The theme song introduces the viewer to the world's most fortunate hunting accident – whereby Jed shoots at game but instead hits " black gold, Texas tea ": he had discovered oil.

Meanwhile, Columbia University's liberal faculty members became disenchanted with the university president's ties to oilmen and businessmen, including Leonard McCollum, president of Continental Oil ; Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey ; Bob Kleberg, president of King Ranch ; H. J. Porter, a Texas oil producer ; Bob Woodruff, president of Coca-Cola ; and Clarence Francis, General Foods chairman.

Graduating in 1948, he moved his family to West Texas and entered the oil business, becoming a millionaire by the age of 40.

The petrochemical industry, launched with the major discoveries of oil in Texas and spurred on by further discoveries in the Gulf waters, has been a vehicle for development in the central and western Gulf which has spawned development on a variety of fronts in these regions.

The largest oil field in the lower 48 states, the East Texas oil field, was not discovered until 1930, when wildcatter Columbus Marion Joiner ( more commonly known as " Dad " Joiner ) drilled the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well, in Rusk County, Texas.

The Spindletop gusher started serious oil exploration of the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, an area that had previously been dismissed by oil men.

However, only about 2, 000 oil wells have been drilled in Iraq, compared to about 1 million wells in Texas alone.

* 1901 – The first great Texas oil gusher is discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas.

ConocoPhillips along with PDVSA operate the Merey Sweeny ( bpd ) delayed coker, vacuum tower and related facilities at ConocoPhillips ' refinery in Sweeny, Texas, U. S. A. for processing and upgrading heavy sour Merey crude oil.

Pumpjack pumping an oil well near Lubbock, Texas

Roy Orbison was born in Vernon, Texas, the middle son of Orbie Lee Orbison, an oil well driller and car mechanic, and Nadine Shultz, a nurse.

Following high school, he enrolled at North Texas State College, planning to study geology so that he could secure work in the oil fields if music did not pay.

Spindletop is a salt dome oil field located in the southern portion of Beaumont, Texas in the United States.

The strike at Spindletop represented a turning point for Texas and the United States ; no oil field in the world had ever been so productive.

The frenzy of oil exploration and the economic development it generated in the state became known as the Texas Oil Boom.

* March 17 – The Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas, owned by oil tycoon Glenn McCarthy, has its grand opening.

* January 10 – In the first great Texas gusher, oil is discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas.

* June 9 – Mega Borg oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston, Texas.

By comparison with West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark standard for crude oil in the futures-contract market, the Green River shale oil sulfur content ranges from near 0 % to 4. 9 % ( in average 0. 76 %), where West Texas Intermediate's sulfur content has a maximum of 0. 42 %.

The South Texas Oil Boom included wells drilled in Zapata County in the early 1920s through the work of Laredo industrialist Oliver Winfield Killam, a Missouri native who once served as an Oklahoma state legislator.

* Oliver Winfield Killam, Texas oil industrialist, former state legislator from Delaware County

* Radcliffe Killam, Texas oil industrialist and philanthropist

In 1940, the Texas oilman and industrialist Bill Noël moved to McCamey, where he joined M. H. McWhirter of Monahans and J.

Mirando City was the center of the South Texas Oil Boom, launched in 1921 by the industrialist Oliver Winfield Killam of Laredo.

LeTourneau, American industrialist who founded LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas.

* Oliver Winfield Killam, Texas oil industrialist, former Oklahoma state legislator ; lived in Joplin

Texas industrialist and former Reform Party candidate for U. S. President, Ross Perot wrote a ' blank check ' to fund efforts to save the tree.

In 1952, Shivers named the oil industrialist Bill Noël of Odessa to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

* Jack Crichton ( 1916-2007 ), Texas industrialist

While driving a stolen Cadillac he plans to sell to his chop-shop contact, Vincent discovers via a cassette that in the trunk is a secret prototype fuel injector for jet, which is to be delivered to a rival industrialist in Houston, Texas in exchange for five million dollars.

Marshall Formby of Plainview, former chairman of the Texas Highway Commission, suggested a plan to fill by appointment future vacancies in the Legislature and Congress, eliminating the need for costly special elections.

Miss Shirley Joan Meredith, a former student of North Texas State University, was married Saturday to Larry W. Mills, who has attended Arlington State College.

In 1948, Lawrence " Herkie " Herkimer, of Dallas, Texas, a former cheerleader at Southern Methodist University, formed the National Cheerleaders Association ( NCA ) as a way to hold cheerleading clinics.

The company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto — former Texas Instruments senior managers.

The Cowboys ' streak of 160 sold-out regular and post-season games began in 1990, and included 79 straight sellouts at their former home, Texas Stadium, and 81 straight sell-outs on the road.

* It is often stated that the Texas flag is the only state flag that can be flown at the same height as the American flag, because of Texas's former status as a nation.

On April 16, 1994, Connick Jr. married former Victoria's Secret model, Jill Goodacre, originally from Texas, at the St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans.

* 1969 – Governor of Texas Preston Smith signs a bill into law converting the former Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, originally founded as a research arm of Texas Instruments, into the University of Texas at Dallas.

Richard S. " Kinky " Friedman ( born November 1, 1944 ) is an American Texas Country singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician and former columnist for Texas Monthly who styles himself in the mold of popular American satirists Will Rogers and Mark Twain.

In a 1993 letter to University of Texas economics professor and former House Banking Committee investigator Robert Auerbach, Friedman wrote:

Norman Hackerman ( March 2, 1912 – June 16, 2007 ) was an American chemist, internationally known as an expert in metal corrosion, and a former president of both the University of Texas at Austin ( 1967 – 1970 ) and Rice University ( 1970 – 1985 ).

* 2002 – A federal grand jury in Houston, Texas indicts former Enron Corp. chief financial officer Andrew Fastow on 78 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to the collapse of his ex-employer.

CMD's executive director, Lisa Graves ( a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U. S. Department of Justice ), has testified several times before Congress on national security, homeland security, and civil liberties issues, joined in legal briefs on such issues, and her analysis has been published by the Texas Law Review and in numerous other articles.

Oklahoma and Texas have two separate supreme courts: one for criminal appeals and one for civil cases-the former being called Court of Criminal Appeals, and the latter the Supreme Court.

* Waterloo, Texas ( former name for Austin, Texas )

** Former U. S. President Lyndon B. Johnson dies at his Stonewall, Texas ranch, leaving no former U. S. President living until the resignation of Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

* May 23 – A team of police officers, led by former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, ambush bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow near Gibsland, Louisiana, killing them both.

The former province of Spanish Texas became part of a newly created state, Coahuila y Tejas, whose capital was at Saltillo, hundreds of miles from the former Texas capital, San Antonio de Bexar ( now San Antonio, Texas, USA ).