Word: spindletop
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Devil Rides Outside shows that it takes all grades of crude to make a literary Spindletop. It is the first novel of Dallas-born John H. Griffin, 32, a blind veteran of World War II. Author Griffin spoke his book into a wire recorder, and he talked far too much. He and his publishers (a Fort Worth firm whose first book this is) cut out 250 pages and could profitably have lopped off 200 more. But though Devil is crudely written as well as overwritten, it has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor...
...Alberta. All Canada has expanded amazingly since World War II; discoveries of iron ore, nickel, copper, uranium and titanium are cracking open a dozen new frontiers. But the biggest boom of all is in Alberta's oil, the most significant new find on the continent since Texas' Spindletop roared in, 50 years...
William McCarthy got none of the wealth of Spindletop. His job petered out and the family moved on. Glenn grew up in Houston's "Bloody Fifth" ward, where as he says today, "the cops were afraid of the people, and there was almost always a dead man somewhere on the street in the morning...
Jackpots. After Spindletop, in the superlatives of the oilfields, came a jillion jackpots-roaring booms at Electra, Ranger, Burkburnett, Desdemona and Mexia proved that oil was where you found it. The automobile age created a rising demand, and after the Lucas No. 1, Texas wildcatters never stopped their probing in the earth's baffling substrata. Glenn McCarthy, a man with a lust for money and fame, became one of them...
...been suckled with the sound of oil rigs in his ears; his father, an itinerant oilfield workman named William McCarthy, came to Spindletop as a driller, and Glenn was born there in 1907. One of his earliest memories concerns the great Gulf Coast hurricane of 1915. As the storm approached, the elder McCarthy galloped to the field in a two-wheeled gig; Glenn went with him and crouched in the roaring darkness as derrick after derrick crashed into wreckage...