Word: derrick
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...driller, and Glenn was born there in 1907. One of his earliest memories concerns the great Gulf Coast hurricane of 1915. As the storm approached, the elder McCarthy galloped to the field in a two-wheeled gig; Glenn went with him and crouched in the roaring darkness as derrick after derrick crashed into wreckage...
...bought a derrick, got an ancient, 3,000-ft. East Texas drilling rig and a leaking secondhand boiler and boldly set out to sink a 6,000-ft. hole in Hardin County. He drafted his father as a tool pusher, his younger brother William as a laborer. It was agonizing toil. Sand ruined the rubber rings in his pumps every half hour; each time, he dismantled the mechanism and installed new ones. The "coffee pot" rig broke down endlessly. He says: "We might as well have been drilling with a high-heeled boot." It took six months to sink...
Partridge clears Charles Dickens of all responsibility for the expression "go to the dickens," a Victorian nice-nellyism for "go to the devil." But Dickens' perpetually optimistic Mr. Micawber produced micawberish and the pompous Mr. Bumble lent his name to incompetence forever after. Similarly, a hangman named Derrick is immortalized in hoisting devices, French Physician Joseph Guillotin in a machine which struck him as more humane than the ax, and be-trousered Suffragette Amelia Bloomer in billowing pantalets. It is a process that has never stopped, concludes Partridge happily-from Solon, who became a synonym for lawyer...
...corner of his 286-acre farm, Joe joined a crowd of several hundred oil scouts, brokers, geologists and gawking neighbors around the tin-hatted crew working the rig on a 128-ft. oil derrick. As Joe and they watched, there was a cough and a sputter; then a stream of oil shot out 30 ft. and poured into the mud sump pit. Joe York rubbed his hands in the oil, smelled it and smiled. "I guess I won't have to go back to milking those Jersey cows," he said. The oil scouts took but one look...
Peter A. Rubel, Richard T. Povill, and Daniel J. Young of Thayer; Derrick M. Wilde and Calhoun Dickenson of Holworthy; William W. James of Mower; Clayton L. Sommers of Massachusetts; Thomas W. Hoya and Richard E. Reed of Weld; Ernest T. Berkeley, Jr., of Lionel; Stephin L. Rudin, Waverley R. Beall, and Richard E. Johnson of Mathews...