six-day-a-week column in the Californian was must reading.

Born in Taft, Rintoul grew up in the oil fields of the San Joaquin Valley’s southwestern corner, where during the summer the region smells like a newly tarred roof.

Rintoul studied journalism at UC Berkeley just as World War II was starting. He enlisted in the Army but finished his course work and graduated before being shipped to Europe as a rifleman. After the war, he had a number of odd jobs, including surveyor.

He briefly worked as roustabout for Standard Oil in Taft. But he determined that life working in the oil fields wasn’t for him and returned to college on the GI Bill, earning a master’s in journalism from Stanford.

He returned to the Central Valley, working briefly as the Californian’s correspondent in Delano before landing back in Bakersfield covering the oil industry. Rintoul worked for the paper for 51 years.

While his nuts-and-bolts reporting background was solid, he brought an artist’s sensibility to his books on the region and its key industry. He wrote eloquently about those who worked in the oil business.

“There are two things to keep in mind about working in the oil fields,” he wrote, “One, it is dangerous. All those who go to work do not necessarily come home.” As a result, Rintoul wrote, “there is a fraternity among oil workers similar to the group Bill Mauldin identified as ‘them that has been shot at.’ ”

“Second,” he continued, “when you work in the oil fields you get dirty. . . . We cleaned our skins with Pearl oil, which is itself part of the oil that comes from the earth.”

Rintoul said the Bakersfield region was far less connected to the farming community that the Central Valley is famous for than it was to the larger world of oil.

In 1982, a reviewer for The Times praised the writing in four of Rintoul’s books: “Spudding In,” “Oildorado,” “Roustabouts” and “Drilling Ahead.”

“Rintoul knows the men who work the drilling rigs; he knows their families, their aspirations, their fears, and it is his use of that knowledge, along with solid literary craft, that has produced the richest body of writing to emerge from the under-world of petroleum,” reviewer Gerald W. Haslam wrote.

Rintoul is survived by his wife, Frankie Jo; a son, Jim; a daughter, Susan Parker; and a brother, Dave Rintoul.