Gail Force: Muskego's Lil Mud Hen

If you were to read the job description of a mud logger, chances are you'd pass on the 'opportunity,' or at least not envision the perfect candidate as a five-foot-nothing woman in the role.

However, if you know Gail Levin, who owns the Curves in Muskego, you may see her taking on the task and think, 'that makes sense.'

Levin's personality is vibrant and for all of her short stature, she's got a ton of energy. As a 19-year-old striking out on her own from Wisconsin to Louisiana to take a court reporter's job in 1977, the thrill wouldn't last, and her pursuit of 'something different' led her to work in the oil fields for two years.

"There was too much sitting, and I had gotten to know people who had interesting jobs, like a tug boat cook, and I thought something like that would be a lot of fun."

Packing up her Datsun a few years after arriving in New Orleans, Levin headed to Jackson, MS, to take on the role of mud logger in response to an ad. The job was a long day of sieving the liquid ooze that the oil drills bring up from the earth in order to log for geologists the features (sand, clay, colors) that are in the pipeline.

The idea is to avoid gas pockets, which can blow a rig to bits, and to herald when an oil strike might be near.

"Holly Patch was extreme," Levin said of her first gig. "Wooden roads, cockroaches that would hide behind the door and hit you over the head with a baseball bat to steal your chewing gum," she wrote in an essay about the experience. (It won her a 4th place mention in the Wisconsin Young Writer's Contest.)

Levin's 'office was a gutted out mobile home that had a mini laboratory set up on one end, and a couch and refrigerator on the other.

She explained that the the job taught her to take on challenges, but after an oil glut about two years later, she found herself unemployed with about 90 percent of her company. However, the moniker 'mud hen' stuck with her after being called that by a prospective buyer of her house trailer, which she sold before traveling around to Colorado and California to visit with relatives.

Although she came back to Wisconsin and found another position with a legal firm, she said she still hated the bureaucracy, and evolved into working as an assistant to the editor at Western Publishing in Racine. When she was laid off in 1997, she used the severance to make the downpayment on Curves, where she still takes her feisty spirit to affectionately boss around her clients to push themselves.

"I'm surprised I'm not dead," Levin laughs of her adventurous past. However whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger as they say, and she continues to mull over what new roles she could take on, including physical or nutritional therapist or volunteering for the Red Cross in disasters.

You know, the usual.