OJ - Where were you born?

CB - I was born in New Iberia, LA in 1948. My father's full name was Chapman H. Burguières, Sr. Everyone called him Bunny. I don't know why that was. Dad and Mom lived in a little shotgun house. I think there were three of those houses within about 300 yards of the sugar mill. The houses were to the north of the mill and we lived in the one in the middle. We lived there until I was seven. I would catch a school bus to St. John's Academy in Franklin. In the beginning of third grade, The J.M. Burguières Co., Ltd. decided to move my father and Uncle Henry to Bayou Sale. My father was an overseer for the Company. He worked in the fields and supervised the sugarcane plantings. I think he also had some responsibilities at the sugar mill. That was during the early to middle 1950's, I think.

OJ - What about your dad's brother, our uncle Henry Burguières, Jr.? What was his role?

CB - I don't remember much about Uncle Henry at that time. I think the Company sent both of them to Bayou Sale because they wanted better production out of that acreage and they wanted family members there to supervise. There were three plantations at Bayou Sale. My father, mother and I moved into a big three story plantation home. It was rundown but it was so much bigger than what we had before.

OJ - When I was a little boy, I visited you and your family at a home that had a cistern attached. Was that the home that had the cistern behind it?

CB - Yes, it had a wooden cistern behind the house. The house itself was built four feet off the ground on bricks and it had two huge screened porches, one on the north end and one on the south end. They were beautiful, big porches with swings. The ceilings must have been at least 12 feet high. There were beautiful live oaks in the yard on about ten acres. On one end were huge pecan trees. The home is no longer there. It burned down. When Mom and Dad got separated and divorced, I was about 12 years old. That was in the late 1950's. They sent me to St. Paul's College in Covington, LA. I was there for two years. I moved back and lived with my mother after the divorce was final, but later I did move back to Midway Plantation with my father. As a matter of fact, I think you visited us there. Do you remember that?

OJ - I do remember visiting you and your dad. Let's talk about him. Were you and your father close?

CB - We were close, but you know how farmers are. They get up at the crack of dawn and don't come home until dark. His life was devoted to the farm. He taught me how to hunt and my mother taught me how to fish. We lived out in the country and there was nothing out there to do. There were no neighbors to go visit; there was nothing to do. The one thing I remember about my dad was hunting squirrels and our fishing together. For vacations we would go to Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi every summer. Those vacations were pretty special.

The rest of the time he was struggling with the farms and making things happen. Those were horrible times. The family was trying to make a profit in the sugar business. It was tough. It seemed that every year there was another spin off of Mother Nature that hurt them. Storms and things; I never remember them ever talking about many good years. Those years were tough years and the Company had debt back then. It was very hard to make ends meet. The cost of buying equipment and having a labor force was too much. About that time the family decided they could lease the land out and not worry about equipment and manpower. My dad was really liked by the workers. On Friday after the field hands got paid, they would go to town and get all juiced up. My dad would go get them and bring them back to their homes. He took care of them and they liked him. I remember him doing that a few times. My dad had a right hand man named Wilbur. His son was named Malou. Wilbur was the mechanic who made sure that the equipment was ready to go the next morning. He fixed everything. They lived in a shotgun cottage with no electricity, ust a cast iron skillet. I remember the meals that came off that stove. I was invited sometimes to eat with Wilbur and his family. They were really good people, hard working and honest. They were ideal employees for The J.M. Burguières Company, Ltd.

Back then we had mules and we used them. That was before the tractors took over everything. You had to grow com to feed the mules. You also had Louisiana black bears that came into the com fields to eat the com that was being grown for the mules. It was really something.

Getting back to the house, the old farm house at Midway Plantation that we lived in, the only water we had was cistern water. My dad couldn't afford to fix the house up. It was company owned. We did modernize it with air-conditioners, though. There was no TV, just radio.

OJ - Tell us about your mother.

CB - Her maiden name was Miguez. Eunice Miguez. Her father's nickname was Rudolph and his real name was Adolph. He had no education. He and his wife lived in a small tin roofed house and they raised seven children. They lived by trapping, fishing, and hunting and living off of the land. So my mother had six siblings. They went to Glenco Elementary, then to Franklin High School, but none of them went to college. I really loved my Grandfather Rudolph. He was really a jolly fellow. I didn't know my other grandfather on the Burguières side. As a matter of fact, I have a picture of all of the Miguez family. My grandfather and grandmother were in their 70's when it was taken. This is inside their house. Look at the walls in the picture. Those are cypress boards. There was no heat, no electricity, no stove; you just put on blankets if you got cold.

OJ - What's the one thing that stands out about your mother?

CB - Well, I'll tell you. She was a tomboy. She was a hell of a fisherman.

OJ - How did your father meet your mother?

CB - Nobody ever told me. I think he was working in the Louisa area and she just lived two miles down across the Intracoastal Canal. They had to have met when they were really young. She was eight or nine years younger than he was.

OJ - After getting out of the service, how did your father end up working on the plantation?

CB - I've always thought that different people have appetites for different things. Obviously the family needed representation on the plantations and I guess it ended up falling to my dad and Uncle Henry to represent the Company. They had two sisters and other brothers who attended various schools and they developed interests in other professions. It was left to my Uncle Henry and my dad. They may not have had an interest in school. They needed a job. Somebody must have shown them how to become farmers. Uncle Henry wasn't really a farmer. He ran parts in the beginning and worked on the PR side.

OJ - Who did your dad and Uncle Henry work for on the plantations?

CB - Uncle Jules and Ed.

OJ - Were your father and Uncle Henry close friends?

CB - They were pretty close. I always felt there was something that stopped them from becoming really close but I just couldn't figureout what it was. They may have had a falling out when they were younger. Uncle Henry never married and was close to his mother and he went to the city quite a bit to visit her. We always stayed in the country. My father went to New Orleans a few times a year, but he was really married to the land.

OJ - You mentioned that Henry ran parts. What do you mean?

CB - We had all of this equipment and everything constantly needed maintenance. Henry was the guy who made sure the things that were needed were picked up.

OJ - When did your dad and Henry, Ed and Uncle Jules get together for meetings or did they ever get together? How did they communicate with each other? Nobody had cell phones in those days?

CB - I guess I was too young to be aware of that. I just don't know.

OJ - How did you and Linda meet?

CB - It was after my tour in Vietnam and I was out of the service. I came back and I had just turned 21. Linda lived in Morgan City. Her father built cotton gins. They did work all over Texas. They went from one town to another. Linda had one brother and they just traveled. Eventually her mother and father divorced. Her mother ended up in Morgan City. She was a seamstress and a waitress. She raised Linda and her brother, Dale. Dale was a few years older than Linda and he worked in the oil industry. He was killed in an oil field accident. Linda and I met in Franklin; she was a hair beautician. We'd run bars and drink beer and work. We weren't going anywhere with our lives. Over a period of time we got real close, though. We've been married now 37 years. We did move to Houma after we were married.

OJ - Let's go back a little. You came back from Vietnam; you started asking yourself what you were going to do with the rest of your life. What were your options?

CB - I was fortunate. Before I went into the Army, I had done all sorts of things. I had dropped out of school in the ninth grade but was able to get my GED while in the service. I went in the oil fields as a roust-about, and started off on inland barges and worked 12/24. I did that for a couple of years. Then I went to work for Penrod Drilling, a big company. I worked on land rigs with them. It was tough work and long hours. Finally I realized I did not want to work like that anymore. It was rough! It paid real well, but you spent half your life out in the gulf on drilling rigs. So I found a company building a water tower in Franklin. The pay was good and I tried to get on with them. I finally got a job and was in the boilermakers union for a year and a half. We built three big water towers and that was enough of that. Linda and I got married about that time.

OJ - You've built a really big operation. Tell me about how you finally put your company together.

CB - Well, I noticed there were companies out there that serviced the oil industry. There were mud companies, both big and small and huge operations like Halliburton. I took a fancy to that and it was certainly a better job than I had at the time. It seemed to have upward opportunity. I put three or four applications in with those mud companies. That's what they called them. They were all in Lafayette. I went over there and all I had was a GED level of education. Mud companies sell chemicals that they mix with water to pump down the well hole as they drill. It's very important to the drilling process. Anyhow, one company offered me a job, but it was in Houma. At the time I was 24; it was 1973 or 1974. At the time I was making $1,200 a month. But this mud company offered me $600 a month with a few perks, including a company car and an expense account, and I didn't have to work off-shore and the work wasn't back breaking. Linda and I talked about it, and I took the job. I worked for the company over nine years. I worked up from a mud engineer, and then they moved me into the office as a supervisor. I was in the office for about five years and I did a little field sales.

I noticed that our clients were occasionally asking for mud tanks or storage tanks that my company didn't have. We would look around and find the client something from somewhere. But what we got was never right and really didn't meet the customer's need. So I saw an opportunity to build a tank that oil companies would rent. A friend of mine, who I had some business dealings with in the past, got interested. I told him it would take $10,000 to build the tank that the oil companies were interested in. I had the contacts and he didn't. I wanted it to be a 50/50 deal. We talked about it and he turned me down. So I decided to do the project myself. At the time I was making good money and was satisfied with how my life was going. But I couldn't stop thinking about those tanks. So I went to South Louisiana Bank and borrowed $10,000. I built the tank and took it to a rental company and put a deal together with them. Within a day it was rented and then rented again. The rentals continued and I plowed the money back into the company and built another tank. Then we built more tanks. When the oil business collapsed in the 1980's everybody was going out of business. So I went to all the auctions and bought equipment for ten cents on the dollar. I accumulated a lot of equipment. The company I continued to work for knew what I was doing and actually encouraged me. Then in the early 1980's, as all oil field related companies were suffering and laying off people, and homes were being foreclosed on, I could see the handwriting on the wall. I had been through two rounds of layoffs and knew I would have to give up my side business or lose my full-time job. By then we had established ourselves and I felt like we could make it. That's when I gave up my full-time job.

I named the company Magnum Mud Equipment. We scraped along with Linda working in the office. When she left, we hired a secretary, then a yard man, and off we went. Today, we have about 66 employees and seven locations and probably about 3,000 pieces of equipment. We tried building our own things but stopped doing that. Today we repair our own equipment and give out contracts to fabrication shops for the special stuff. Looking back, I probably spent way too much time in the business and too little time with Linda and my two boys. You pay a price. The price you pay for success; I don't know if it was worth it.

OJ - You say that, but at the time, it was a different story, wasn't it?

CB - Sure it was. August of 2011 is 30 years that we've been in business. I don't know if l would have said it then, but I'm proud of the 30 years.

OJ - Switching back a little bit, tell me if your mother and dad stayed friendly after their divorce?

CB - I'll tell you what, when they separated that was mostly it. They were not on the best of terms.

OJ - Then your dad met a woman named May. What do you remember about her?

CB - While I was in boarding school at St. Paul's College in Covington, Louisiana., my mom and dad were divorced. At that time Dad was still living at Bayou Sale and it was about the time that JMB was getting out of the operation and farming side of the business. The Company shifted into leasing the land to other people. That was the time my dad met May. Her maiden name was Lucker. Her husband had passed away and she ran a little general grocery store and antique business on Hwy. 90 in Centerville, Louisiana. They met and got together. It was a good marriage. She was a good wife and took care of my father. When she developed Alzheimer's disease, Daddy took care of her. When she passed away at the nursing home she was buried right behind the Presbyterian Church in Centerville. When my daddy died he was buried right next to her.

OJ - In the later years of his life, how did you and your father get along? Was it a good relationship?

CB - When I got out of the service I didn't do things that always made him happy, but I was paying my own way. He didn't support me or anything like that. I don't think I was living the type of life he thought I should be, but when Linda and I got married, and had two children, our relationship turned around. We always had respect for each other and we always cared about each other. But I missed his birthdays and some holidays and things like that. But after our kids came along, we both came around. It was good. I loved him and he loved the grandchildren. I think it all turned out as good as we could have hoped for. My Uncle Henry told me once that my father was a different person when he came back from the war, World War II. He had somewhat of a disability. I think he was shell shocked.

OJ - So he saw action during the war?

CB - Well, my understanding is that his unit went into various areas and built landing strips. They were bombed. He was in the Pacific. He never talked about it.

OJ - How about your relationship with Henry?

CB - Uncle Henry always lived in Franklin. He never wanted to be married and didn't live on the farm. As I got older, he took a liking to me. We were friends. He was close to his nephews.

OJ - Linda, tell me about your parents.

Linda - My father was 20 years older than my mother. He had been married before. My siblings were grown by the time I came along. My dad built cotton gins and they traveled around a lot. I went to more schools than people have fingers and toes and didn't realize it until later that we were never in one place long enough for me to make lasting friends. I don't remember any of their names and I don't keep up with any of them. When my parents separated, my mother raised me and my brother. She was a waitress and we lived off of tips. She sewed and did alterations for people and she was good at it. My father stayed in Texas after they separated, but they kept in touch with each other. When I got older, I became a beautician and lived in Morgan City with my mother. I met Bobby just after he got back from Vietnam. But I didn't see him for another year after that first meeting.

Henry Branch Editors' Notes

There is another certain shift in focus from the older family branches, as we find two of Henry's sons, Chapman and Henry, Jr. working for the Company in the fields and living in Franklin or on the plantations. Also, this was the generation most affected by WWII. Henry, Sr. had died in 1938. His sons were just in their early 20's and several years later they all reported for the war effort. Fortunately, all returned. Jack moved away to New Jersey, Sam T. stayed in New Orleans, as did his two sisters. Chapman and Henry worked the land for the JMB Company.

The quote below was taken from a letter that Sam T. Burguières, Sr. wrote and insisted be a part of the minutes of the January 27, 1972 annual shareholders meeting. His frustrations were clear:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am reading from a prepared statement. All of you are familiar with the many lawsuits brought against the Company and /or its irectors and officers. Within the last few years, several of these suits have been tried and dismissed. Of course, most of them are now on appeal. This continues and increases the cost to the Company, and the time and energy expended by management and professional people, attorneys, accountants, etc. They are costs that in our judgment are unnecessary...”