The man responsible for the school's tithe of royalties, Levi Dodd, was one of the most fiercely moral men who ever settled their families in Franklin. He started the first Presbyterian Sunday School and poured large, forcible doses of religion into his children like castor oil. His son Sam was one of the brightest pupils in the public school-- ten years before his father drilled for oil in the playground there. I doubt if Sam ever played even Blindman's Bluff, because he was a dud at sports and games. What he did best was debating. After graduating from Jefferson College below Pittsburgh (now Washington and Jefferson) he had studied law with James Kerr and been admitted to the Venango Bar just in time for the oil boom, at the age of twenty-three. He was a big, clumsy, overgrown bear-cub of a man with a funny little mustache that would have better fitted a poodle. Townspeople agreed that he was smart as a whip, but too free-thinking, and at first they felt safer giving their business to old, established law firms like Church & Heydrick.

...

He was odd for sure, by town standards. When a fellow lawyer ran into his office to tell him jubilantly that Cyrus Field's transatlantic cable had been laid successfully, he was startled at Sam's bitter reaction. "Life's already too harried," Sam said. "It won't be worth living unless we stop making inventions to annihilate time and space. Why do we have to tie continents together with electric bands? Why can't we get along the old way?"

Even his most clacking critics agreed that he didn't care a hoot about money, and he practiced law and took all kinds of cases for the sheer love of it. When the big railroads began to move in, to carry oil freight, and took right of way through farmers' property willy-nilly, Sam Dodd handled so many cases for farmers that he was called the Poor Man's Friend. Just the same, his practice swelled so lucratively that while he was still paying $8 a month rent for his house, he paid six times that for a new office to hold his onrush of clients. Frankliners always called him by his first initials-- S.C.T., Esseetee-- which ha d a hissing sound in the mouths of those who considered him too radical. I mention this because later Sam Dodd became the head counsel for Standard Oil, and drew up Standard's first trust, on one sheet of paper.

- from The Great Oildorado (1959)