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about four inches per year. The temperature from late May to early Sep-
tember was about 112 degrees every day. A fellow I knew once tested
the temperature in the sun in the summer. It was 145 degrees Fahrenheit.
The local Arabs were virtually all illiterate in Arabic. There were no
roads, no schools, no hospitals, no clinics. There were no newspapers,
of course, because who could read them? There was no radio or TV.
As will be seen, the oil company had to develop basic services or they
would remain nonexistent.
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and brush in the desert would be exhausted. The Bedouin would bring
their animals to the seacoast areas where they would trade their animals
for rice that was imported and dates that were grown locally. Bedouin
would return to the desert in the fall, around September. Law and order
was maintained through observance of Muslim religious law and fear
of the governments police. (To anyone interested in a proper account
of the early days of Aramco, I suggest you read the book Discovery by
Wallace Stegner.)
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land and Bill Jewell. Dan had been born and raised in Salt Lake in an old
Mormon family but his wife had led him away from the Church. My
primary function was to secure data from companies in the United
States with comparable jobs to those in Saudi Arabia so that Aramco
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involved medical positions. The next group was the pilots, co-pilots and
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Arabia. Within a couple months of my joining Aramco, Life Magazine
published a big article about the oil operations in Saudi Arabia. Ev-
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avidly because of the lack of information they had. I was most anxious
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their vacations I took each of them to lunch to pump them.
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