Word: oil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Thousand Men. A wild boom began as a 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...
Last week 154 wells were pumping on one 80-acre tract and 4,000,000 of the pool's estimated 18 million barrels had been sucked out. Though the Placerita boom had knocked the price of crude oil from $2.16 to $1.53 a barrel in Los Angeles, onetime Con-Man Yant and many another were getting rich. Yant was also insisting, to whoever would listen, that the oil find "vindicated" him. "Some people think I'm a scoundrel and some think I'm a wonderful guy-depending on whether they made or didn't make money...
...west Texas, the five or six daily editorials in the Abilene Reporter-News (circ. 35,241) are often as important conversational topics as oil, cotton, cattle and sandstorms. The folksy, shrewd comments on politics, literature, science and almost everything else are the work of Frank Grimes, the tall (6 ft. 3 in.), cadaverous editor of the Reporter-News. Last week, Editorialist Grimes, 58, celebrated his 35th year on the paper by summing up "15,000,000 words later" everything he had learned about editorial writing...