Drillers' apprentices, tool dressers-- toolies-- wore railroad boots that cost $1.50 and could thump to a fiddle and foot a fast hoedown to the music of "Chase the Squirrel" or "Money Musk." Most of the toolies were as lively and agile as monkeys; one of their chores was to climb to the top of a derrick to grease the crown-pulley, and it was toolies who rigged up the penants that floated and flapped above the derricks derisively: Big Bologna, Old Misery, Scared cat, The Vampire, Sleeping Beauty.

Toolies made $2 to $3 a day, for a twelve-hour shift, and spent it as freely as oil. To accommodate the day and night shifts, saloons kept jumping around the clock, and there were always self-styled ladies handy, in what a preacher called "suspicious houses." But the soiled doves's patrons-- rig-builders, toolies, teamsters, drillers-- even when they came away with cleaned-out pockets, weren't suspicious; they seemed to feel they'd got their money's worth, and they drowned out Methodist dissenters with their roar of approval:

"The Oil Creek girls are the dandy girls
For their kiss is most intense.
They've got a grip like a rotary pump
That will lift you over the fence."

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)