Steel City or Boom Town

Last night I sat at the Fish Market bar in Pittsburgh and had dinner while I talked to Texas oil men who were betting their fortunes on Ohio and Pennsylvania shale plays. Fortunes are being made investing in the leases prospective for the Marcellus and Utica Shales. One entrepreneur grew up dirt poor in Wichita Falls, Texas and never finished college but had made tens of millions of dollars flipping leases to independents. A couple of guys had started a business laying pipe and delivering thousands of barrels of water to producers for their hydraulic fracture treatments.

All this made me think of Jack London's book Call of the Wild. Jack set off for the gold strikes to make his fortune. Fortunes were made mining gold and selling picks and shovels. The shale plays are similar opportunities. Every generation has an opportunity for adventure and fortune whether it be from natural resources or computer chips.

After dinner I walked Pittsburgh's downtown streets in the cold night air. The streets were damp from one of the last rain storms before winter. Christmas decorations were on display signaling the snows to come. The buildings house a mix of restaurants, hotels, residences, and charter schools. Pittsburgh brings the industrial commerce on major rivers together with office workers from Mellon Bank, EQT, etc. It will be interesting to see how downtown changes with the shale boom. I ran across a theatre on Liberty Street that shouted out a welcome to my grandson by the same name:

P.S. Harris, HB Jones claimed that Call of the Wild by Jack London is the only book he ever read.