OIL: King of Wildcatters

The President of Minneapolis' Northern Ordnance, Inc. is a profane, rambunctious, Texas-born individual named John Blackstock Hawley Jr., 44. In the space of 15 months, Gunmaker Hawley has also become the biggest driller of wildcat oil wells in the U.S. And in all the rough-&-tough oil industry no one has yet been able to top Hawley's three-word description of himself: "I'm a pirate."

Gunmaker Hawley, who also has described himself as the "world's greatest hydraulic engineer," jumped into the oil industry with his own characteristic platform: "Oilmen are a bunch of...

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