Word: oiling
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...Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes By Bryan Burroughs 556 pages; Penguin...
...industrialism, not to mention modern American conservative politics. In his tome on the Big Four - Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson and H.L. Hunt - Burroughs, author of Barbarians at the Gate, offers a Hollywood-worthy story that's equal parts political investigative journalism and dramatic family history. Think oil wells gushing black crude hundreds of feet in the air, the pitfalls of billions in new money, and family scandals that include bigamy, ungrateful children, trust funds and professional sports teams...
...wildcatter" Ray Cullen's efforts to convince a man named Judge R. E. Brooks to invest in drilling for crude in 1920: "That the judge couldn't find oil in a barrel didn't matter to Cullen; all that mattered was that Brooks and a dozen other leading Houston citizens had committed money to this drill site. Cullen politely suggested Judge Brooks pick the spot to break ground, and he did. When Cullen realized they had nothing to mark it, he walked to a mound of what Texans tastefully call "cow chips," pick up a few dry chunk, and piled...
...what happened when Cullen decided to drill deeper into ground others had determined to be dry: "[B]y midnight, when Cullen lay down by the derrick to grab some sleep, they had penetrated the slushy, oil-bearing sand underneath...Four hours later Cullen heard Brown shout: "Wake up, Mr Cullen. I think she's coming in!" In the dim predawn light Cullen rose to see oil and gas spewing so violently from their hole that the four-inch flow line, which connected the well to a storage tank, had come loose and was wildly slashing the air. Cullen dashed...
...children of right-wing oligarchs. Many were leftists themselves, with first names like Stalin. Their beef, they said, wasn't so much with Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, which many of them acknowledged had finally enfranchised the poor in a country that has the hemisphere's largest oil reserves but one of its most shamefully inegalitarian societies. Rather, they were part of the first Latin American generation raised on a democratic political diet, and they feared, fairly or not, that Chávez was out to become their generation's Fidel Castro...