Word: petunias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than in any year since the Depression, as well as more than 6,000 bankruptcies and farm-loan defaults. Still, Sooners were not prepared for the latest bad news: the oil well on the lawn of the state capitol in Oklahoma City has gone dry. Nicknamed Petunia when drilled in a flower bed in 1942, the well and the derrick atop it became a symbol of Oklahoma's boom times. Drawing from an oil pool directly beneath the capitol, Petunia pumped some 1.5 million bbl. during its 43 years...
Though the well's majority owner, Phillips Petroleum Co., quietly closed down Petunia's oil production last April, for public relations purposes Phillips will continue to tap the well's small yield of natural gas. Thus, as the Tulsa Tribune put it, "Oklahoma still has a distinction as a capitol: two sources of gas, one underground and one in the legislature...
...pressing the flesh. Polk and William McKinley both developed extensive theories about the best way to shake many hands without pain or injury; Lyndon Johnson could extend a normal greeting into something like a mugging. Some Presidents failed handshaking. Benjamin Harrison's grip was likened to "a wilted petunia," while one newsman described Woodrow Wilson's as "a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper...
...story of Adam and Eve should have made the point once and for all: no matter how blissful the garden, there is always a snake in the grass somewhere. Yet the green enticements of Eden die hard, especially among city folk who would not know a primrose from a petunia. The more man-made their environment, the more likely they are to dream of running for shade. In The Beginning Place, her 13th novel, Ursula Le Guin retells this story, one of the oldest in Western literature, in modern dress. She creates two postadolescents who are drowning in personal uncertainties...