OMSA Recognizes Marilyn Muchowich Stanley for Distinguished Service
The Offshore Marine Service Association (OMSA) recognizes individuals through the association’s highest individual honor, the Robert J. Alario Distinguished Achievement Award. This year, Marilyn Muchowich Stanley, Chairman of the Board of Offshore Oil Services, Inc. and a former OMSA Board Member, was recognized at a dinner on Tuesday, November 10.
Created in 2020, the award is reserved for individuals who, through a lifetime of hard work and accomplishments, stand as indisputable champions of the U.S. maritime industry. Nominees come from OMSA’s own membership, and the OMSA Board of Directors votes on every name before it is approved.
The award carries the name of Robert J. “Bob” Alario, who spent two decades as Chairman and President of OMSA and is credited with merging the separate Texas and Louisiana offshore trade associations into the single, unified voice the industry relies on today. Under his leadership, OMSA became a legislative and regulatory force that member companies continue to still lean on. Alario passed away in November 2020, not long after OMSA presented him with its first Lifetime Achievement Award. The Board created the Distinguished Achievement Award in his name so that the standard he set, service measured in decades, not headlines, would keep being recognized.
Past recipients have included:
- - 2021 — John P. Laborde, founder of Tidewater, Inc., who built the company from two vessels into the world’s largest offshore oil and gas marine operator over a 38-year career as CEO.
- - 2022 — Donald T. “Boysie” Bollinger, who grew Bollinger Shipyards into the largest privately owned shipyard in the country, and Otto Candies, Jr., a founding member of OMSA and longtime leader of Otto Candies, LLC.
- - 2023 — Larry Hornbeck, founder of Hornbeck Offshore, recognized for turning a personal vision into one of the industry’s leading offshore service companies.
- - 2024 — MJ Cheramie, longtime leader of L&M Botruc Rental, Inc., who spent decades building his family’s Galliano, Louisiana-based crewboat business into one of the Gulf’s established offshore vessel operators and helped pioneer the modern Offshore Support Vessel (OSV) industry.
What connects these names is not just longevity, but the fact that each one shaped the industry’s infrastructure, its workforce, or its political standing in ways that outlasted their own careers. Each was, in some form, present for the person who came before them. Otto Candies, Jr. presented Bob Alario’s own award in 2020. Boysie Bollinger later presented Candies, Jr.’s award to his son.
This year’s honoree, Marilyn Muchowich Stanley, extends that record. She has spent nearly five decades with Offshore Oil Services, Inc., a Gulf of Mexico crewboat operator her family has run for nearly nine decades, rising from the workforce her father built to Chairman of the Board she still leads today. Her OMSA Board service places her, like several honorees before her, among the people who shaped the Association’s direction from the inside before being recognized for it publicly.
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“Marilyn Muchowich Stanley represents exactly what this award was built to recognize: someone who showed up for this industry for nearly fifty years, not because anyone was watching, but because the work needed doing,” said Aaron Smith, President of OMSA. “Bob Alario spent his career building an industry that took care of its own, and every year we present this award, we’re really just pointing back to that same standard.”
The offshore marine industry is unique in its long history of multi-generational companies. The Alario Award’s shortlist reflects that same pattern. It recognizes the people whose decisions decades ago are still shaping how the industry operates today, and it does so at a moment when institutional memory of that kind is essential to preserve.
