Gossip Friday: Back to the Oil Fields

From July 1940:

When a mere youth of eighteen, Clark Gable went out to his father’s farm near Hopedale, Ohio, took one look at it and said, “Farming’s not for me.” He said he was going to find work he liked better. His father smiled and let him go.

The first work he found thereafter was in the Oklahoma oil fields. It was harder than farming but Clark Gable liked it.

Now for the first time since, he is doing some of that boyhood work. He is playing an oil driller in “Boom Town.” When he worked in the oil fields he was a roustabout. He was too young and inexperienced to be trusted with the highly paid work of drilling. But he saw gushers come in. In “Boom Town” he does the work they wouldn’t let him do as a youth.