Time of Plenty Author:Ed O'Brien H. B. Ross, a veteran oil hand by his late teens who enjoys browsing the encyclopedia in his spare time, is convinced that the major problem with oil is that there is just too much of the stuff. Everywhere he turns in Oklahoma, almost behind every blackjack, he's beginning to believe, rich pools lurk. With the price of oil in the pits – te... more »n barrels (420 gallons) going for a dollar – H. B. wonders how crude can ever amount to much, with clods yanking it from the ground faster than it can be used. He battles many who want to run the choke wide open, among them one Cecil Jones, a rich royalty owner. Cecil, when not pushing unlimited production, strives for mastery of his wife Mary Belle, a woman full of unsettling ideas like the one proposed that morning: a bunch of women going off alone, to watch a dancing marathon in Tulsa, without a single man to guide their thinking for an entire afternoon. A dutiful wife, Mary Belle manages to give Cecil his way, in every little thing, while steering him, with an unseen touch, to where she prefers he go. It is a time of plenty, the 1920s and early 1930s, when the curtain rises on the great American oil glut. And it is a time of searching for H. B. not only for treasures below ground, but, more importantly, for the grand prize at the end of the rainbow: to find his true love as he maneuvers to outwit Cecil and Mary Belle and discover himself.« less