over. The men who represent the owners of Tapline took no chances in appointing Burt E. Hull as President. Forty years before, Hull had built the first big oil line, from Tulsa to Port Arthur. And he had built the Big Inch and Little Inch lines in World War 11.

Prior to Hull's appointment work had progressed both in engineering of the line and the negotiation of agreements with the countries through which the line would pass. In dealings with those countries Tapline representatives followed the pattern cut when Standard of California first dealt with Saudi Arabia concerning the original oil concession there. Middle East countries had been accustomed to the European mixture of government and commerce in dealing with companies which really were no more than extensions of the government. Americans went into the Middle East simply as businessmen. In effect they said:

"Look. We are prepared to take risks, to make sacrifices and to overcome difficulties for exactly the same incentive that brought greatness to America. That incentive is the hope of reward commensurate with those risks, sacrifices and difficulties. If at the same time your country flourishes because of our efforts, if millions throughout the world benefit from the increased production of petroleum, why then no one is happier than we. But we are businessmen and we are going into this for profit and you will profit too."

That was new in the Middle East. It has been successful in Saudi Arabia and it was successful when Tapline men carried it across the desert and the mountains to the Mediterranean. Permission to construct the line was granted by the countries concerned and the work began.

In the summer of 1947 Tapline started, from scratch, to lay the biggest pipe line ever laid across one of the most ominous regions of the world. Engineers had drawn a line on a map. It followed a great circle route from a place which might have been called Nowhere on the Persian Gulf to the ancient Biblical city of Sidon in Lebanon above the Mediterranean.

From either end of this line reconnaissance parties and then surveyors moved on converging courses into as barren a land as could be