Word: spindletops
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Texaco grew from one great gusher. In 1901 Joseph Cullinan, a former Standard Oil employee, found black gold on Spindletop Hill, near Beaumont, Texas. The next year he formed the Texas Co., and by 1928 it was operating in all 48 states. Texaco ventured overseas in 1936, when it teamed up with Standard Oil of California to market Middle Eastern oil. It also bought an interest in California Arabian Standard Oil, which held a major concession in Saudi Arabia. That company later became Aramco, a consortium that joined Saudi Arabia and American producers...
...speak of wanting to make a personal "substantive contribution," and some of them do. All of them, because they are Houstonians, spend a lot of time making the distinction between old money and new money. "We don't know where she comes from," sniffs old money made even before Spindletop. "You can get in the papers, but you can't get in," laments new money from real estate. The preoccupation with admission to the reigning oligarchy seems to obscure completely the larger distinction between money and no money...
...drilling around a dome near Beaumont, Texas, produced a gusher of unprecedented size. It was called Spindletop and gave birth to the modern petroleum industry. Since then, salt domes in the Gulf States have helped point the way to more than 6 billion...