Each week we’ll take a step back into the history of Great Bend through the eyes of reporters past. We’ll reacquaint you with what went into creating the Great Bend of today, and do our best to update you on what “the rest of the story” turned out to be.

Front page of the Great Bend Tribune Monday, Jan. 14, readers learned one of the factors why the country was undergoing an energy crisis.  “Oil company officials admit production cuts,” the headline read.    
Executives from eight of the largest 10 oil companies were willing to be interviewed about why their companies had not produced as much oil as they could have, as long as their identities were not revealed.
“The oil we’re talking about is in fields that are in secondary and tertiary recovery stages,” said one official.  “It’s very expensive to produce that oil and with the prices we could have gotten for it (under federal price regulation) in past years, we would have lost money.
"To some people, I know it’s going to sound evil.  But we have a business proposition here.  It’s hard-headed business economics.”
The country was in the middle of an energy crisis largely because the Arab nations had cut off the United States from purchasing their oil.  Now, the country was feeling the effects no only at the pump, but also at the market thanks to inflation, and on the highways, thanks to slower speed limits.
In recent months, however, the Federal Energy Office and other governmental agencies had made policy and regulation changes, that were turning the attitudes of oil companies around.  
The American Petroleum Institute president Frank N. Ikard explained, “the amount of oil recoverable from a petroleum field varies widely depending on specific condition.  But in many cases, he said, the oil recovery can be increased, often almost doubled, by applying special techniques to maintain the underground pressures that force oil to the surface.”
Today, we call those “special techniques” fracturing, or fracing.  It can be done both vertically and horizontally, depending on the depths of the basins where oil has accumulated.  In Barton County, the depth, according to ....at the Kansas Oil and Gas Museum, is too shallow for horizontal fracturing, but vertical fracturing is a common practice.
Two days later, on Jan. 15, “Energy austerity plan starts today,” marked the beginning of a period where people in America were advised to set thermostats in their homes six degrees lower and places of business 10 degrees lower than the same period a year earlier.  Service stations would receive up to 20 percent less gasoline, and the public was asked to voluntarily limit themselves to 10 gallons of gas per week.  At that time, the average four-door sedan went 13.5 miles per gallon, according to a report by the Pew Environment Group.  Airlines would receive less fuel, and would reduce the number of scheduled flights.  Eventually, the embargo ended, but the memory of it has lingered for the past forty years, and has affected the way the country considers the need to find homegrown solutions to our energy needs.

Happy Days
A page 12 story, “‘Awful 1950’s comedy series will make it big,” ushered in a ground breaking  popular 1970s television show.  (This reporter remembers the family gathering on Tuesday nights after dinner to watch the show together, and learned at an early age the thumbs-up signal that indicated things were great. She also remembers her mom telling her to stop doing that, and explaining why Fonzie wasn’t really that cool, and certainly not a role model to look up to.  Sigh.)
“The ABC Television network tonight is emitting a sort of “Son of American Graffiti” called “Happy Days.”  It is a half-hour comedy series.  It is set in the 1950s.  It is awful,” wrote AP television writer Jay Sharbutt. But, he admitted he liked it nonetheless.  As did many other Americans, as he predicted.  The show enjoyed a ten year run.  In the final episode, Tom Bosley, who played Mr. C,  stepped out of character and turned to the camera thanking the viewers for being part of the Cunningham family for the many years the show had been on.
The character ‘Howard Cunningham’ was ranked #9 in TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time” (20 June 2004 issue).
A bronze statue of the Fonz was unveiled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008.

Watergate
On the front page of the Tribune, the story “Experts say tape erased,” brought to light the dishonesty that touched off Watergate.
“Technical experts reported today that the 18-minute gap in one of the subpoenaed Watergate tapes was caused by “the process of erasing and re recording at least five times, and perhaps as many as nine, separate and contiguous segments.”
This threw out the possibility that the President’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, could have accidentally messed up the tape by inadvertently pushing the record button instead of the stop button while transcribing the tape when interrupted by a telephone call.
Eventually, the controversy led to the impeachment of then President Richard Nixon.  Recently, the character that tipped off Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the conspiracy, code name “Deep Throat,” was finally revealed.  Deep Throat was none other than Mark Felt, the number two man in the FBI, a person the Nixon administration had suspected at the time the Post writers were exposing the story.  His identity was revealed in a Vanity Fair article in 2005, and confirmed by the Washington Post on June 1, 2005.