For Clark Gable, playing a free-wheeling oil field wildcatter in the 1940 film Boom Town came easy.
The film was inspired by the story of Burkburnett, Texas, a sleepy cotton-farming town where, in 1918, a lucky farmer struck oil and thousands of oil field workers took over the town.
As Burkburnett was becoming a boom town, twenty-year-old Clark Gable was …
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