Pipeline to Jacksonville: Sanford gets to work at home for first time

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

As a career pipeliner, Jacksonville resident Bobby Sanford has criss-crossed the globe for his job. During the last 40 years he has laid tens of thousands of miles of pipe in all four corners of the Earth.

Yet throughout all those decades of pipeline projects, Sanford has never been able to work from home — until now. The job that has always taken him to far-flung locales like Morocco and the Bosporus Sea and Canada, has now brought him back to Cherokee County.

Thanks to the construction of Energy Transfer’s new 143-mile natural gas pipeline from Minden to Maypearl, which will maintain a construction yard in Jacksonville throughout the duration of the project, Sanford gets to come home from a hard day on the line and sleep in his own bed.

“After 40 years in the field, this is the first time he has been able to work in his hometown, come back to his house, lay his head on his own pillow every night and go to his home church on the weekends,” said Shell Sanford, Bobby Sanford’s son and fellow pipeline worker. “I guess you could say this is the first time he is going to be able to be on a project and still live the rest of his life.”

Bobby Sanford, now 67, was born in Troup and graduated from high school in Dialville, but was raised in Jacksonville. His career started in 1970 when he was 29 years old. His first job was a project in the Gulf of Mexico, and his son said his dad spent much of his early career out on the water.

“He worked mainly off-shore construction until 1981, and that took him to the North Sea, the South China Sea and a lot of other amazing places,” Shell Sanford said. “Then in the early ’80s he got more involved in on-shore construction, and those projects included work in the UK, France, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Iraq, Morocco and many more countries — those are just some of the ones I can think of off the top of my head.”

Bobby Sanford didn’t work his first mainland-America pipeline until 1999, but has since been involved in projects from Mississippi to North Dakota and from Wyoming to Illinois.

It was also at that time that Sanford’s wife, Shirley, started being able to accompany him during some pipeline projects.

“For the last 10 years my mom has been able to spend a lot more time with him, but for most of his career she stayed home and raised their six children. This line of work has a high divorce rate because you have a father and a husband who might be gone for six months at a time, but they are one of the few couples who make it work,” Shell Sanford said. “He is one of the few men who could be gone for a year and then come back and step right back into the roles of father, husband and friend.”

For the most part, the Sanford family wasn’t able to accompany Bobby as he trotted the globe; however, for 18 months in 1975 and 1976, the whole family joined him for a project in Scotland. Shell Sanford and his five younger sisters attended Scottish public schools during that time, and he said it was a great opportunity to experience a foreign culture.

An automatic welding specialist, Bobby Sanford’s part in the new Energy Transfer pipeline is expected to begin in early April. Currently working for CRC-Evans Automatic Welding, he has also worked for Kellogg Brown & Root and J. Ray McDermott over the years.

“My father really was a role model for me growing up, and it is because of the good example he gave us that so many in our family have gotten into the business after him,” his son said. “Myself, four of his son-in-laws and three of his grandchildren are in the pipeline business at this point, and his influence is without a doubt the reason why all of us entered this industry.”

With his father starting to advance in years and the pipeline in Jacksonville a seemingly perfect opportunity to saunter off into the proverbial sunset, Shell Sanford hopes — but isn’t holding his breath — that his father will decide to hang up his automatic welder for good following this project.

“He’s the kind of person who needs to stay active, who always needs things to do. If you put him in a straight jacket he would be dead in 10 minutes. I hope he retires after this one, but I can understand why he keeps working. This is more than just what he does; it is who he is,” Shell Sanford said.

According to Shell Sanford, his father is just an “average East Texas country boy who has had an amazing life.”

“Everybody has someone close to them whose story they think needs to be told, and I think his story is definitely worth telling,” Shell Sanford said of his father. “I am very proud of him. I have always asked him where his favorite place to work has been, and he always says just getting back home was his favorite part.”

So the next four months should be heaven for Bobby Sanford.

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