The Early Lives and Times of 7 Oil Barons


Want to become fabulously wealthy overnight and open the door to starting your own eccentric dynasty? We suggest striking oil.

1. John D. Rockefeller

Rockefeller was so rich, he spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement. But the beginning of his life wasn’t as glamorous. His dad was a vagabond snake oil salesman, a self described “botanic physician,” who once said, “I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ‘em sharp.” And his boy was. Before he struck oil, young John made money by raising turkeys and selling potatoes. By 1870, his company was refining 90 percent the country’s oil.

2. H.L. Hunt

Although Hunt worked on a cotton plantation, he was known as a math whiz. One day in the early 20th century, with only $100 to his name, he booked it to New Orleans and bet it all on a poker game. Thanks to his mathematical chops and some good luck, Hunt turned that $100 into $100,000. He used his winnings to buy the East Texas Oil Field, which went on to earn him millions.

3. J. Paul Getty

Getty was lucky enough to grow up in an oil family. He made his first million two years after graduating college in 1914. After that, he decided to retire and become a Los Angeles playboy. He eventually got tired of the high life and returned to the oil biz, making millions more. But that didn’t stop him from being a penny-pincher: Getty made guests at his home use a payphone.

4. Edwin L. Drake

In 1858, the Seneca Oil Company sent Edwin Drake to Titusville, PA. It wasn’t because he was a revered oil baron. Instead he drew the assignment because, as a retired train conductor, Drake could travel on the railroad for free. And so Drake looked for oil the way everybody else did—by digging trenches. But then he had a wild idea. He tried drilling for oil instead. It was a first. People called him crazy, and Seneca Oil backed out. But then he struck black gold, initially collecting it all in a bathtub.

5. Anthony Francis Lucas

Born into a Croatian family of shipbuilders in 1855, Lucas became a mechanical engineer, moved to the US, and switched careers to become a gold prospector. Later on, he worked as a salt explorer for a New Orleans company. Later working in Texas, as he became more acquainted with the landscape, he guessed there was oil underfoot. Geologists called him nuts. Everyone stopped laughing when he hit a gusher that spewed oil for nine days.

6. Columbus Marion Joiner

Who needs education? Joiner went to school for a total of seven weeks! He taught himself how to read using the Bible and learned to write by copying Genesis. In the 1920s, he started drilling for oil in Texas with dilapidated, rusty equipment. After three years of pulling up nothing but dirt, Joiner hit a gusher. At that time, it was the largest oil field in the world.

7. George Bissell

When Bissell entered the business in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, most people collected oil by soaking blankets in surface deposits and then squeezing it into barrels. Bissell was a bit smarter than that. Actually, he spoke eight languages—including Sanskrit. But when he suggested people could pump oil out of the ground, one critic said, “Oil coming out of the ground, pumping oil out of the earth as you pump water? Nonsense! You’re crazy.”


Five rooms of one's own.
Five rooms of one's own.





Sadly, the cool ceiling lamp is not included.Allwood/Amazon


Intrigued? Find out more here.

[h/t Simplemost]


The Unkindest Cut: A History of the Bowl Cut

Jim Carrey, one hideous bowl cut, and Jeff Daniels star in Dumb and Dumber (1994).
Warner Home Video

Moses Horwitz dreaded going to school. It was 1903, and the 6-year-old Brooklynite found himself at the mercy of cruel children who would tease him ruthlessly. Their taunting was directed at his hair, long and finger-curled by his mother before class. It was a style deemed more appropriate for girls of the era, and the boys made sure Moses knew it. Even the girls thought it strange. He was heckled before, during, and after school.

This went on for years. One day, at age 11, Moses decided to do something about it.

Over at a friend’s house, he impulsively grabbed a pair of scissors, closed his eyes, and began trimming his hair in a blind circle. When he opened them, his friends were laughing. Moses had crafted a bowl cut—a straight line around his entire head. It was not exactly flattering, but it reduced the number of bloody noses he had to endure.

The cut would eventually prove useful for Moses, who later took on the stage name Moe Howard and formed The Three Stooges comedy team—all while maintaining that trademark hairstyle.

Moe Howard (L) was famous for his bowl cut.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The origins of the bowl cut extend far beyond Moe Howard. The style was common among European men in the 12th through 15th centuries as well as Russian serfs in the 18th century. The appeal was simple: It was a style that could be achieved with no skill, no brushing, and at virtually no cost. It also straddled the line between the longer styles that went in and out of vogue in the Middle Ages and the shorter cuts favored by soldiers and religious leaders. Men of greater means often accessorized the cut with elaborate hats.

While the style persisted, it’s not clear when it adopted the names bowl cut or soup bowl cut, or whether anyone actually used a bowl as a guide. But by the time the Great Depression hit in the late 1920s and '30s, an economical way of trimming hair at home became a popular choice for households trying to conserve funds. Sitting a child in a chair and snipping in a circle was something virtually anyone could do.

The bowl cut, it seemed, prospered wherever haircuts were prohibitively expensive. In 1951, Vancouver residents balked at barbers raising the price for a cut to 85 cents by buying trimmers and electric clippers to shape bowl cuts at home.

The bowl cut experienced another surge in the 1960s, though this time it owed more to fashion than the economy. When the original members of the Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Stu Sutcliffe—went on tour in Hamburg, Germany, in 1960, they befriended a group of art students including Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer. Kirchherr and Sutcliffe fell in love. When she agreed to give Sutcliffe a haircut, she emulated the bowl style popular among art students at the time. Harrison requested the same thing. Later, when Lennon and McCartney visited Vollmer in Paris, they got similar cuts.

By the time the Beatles arrived stateside in 1964, the group—now minus Sutcliffe and Best, but having added Ringo Starr—was sporting what TIME magazine dubbed the “mushroom” haircut. The band’s fanatical followers emulated the style.

The Beatles got their look while touring in Hamburg, Germany.Keystone/Getty Images

Though the group's hairstyles would later mirror the long hair of the late 1960s and 1970s, the bowl cut had at least earned some level of respectability. It was a common feature of child stars in the 1970s, including Adam Rich of Eight is Enough fame, and later got a featured spot when actor Jake Lloyd grabbed the look while playing young Anakin Skywalker in 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But adults adopting the style was often shorthand for imbecility or mental disturbances. Jim Carrey sported a bowl cut in 1994’s Dumb and Dumber. So did Javier Bardem, as philosophical hitman Anton Chigurh, in 2007’s No Country for Old Men.

More recently, the bowl cut has taken on some sinister connotations. The style has been used in memes advocating far-right and white supremacist beliefs after Dylann Roof was seen with the cut following his 2015 mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine people. In 2019, the Anti-Defamation League added the bowl cut to its list of hate symbols. It's a rather ignoble fate for what was once simply a silly haircut, one which may never again have the respectability and dignity afforded to it by Moe Howard.