Word: one
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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People came by the hundreds and then by the thousands. They came from as far away as New Orleans and Oklahoma City, over a million of them. They trampled Homer's grass. They tied up traffic for 20 blocks. Old people came in wheelchairs and one man in an oxygen tent. Sometimes they called up Homer at 3 a.m. to ask him to turn on the lights. "It was worth it," says Homer, "to watch parents with tears in their eyes explain the Christmas story to their children. One little boy told his mother he didn't want...
...this year the neighbors got riled. What with the traffic and the music, they couldn't talk, think, sleep, or get in & out of their own driveways. "I am sorry to say it," said one, "but I don't believe I want to hear Silent Night ever again...
...One of his customers was a wealthy Spanish cattleman named Ramon Samovia; Yant confided to Samovia that oil had just been discovered near some property he owned in Placerita Canyon-he would be rich as soon as he dug up enough money to sink a well himself. Samovia bought into his scheme...
Yant dutifully sank a well, not near the canyon bottom as Samovia had expected, but high on his own hilly acres. To every one's amazement he hit oil: 2,000 barrels a day. He sank four more wells, brought in a producer every time...
...horde of lease-hungry oil speculators and scores of Yant's once disgruntled suckers (many of whom had never filed their deeds) converged on the canyon. The results were spectacular. Amid angry litigation set off by the rush, the California" superior court reversed a law which allowed but one well to the acre, and oil derricks began to rise on Yant's old subdivision like quills on a porcupine's back. In less than a week, 44 drilling rigs were trucked up the single road to the field; 10,000 men labored feverishly at the task...