THE LAST BOOM

True oil adventures of the '30's with a rambunctious cast of codgers, tycoons, hustlers, hookers, politicians, lawyers, generals, and wildcatters as big as Texas where it all took place. It so happened that Columbus (Dad) Joiner, after years of not a sniff, finally struck not a dinky well but a ""whopper"" in Rusk County on the widow Bradford's farm and that's why the well was named the Daisy Bradford 3. And that's why H.L. Hunt, than a frisky 40, bought out Dad for over a million and soon all the big companies came to East Texas to get in on the Boom romantically called the Black Giant. And just as in the Gold Rush days soon everyone and his damblasted uncle swooped down on Joinerville ""like the cavalry of Genghis Khan."" In time there were so many boomers that the mayor hired an unshaven stranger called Lone Wolf Gonzaullas who was really a Texas Ranger to bring law-and-order to the territory. And, you can believe this, it wasn't long 'til the legislature and the bankers got their fingers in the barrel. That's about the time the Governor was obliged to declare martial law in the fields to put a stop to those ""hot oil"" runners and it's understandable why about this time Dad Joiner was suing H.L. Hunt, now very rich, for fraud and why the New Deal started getting itchy about that hot oil in interstate commerce, a flow ""Tough Tom"" Kelliher of the Interior Department soon reduced to a trickle. But before you could cuss the filthy word FDR, a smart lawyer named Fletcher Whitfield (Big Fish) Fischer got up a suit against the government and, don't you know, Big Fish won it. Later on there was an awful tragedy when an explosion blew up a school and killed 280 children, but the Black Giant kept right on producing through the war more than any five fields put together. And it's still going strong today, even the Daisy Bradford 3 which is still owned by, you guessed it, H.L. Hunt. Affable popular history.