Word: gearing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...still heading east as First Officer Robert E. Fox lowered the craft's wing flaps to slow it to 170 m.p.h. He dropped the landing gear and pulled the plane's nose up, in preparation for banking sharply to the right...
...campaign, his most likely successor seemed to be Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, 37, a populist in polo shirt and plaid pants. But he lost last week to Forrest ("Fob") James Jr., 44, a former star halfback at Auburn University '55 and a millionaire manufacturer of sporting gear. James' victory showed that Jimmy Carter's tactics can still pay off, at least in the South. His lavishly financed $2.5 million campaign played up his role as an outsider with no ties to the political system. That image was reinforced by Walker & Associates Inc., a Memphis-based political...
Neither the size nor the complexity of the equipment deters the thieves. Alcorn Well Service Inc. of Victoria, Texas, reports $15,000 worth of gear stolen this year; latest loss: a $1,200 pair of 60-lb. elevators used to pull pipe. Says Alcorn Vice President Jimmy Hendrix: "Just about dang near every weekend somebody gets hit. They come in after dark, strip your rig, and we never recover anything...
...thefts are inside jobs. Says Houston Police Lieut. J.B. ("Bill") Bradley: "It goes right down to the roustabout in the field." Identification procedures are so lax that some firms wind up buying or renting back their own equipment through various "midnight" dealers. When it is sold, the stolen gear usually goes for bargain prices ?$500, say, for a high-pressure valve that costs $5,000. But some thieves with business savvy have been known to make really big money. In July, Houston's special "fence detail" arrested a middle-aged veteran salesman with a major drilling-equipment manufacturer...
Trying to curb the flow of stolen gear, drillers in Oklahoma and Louisiana have set up rewards earmarked to pay informants. Throughout the South and South west, law-enforcement officials and oil-company security people are holding seminars on antitheft measures. Says William J. Sallans, executive vice president of a Houston-based association of 210 petroleum-equipment manufacturers and suppliers: "We've bought more' cyclone fence since 1973 than at any other time in the history of the oil industry...