Pennsylvania

"He began by incorporating his partnership as the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), making it easier to raise the vast new sums required for his scheme. Then, early in 1872, Standard Oil forged an alliance with the three dominant oil-shipping railroads, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and the Erie, which were weary of intense price competition among themselves. The alliance among shippers and carriers, known as the South Improvement Company (SIC), drastically raised freight rates for all refiners, but granted rebates of up to 50 percent for SIC members. Even more outrageously, to critics of monopoly capitalism, the railroads gave its refining members rebates on each barrel of oil shipped by nonmem¬ bers. In addition to these tremendous cost advantages, Rockefeller re¬ ceived detailed information from the SIC about nonmembers’ shipments, which helped immeasurably in undercutting his rivals’ prices."

"Until, that is, one momentous day when Diane told me about a television shopping channel called QVC, the acronym for Quality Value Convenience. It sold all sorts of merchandise directly to viewers. I’d never heard of it before. She said since I was stuck in this limbo, I ought to go to the wilds of Pennsylvania, where it was located, to see the operation and report back if it would be worthwhile for her to sell her clothes on the channel. It is no understatement to say that trip gave me one of the purest and most powerful epiphanies of my life. I didn’t know it then, but it would turn out to be my way forward."

"If the Gammells were prosperous and well connected, they were also tough and practical Scots. The family rite of passage was to send each grown child ‘somewhere in the world’ with a one-way ticket the year after leaving school. One brother went to Tanzania, another rode the range in Texas, a third went to Canada and their sister went to Pennsylvania. Bill came to Australia to work as a roughneck in a geological mining crew at Tennant Creek in 1970."