Word: derricks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sinclair proves his old admirers at least halfway wrong. In this happily Buddless parody of Richardson's famous classic written in 18th Century idiom, Sinclair shows that though he may no longer be capable of striking Oil! he still has craft and subtlety enough to rig a strong derrick and drill some telling holes in the seamier sides of U.S. life. Not that his plumbings achieve any new level, for in Another Pamela, as "in almost everything he has written, Sinclair sticks close to his favorite theme: the way of life of the wealthy and the power that money...
...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...
...luck held. He bought up a lease with only eleven days to run, gambled on drilling before its expiration date. It rained night & day for the whole eleven days. McCarthy toiled in knee-deep, liquid mud for days at a stretch, drove his men to exhaustion. But his derrick was up and rigged and his rotary turning in 10½ days. He brought in a big gas producer...
Then one disaster after another hit him: a derrick collapsed, a well blew out and started a quarter-million-dollar fire. McCarthy invaded the Palacios district, sank $700,000 in leases, a million dollars in equipment, drilled five disappointing wells at once and went broke. By the time his mansion was built he was $1,500,000 in debt...