“I was raised on cable tool rigs by my dad,” McPherson recalls. “I worked for him and other drilling contractors off and on in the beginning. I bought my first rig in January of 1969. It was a Mayhew 1000 that I used for mineral exploration in western Colorado. The mineral market I was in was uranium. Then the Three Mile Island incident hit and interest in uranium fell flat so I had to find something else to do. By the end of 1982, I decided to go into the oil and gas drilling market. My brother was drilling in Augusta, Kan., setting surface for the bigger oil rigs, and he said there was a possibility of work in southeast Kansas. So I went on down there to get set up and my family followed some six months later.