Word: utah
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under a blazing sun, the governors of Colorado and Utah last week took part in a historic ceremony: the opening of the first privately financed U.S. plant to make gasoline in quantity from a solid hydrocarbon. The place: American Gilsonite Co.'s new $14 million refinery outside Grand Junction, Colo. There, as Colorado's Steven L. R. McNichols and Utah's George Dewey Clyde each pulled a handle, water gushed from a pipeline, turned black with particles of Gilsonite...
Gilsonite is one of nature's freaks, a petroleum-like substance which, through geologic accident, failed to liquefy. The man who first saw the commercial possibilities of Gilsonite was Samuel H. Gilson, a U.S. deputy marshal in Utah and part-time prospector. One day in the 1880s while prospecting in eastern Utah's Uintah Basin, he found a crumbly, shiny, black substance which he mistook for a new form of coal. But when he tried to burn it, it melted. It was one of the world's largest known deposits of a natural pitch substance similar...
...with the techniques of Pioneer Gilson's day, was to move the Gilsonite out of mountains in bulk at low cost. American Gilsonite's solution is a 72-mile-long, $2,500,000 pipeline which daily carries a slurry of 700 tons from the minehead at Bonanza, Utah over 700-ft. gorges and across an 8,500-ft. pass to the refinery...
...fanciest Miami Beach hotels waited hand and foot-and charged an arm and a leg-on folks from What Cheer, Iowa and Rough and Ready, Calif. Nearby motels turned away road-tired hordes at the rate of 50 a night. In Washington, D.C., tourists from Calamine, Ark. and Hurricane, Utah scrambled to the monuments and parks, bought foam-rubber hats and doused them with water to get cool. And Washington's Manger Hamilton Hotel, one of thousands of hotels offering family plans (children free), was caught in a dither when a couple from Kentucky showed up with eleven youngsters...
...tears got her nowhere: her husband, Air Force Staff Sergeant Gene Ennis, 28, stationed at Baltimore, confirmed it; so did Ennis' mother in nearby Crisfield, Md.; so did Leona's mother in Dallas. At length Leona turned in her crown (to Charlotte Sheffield, Miss Utah) and confessed that she had done it all because "we desperately needed money to buy clothes and shoes for our two small children [aged 3 and 2]. My husband makes only $300 a month, and we owe so many bills." Then that story, too, got caught in the wringer...