There are just a few wells left on the grounds now. All of them are "stripper" wells, and the easy extraction oil is gone. Now the pump jacks just run a few hours per day, and the towers are not really needed, but left there as a visual reminder of the olden days.
April 19, 1919 – Leslie Irvin of the United States makes the first successful voluntary free-fall parachute jump using a new kind of self-contained parachute. Irvin was born in Los Angeles. He became a stunt-man for the fledgling Californian film industry, for which he had to perform acrobatics on trapezes from balloons and then make descents using a parachute, the Type-A. Irvin made his first jump when aged fourteen, and for a film called Sky High, he jumped from an aircraft from 1,000 feet in 1914. He developed his own static line parachute as a life-saving device in 1918 and jumped with it several times.
He joined the Army Air Service’s parachute research team, and at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio. After World War I, Major E. L. Hoffman of the Army Air Service led an effort to develop an improved parachute for exiting airplanes by bringing together the best elements of multiple parachute designs. Participants included Irvin and James Floyd Smith. The team eventually created the Airplane Parachute Type-
Roger Sherman, the only person to sign all four of America’s founding documents: The Continental Association, The Articles of Confederation, The Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution, was born on April 19th, 1721 in Newton, Massachusetts.
Image via National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. Bradley B. Gilman
Mexican farmers first settled the Rio Bonito Valley in the 1850s, naming their village La Placita del Rio Bonito. The farm community was renamed Lincoln when it was made the county seat in 1869.
LIFE Photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s camera equipment is laid out before she left for assignment in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations - early 1943
Picture taken by fellow LIFE Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt