Word: kinley
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...oilmen knew what to do. They put in a hurry call to the world's most famous oil-fire fighter, 53-year-old Myron Kinley. As marks of his calling, Kinley has a permanently crippled right leg and carries masses of scar tissue all over his body. The call found him at his Bel-Air mansion near Hollywood, where he likes to cool off in his private swimming pool between alarms. Within three hours, he hopped a plane east, carrying nothing but a change of shirt, and socks-and his enormous knowledge of fire fighting...
...scene, he found part of the well platform a mass of wreckage. The wells' damaged "Christmas trees" (i.e., cluster of valves topping the well pipe) kept the flames close to the platform, making the area too hot to approach. Kinley borrowed a four-man Army team from Louisiana's Camp Polk, tried to shoot off the trees with 75-mm. recoilless rifles. The tree of one well was shot off. Kinley got Pure Oil's crews to weld together a 90-ft. boom of pipe tipped with a big loop and cooled by hundreds of gallons...
Luck & Danger. Kinley, who is called the "indispensable man" of the oil industry, owes his highly profitable trade to an accidental discovery. His father made his living "shooting" oil wells (i.e., dynamiting them to loosen the oil-bearing formations). One day in 1913, when a well caught fire he discovered that a dynamite blast could snuff it out. Myron and his younger brother Floyd concentrated on oil-well fire fighting. In 1931, when Myron went to Rumania to put out a fire which had raged for two years, his fame became international...
Every new fire was a new problem. In Rumania, the caved-in well had made a crater 250 ft. wide and 65 ft. deep filled with small ground fires and a tangled web of melted pipeline. It took Kinley six months to lick the fire. In Oklahoma, when his leg was caught in some machinery and broken, Kinley got it set in a cast, went back to direct the fire fighting from horseback. In Venezuela, when shifting winds blew the fire on to him, he spent five weeks on his stomach in a hospital recuperating. In Texas...
Died. John Kinley Tener, 82, Irish-born onetime Governor of Pennsylvania (1911-15), oldtime baseballer and National League president; in Pittsburgh...