When Tony Harris graduated from the University of Illinois with a chemical engineering degree, he already knew one thing clearly: he didn't want to spend his career designing distillation towers.

That wasn't ingratitude — it was honesty. He had the degree and could have gone to work for any number of chemical manufacturers. DuPont had offered. Others had too. But a chemical engineering degree, he recognized, was essentially a skeleton key. It could open almost any door in the technical world. The question was which door.

Shell Oil answered it.

A 1968 graduate of Salem Community High School, Harris was drawn to Shell during the interview process not by the job description but by the company's philosophy. They weren't, as he put it, "trying to put a round peg in a square hole." They were hunting for capable people and were willing to figure out the fit afterward — a four-to-six week orientation taught by experienced practitioners, then the freedom to rotate through different specialties until something clicked. If your first assignment wasn't right, they'd move you. They wanted the match as much as you did.

For Harris, that suited him exactly. He wanted something new. Something not covered by four years of coursework. "It's a new frontier," he recalled thinking. "It's not out of a book. It's hands-on, real hands-on experiencing." The oil and gas industry in the early 1970s had almost no formal academic pipeline — only two universities in the country taught anything close to well drilling and production, both in Texas and Oklahoma. Shell needed smart engineers willing to learn on the job, and that was precisely what Harris was offering.

He spent the next thirty years in New Orleans, working across the Gulf Coast region in both exploration and production — though, as he notes, the line between them is thinner than most people realize. He worked onshore and offshore, shallow water and deep, land rigs and floating platforms. As the industry pushed into deeper water, the challenges multiplied. Wells began extending past 30,000 feet below the surface. Standard steel casings couldn't handle the pressures, so Harris and his colleagues worked directly with steel manufacturers to develop high-collapse-resistant materials purpose-built for those conditions. The control rooms on the deep-water rigs, he said, looked like something from NASA — wall-to-wall electronics, sensors everywhere, technology that would eventually migrate into commercial applications far beyond the oil patch.

The final chapter of his career took him to Alaska, working on an offshore project in conditions unlike anything in the lower 48. Everything had to be sourced and shipped from the continental United States. The EPA required two rigs on site at all times — if one caught fire, you needed immediate response capability, and there was none nearby. The thinking required to manage that project was different from anything he'd done before.

"We were working about four or five miles from Russia," he said, in the flat matter-of-fact tone of a man for whom that was simply a logistical fact.

Harris grew up in Salem and credits the school's teachers with doing what good teachers do: raising questions a young person hadn't thought to ask yet. What did he want to do? What problems were worth solving? Where might his particular mind find its best use? He doesn't frame those conversations as formative revelations — more as the steady, low-key work of people who cared about outcomes. He is not a man given to grand pronouncements about his own story.

He and his wife are marking their fiftieth wedding anniversary — today, as it happens, the day of this interview. She grew up in Southern California, which explains the Palm Springs home they've kept for retirement. June in Palm Springs means 110-degree days with overnight lows of 83, which explains the summer home in Estes Park, Colorado — where the high today was 70 degrees, the humidity was negligible, and the elk were already moving through the yard earlier than usual this year. Tony has theories about why.

Three daughters — the second and third are a twin set — are all in their upper thirties and doing well. The curiosity that carried him from Salem to New Orleans to Alaska to the Bering Sea hasn't gone anywhere. It's just pointed at different horizons now.