Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...those early years, Harry Sinclair helped fix the standard type of U. S. oil-boom promoters. His energy was tremendous. His big smile and loud, harshly good-natured laugh would persuade strong men to work and inspire other gamblers' confidence. But, if necessary, Harry Sinclair could drive strong men to work and outsmart the money fellows. He was, and still is, as shrewd as they come in the whole shrewd oil game. His big laugh and heavy hand are the foils of a cunning mind...
President Harding's favorite evening game was poker, but there came an evening when President Harding had to think about Oil instead of drawing to a straight flush. Sinclair and another big oilman, Edward L. Doheny from the Pacific Coast, an old friend of Fall's, were anxious for some leases on the naval oil reserves at Elk Hills, Calif., and the Teapot Dome in Natrona County, Wyo. To accommodate them, Secretary Fall and Edwin Denby, Secretary of the Navy, prepared an executive order, transferring these reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. President Harding...
...until 1916 did he start branching out from production into Oil's subtler phases-transportation, refining, marketing. He formed the Sinclair Oil & Refining Co. out of seven small enterprises and built his own pipe-line to the Great Lakes. In 1917 he formed the Sinclair Gulf Corp. with his own fleet of ships. While larger companies were getting War contracts, he, an alert independent, developed a Latin-American trade. In 1919 he let his friends in on various "ground floors" of the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corp., a towering organization of world-wide schemes...
...outside of oil, he was making his dominance felt by bucking the baseball business with a league of his own. The National and American leagues were too much for him, however, and his costly Federal League died in its 2nd year (1915). With racehorses he did better. He bought the services of famed Trainer Sam Hildreth and out of his Rancocas Stables, in 1923, came Zev, world's champion. He bought a yacht, a private car, a Fifth Avenue mansion, an estate at Great Neck...
...flung out by the burly Destiny Man to Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama; to Angola, in Portuguese West Africa; to Russia. Sinclair's technique was to approach the government of a country with the flyleaf of his checkbook showing. "Men mumble but money talks," is an old oil adage. He would ask for a franchise to prospect for petroleum. If he found some, the government could have it all, except for a million or so acres. Sinclair always got his acres along the coast, where his tank-ships could put in. The oilfields he obtained this way soon brought...