Passion is certainly one thing this industry inspires. Sometimes that passion may be against it (as many of us have seen) but more frequently, the passion is for it
This story and photos were submitted By Don Rost, Edmonton Alberta.
The story is about Don Rost as a young teenage boy growing up on a farm in the Hay Lakes, Alberta area during the oil boom.
in 1954 there was an oil boom in many areas, Hay Lakes was among them, there were drilling Rigs everywhere around us. Almost everyday I would bike out to a rig site and watch it operating, totally fascinated. As I'm watching this operation I decided that I should build a model drilling rig. The first model built was about 3 feet tall and a crude piece of work, I then decided to build a 5 foot operational drilling rig and started on that project in 1955,
The days of riding bike and building a rig were interrupted by going to work, I was hired by Premier Steel Mills, later to become Stelco Steel Mill in East Edmonton and shortly thereafter I met my future bride Velma. I was now a bit distracted from rig building. After Velma and I were married we moved to the small hamlet of Rollyview, Alberta. At this point I had only managed to build the derrick, but now that we had settled into our own home and had the space, my evenings were spent building this rig and the outside buildings to completion. My wife Velma was not always in favor of the time committed to this because if she needed my attention she would have to run down the stairs as it was long before cell phones. One evening she had made that trip to the basement just one too many times and when she needed my attention a little later she shut the power off to the basement!
I bought a lot of Meccano gear sets to build the working parts. I had never worked on a rig but I was very intrigued with them and how they worked, To add to this, my brother-in-law was a Toolpush, he knew about my rig model so when we would visit them he would take me to his rig and I'd get more ideas on how to complete The Don Rost Drilling Co. Rig #1.. From beginning to end, this rig model took me from 1955 - 1970 (15 years) to complete, built to scale without a blueprint,
I remained with the Steel Mill until my retirement, never working on a drilling rig..
The completed Don Rost Drilling Co. Rig No. 1 - still in full working order!!
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