Capital Correspondent
From 1970 to 1980, Mary K. Shell was a correspondent based in the state capital of Sacramento for The Californian and the syndicated Capitol News Service. She covered the legislature and other state agencies: "That was before we even had fax machines," she recalls. She wrote her weekly column on a typewriter and shipped it to Bakersfield on a Greyhound bus. Shell's old job was discontinued by the newspaper in 2007 because of financial reasons. Shell won honors: the 1972 Excellence in Reporting Award from the California Trial Lawyers Association and the 1975 California Taxpayers Reporting Award for her revelations about excessive early retirement benefits for legislators, a phenomenon unknown to many California voters. Joe was a lobbyist for oil companies while the couple lived in Sacramento. During that period, they generally made two trips monthly to Bakersfield, where they would move permanently in 1980.
In 1978, the Shells opened an oil business together and drilled four heavy-oil wells in at the Deer Creek field in Tulare County located adjacent to Kern County. Because the name "Shell" could not be used, they called the endeavor Concho Petroleum. They maintained the low-output wells until 1993.
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Famous quotes containing the word capital:
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)