Editor’s note: Former SEN editor Steve Sasanow pays tribute to ‘subsea watcher,’ journalist Derrick Booth, who passed away in 2016.
Derrick Booth, who died at home in California at the age of 89 on Oct. 25, was the original subsea watcher. Before there was SEN, there was Derrick’s Subsea Data Services (SDS) and its Subsea-Data-Base (SDB), which was a model for the information services businesses that sprung up once the industry learned to use computers and love Big Data. This appreciation-cum-obituary appears now as news of Derrick’s passing was only learned of the week before Christmas.
Derrick and I were an interestingly matched pair. He was the Brit who ended up in the U.S., and I was the Yank who settled in the U.K. When Derrick first espied an issue of SEN back in early 1986, I recall he remarked “this was what I always wanted to do.” So as SEN began its third year of publishing in March of that year, he joined as “Our Man in Houston” and provided background information and insight that the growing SEN readership appreciated.
Meanwhile, SDS and SDB were becoming important tools for the nascent subsea production sector with its tracking of all the subsea wells installed in the world. Part of SDB’s allure was it was user-friendly in those early days of personal computers. Derrick was very tech savvy for the time. Later when his eyesight began to fail and writing became harder, he took advantage of optical character recognition software, which allowed him to carry on using a computer even with limited vision.
He was also very interested in typography probably via his second wife Lois, whom he met in Houston and whose brother Roger Black was a well-known typeface designer. Derrick eventually had a database of typefaces, possibly the first of its kind.
Our sole business venture together was SPY, or The Subsea Production Yearbook, which was first published in 1990 and ran for a decade. It combined the journalism of SEN and its network of correspondents with a selection of new subsea well data from SDB with the latter getting a wider exposure than it had up to then.
Derrick was initially a general journalist who fell into the oil field as did I. While working for a daily newspaper in East Anglia (northeast of London), he was recruited to work for Spearhead Publishing’s Offshore Services magazine, then edited by Bob Barton. After that publication was sold, Derrick was convinced by Spearhead to go to Houston to set up an operation there with plans to publish several oilfield directories—which is how he ended up on the other side of pond.
It was then that he met Lois, a sophisticated and erudite Texan woman who was a counterpoint to his slightly rough-edged traditional British journalist. He will be missed and fondly remembered.
—Steve Sasanow, former editor, SEN
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