Word: wildcatted
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Even as the nation good-naturedly shook hands with itself after the election battle, the realities of the world came crowding back. The Berlin airlift was clapped under new Russian pressures. The U.S.-supported Sophoulis cabinet wobbled and fell in Greece. Along the nation's East Coast a wildcat strike of longshoremen exploded into a full-scale tie-up. Then last week came the news that the whole Nationalist government in China faced collapse, that Nationalist China was fighting for its life on the Suchow front...
...story doesn't greatly matter: a bluffing old Confederate veteran (capably hammed by Roland Culver) is deceived into fronting for an itinerant salesman (Patric Knowles) of wildcat oil shares. The wildcat is also a tomcat, and Veronica Lake, the prettiest of the colonel's three daughters, falls for him. The second daughter (Oklahoma's Mary Hatcher) sings a good deal, and the youngest (Mona Freeman) is on hand with wisecracks. There is also a cook (Pearl Bailey), and a comic swain (Billy De Wolfe...
...find it, Humble put its wildcat crews in boats and pioneered some radically new techniques. Its geophysicists cruised the Gulf with seismographs and gravity meters to look for salt dome structures (where salt domes are, there is usually oil), finally spotted one in the waters off Grand Isle, La. (see map, NATIONAL AFFAIRS). An oceanographer who helped plan the Normandy invasion also helped Humble. He gathered the weather data for a stormproof drilling platform that took over 5,000,000 pounds of steel to build and whose pilings were sunk 197 feet into the Gulf bottom...
...wildcats, who have been making money, plausibly retort that without the cheap "air coach" rates most of their passengers would have gone by train or bus. Said strapping (6 ft. 3½ in.), cocksure Stan Weiss, president of wildcat Standard Air Lines: "The airlines are afraid of us, not because we are taking money away from them, but because the public and the Government now have something to measure them...
That was why CAB last week ordered Wildcatter Weiss to suspend all operations, declared it would register no additional wildcat lines, ordered an investigation into all wildcat "practices and activities." Weiss, whose airline faces a death sentence if the CAB order sticks, went into court, and got a ten-day stay of execution. Without blocking a metaphor, he argued that the airlines were angry because wildcatters had "pulled the ground out from under them," added that he was "not going to be shouted out of business by [an] octopus...