Archive for August, 2006

Petroleum potentates

Though whalers are a thing of the past and wagon trains live only in the memories of very old men, “Pete”, the big provider, still pioneers new fields. It’s a scant fifty years since the bell on a horse’s harness announced that the coal oil man was near and housewives hurried with potato-stoppered cans to buy kerosene for their lamps. Today a look and a smell at Indiana’s Whiting cracking plants unfolds a fabulous story of catalytic progress.

Those days are done when wildcatters set up their pitch in booming oil communities, and showed geological surveys indicating a drilling site “smack over the top of the anticline”, with a bit of ballyhoo to “Hurry, hurry, hurry, Lucky Lew is spuddin’ in”. A modern driller needs a permit issued only upon proof of proper pipeline facilities, and a demand for oil. Geological surveys don’t mean much any more since seismographs map subsurface structures-thus scientifically predicting the potential production of each well.

New frontiers still beckon by means of secondary recovery, a process that puts new life into old fields and turns old pumpers into young gushers again. And prospecting for petroleum in the open ocean among the hurricane playgrounds continues to kindle our imaginations-as oilmen struggle against nature to tap tideland oil from the continental shelf in the Gulf. One of the quirks of wealth is that even with a million a man can still be a misfit. That happened to the petroleum potentate who went from pitchfork to putter in one month after the well blew in. He installed ranch-to-ranch carpeting and bought a boy for his dog; ordered tailor-made underwear and mink manure to raise roses. He has cattle engraved instead of branded, and his guests use sport cars for golf carts. When the old one got all wet, he bought a new yacht for his winter home on the Gulf.

Some oily millionaires carry bankrolls so big they have them put on microfilm to fit in their wallets. The only difference between these men loaded with pelf and those who are poor, is that the rich one worries in bigger numbers. He has to stop using a clip for his money and get bookends instead.

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Nuclear physicist

In addition to dealing out death and destruction, atomic power promises peaceful pursuits. Until recently the process of atomic powered electricity was complicated. It furnished heat; that heat produced steam; steam turned the turbines; and they propelled the generators.

Perfection of the atomic battery cut out the middle men by producing electrical power directly from radio-active material. This brings the likelihood of atomic autos and household appliances with built-in power within the foreseeable future.

More potent power at a much lower cost will do more to preserve the peace than all the atomic energy devoted to destruction, for what wins wars ALSO avoids them. Wars are won by keeping the wheels of industry turning and production lines humming. Mass production made America the strongest nation today, and when nuclear energy is applied to stepped-up production-our atomic jitters will be jolted to a standstill!

Patent medicine men-now and then

Patent medicines have travelled a long way since tribal days: poor men turned rich when Grandma was a girl by peddling pills and trading in tonics. “Pink pills for pale people” was a popular slogan. Most of the tonics were no more than tinted alcohol and a good many reformers drank more thus disguised as medicine, than the drunkards they tried to turn away from whiskey.

Medical research within the last generation is responsible for the boom that’s boomed in medicine. Old ailments have adopted new names what used to be an itch is now an allergy, and the air is crowded with commercials about remedies that won’t upset your stomach. Just as one scientist comes up with a drug that makes an ailment extinct, one of his colleages isolates a new virus. The continuing cycle of sickness has blessed us with a rash of wonder drugs that now help every ill but age.

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Millers

Today we’re introducing a miller, a man in a line we take pretty much for granted in our time of “refined” products. There was a day when his kind wore clothes covered with flour dust and carried bran cake in their hair. The milling industry has the longest continuing run in history. It reaches back before written records though it didn’t come to America’s shores until Dutch wind mills became popular. Some of those lumbering leviathans stand as scattered landmarks, but the behavior of both the mills and millers has changed along with everything else.

There’s a considerable span between the old-wind-powered grist grinder and the modern rollers that put water-powered plants along the old mill stream. With this advent of modern mechanism, millers were too plentiful and many grain grinders left that old mill stream to its romance and song. To bring us up-to-date on a story with an interesting background, we have with us:

Ministers

Businessmen expect to get what they pay for-except when they hire a preacher; then they expect $15,000 value for $1500.
Recently when no minister was available for a convention invocation, one of these businessmen, acting as Chairman, began:

“There being no clergyman present, let us thank God!”
This parishioner’s idea of a good sermon is one that goes over his head, and hits one of his neighbors.
Generally speaking, congregations expect a great deal from their ministers. They expect these men of God to save their souls, maintain their churches, and do it all on meager donations. An enterprising pastor, discouraged by the poor offerings, hit on the successful plan of posting a “Buy Now, Pray Later” bulletin.

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Librarian

It’s quite likely that during their formative years, librarians study the tenacity of ants and bees. The devotion to duty these tiny creatures display must have left a lasting imprint on these people who convert dusty volumes into revolving funds for fiction and research.

Year after year, librarians guide young America through the Land of Oz, and Mark Twain’s time-then first thing you know, into the tales of love. The next step comes with the care and feeding of infants-and in just a few years the cycle starts all over again.

A librarian is more than a teller in a book bank-they extend a helping hand toward research and education, and help us draw love, mystery or melodrama from the open shelves.
Librarians are no book burners-they think too much of literature. They have faith in the freedom to read and respect the reader’s own judgment in accepting what’s good-and rejecting what isn’t.

Lumberjacks

Lumberjacks awaken the woods with the snoring of their cross-cut saws and the crunch of axes as they bite sharply into living wood, before the crash of a tree and a cascade of cusswords after the familiar cry of “Timber!”

Metallurgists

The heat’s on at any parley of the country’s hottest engineers as they ponder over coke oven, blast furnace and open hearth processing of better, cheaper steel. According to a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, the process begins by mining coal; ends with literally baking the tar out of it. The solid carbon substance that remains, is coke. In the early days coke ovens dotted the countryside like beehives and wasted their vapors but that waste has been harnessed and converted into plastics, nylons and an in-increasing number of “miracle” fibers.

With the coke out of the oven-what about the blast furnace? Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s trip to a fiery furnace was all in vain, but when coke, lime and iron ore go into a furnace at 3,000 degrees they come out in the form of molten lava or pig iron-a hot mass next mixed with manganese and carbon over an open hearth fire. The result is modern steel. Continuing research keeps the industry aiming at bigger things. To little folks like you and me, they’ve brought the comforts of metal rails on which we roll to work in the morning, and other conveniences all through the day . . . down to the non-sag springs that support our weary bones at night.

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Hospital-ity

When a first-time patient enters a hospital he finds it full of unhospitable surprises. First, a receptionist sees him and signs him in (after he proves that he can pay for his stay). After his credit is established he’s turned over to an unsympathetic escort who accompanies him in an elevator. At each floor the door opens on the sterilized smell of anaesthetics, medicines and food. Maternity patients on white carts are heading for the heir port and each open arch looks as though one ward just leads to another.

Finally, he comes to his own clinical cubicle and is ordered to bed in a gown too brief to be decent. When he’s barely settled, he answers questions, has his temperature taken, answers questions, swallows a first cousin to wallpaper paste, answers questions, and finally-when the sounds of the night are somewhat stilled-he drifts into restless sleep. In no time at all the shafts of the morning sun show up and the bed-pan brigade clatters down the hall, wash basins bang at each bedside, and a sweet young thing brings his breakfast. Surely, the only logical reason for that cock-crow awakening is to get a little work in before the night shift leaves.

On the heels of his tasteless toast comes another question and answer period, followed by tests, probings, Xrays . . . then finally the blood-letting begins. The entire sterilized routine is so statistical, impersonal, and indifferent, that even an effervescent convalescent feels levelled so low that he’s next to inanimate . . . just a case history on a hospital chart.

The law man

Perry Mason’s creator (Erie Stanley Gardner) is an exception to the illusion that crime doesn’t pay. In Chicago it collects, where “the boys” make book in City Hall-or so the story goes. Our speaker is of the opinion that taking the line of least resistance makes a man crooked; the ones who resist the least end up crooked as snakes with the colic, and when one of them dies, they just screw him down into the ground.
“Honor among thieves” he says is a lot of nonsense. A crook is just as bad as anybody else.

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Hardware men

When our innards go haywire, a doctor seeks the cause and the cure; but when something goes wrong with a house it’s the hardware man who comes into his own. On Saturdays his store is a swarm of sawyers, and as “house doctor for these customers, dishes out helpful hints on repairs and suplies the materials for his fix-it fans.
Hardware customers are a progressive lot the doers who keep repairing, building or tinkering but their first step is to consult the neighborhood helper who can cope with household ills everything from a leaky faucet to a squeaky door.
A nostalgic sort of tie binds today’s hardware man to the general merchants of that faded age when a storekeeper gave every purchaser a part of his own personality a quality of warmth lacking in modern help-yourself layouts.

Hospital administrators

A hospital needs patients to pay the expenses . . . but the administrator of one of these healing-houses needs something akin to the patience of Job. A hospital’s head man has to have a deep understanding of human behavior. He must master several conflicting services and have a technical know-how for managing the diverse facilities designed to heal the sick, operate the laundry, run the restaurant, and maintain cooperation among all of them. This, plus the problem of operating in the capacity of an executive without complete control of his personnel. His internes, orderlies, nurses, dieticians and student trainees take orders from attending physicians a situation that adds somewhat to the sterilized mixture. Why, then, would anyone seek this vexatious post? For the heart-warming satisfaction of relieving suffering-preserving life-and helping others to do likewise.

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Economic analyst

Our guest is an economic analyst-a specialist who looks at the business barometer and then comes to a costly conclusion. He started analysing things in the Army when he received his sweetheart’s snapshot taken at the beach. It pictured two couples smiling happily while she sat alone to one side. The accompanying note explained that this was how she fretted away the time, awaiting his return.

That night he took another look; our speaker turned to his buddy and puzzled, “Now who do you suppose took that picture?” From that day forward he has used pictures to prove his points about business and has grown adept at giving a clear view while keeping out of the picture.

Efficiency expert

An efficiency expert is smart enough to tell you how to run your business and too smart to start one of his own. He knows that the most efficient way to get a job done is to give it to a busy man. He’ll hand it to his secretary.
Our speaker is such an efficient time-saver he walks in his sleep to get his exercise and his rest at the same time.

Feed men

The man who mixes his own is as rare as the man who rolls his own, and therein lies the feed men’s story of rags-to-riches through research. Near the turn of the century, farmers who were forced by circumstance to buy feed rather than raise it, found themselves going broke. The community feed store generally was a big barny building across the tracks, frequented mostly by cats and rats. No matter how you looked at it, it was chiefly a chicken feed business but yesterday’s chicken feed is today’s two billion dollar industry.

Enterprising dealers turned to science and nutrients. They developed mixtures with antibiotics and vitamins that produce 25 percent more meat, milk or eggs with 25 percent less feed, and in one quarter the time involved when home made mash and home grown feed were a matter of course. The chicks that once took months to mature now just take weeks to develop into bigger and better birds-a development that has made farm-mixed feed nearly passe. Today’s feed stores are popular and profitable, thanks to the determination of men who converted a frayed-as-a-feather business into an industry they could crow about. Our speaker is one of these.

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