Dangerous business in those days. Any roughneck that had been in the job for
a couple of years and still had all his fingers was suspected of being a
poofter.




Based on what I know of the roughnecks of yore..dying at 47 was not
all that unlikely..they lived hard, played hard..and died hard.

On the gripping hand..there are lots of radioactives used in the
pipeline industry for X-ray photographs of pipe weldments. Some of
those can be pretty gnarly.
Cesium-137 being one of them.

Gunner