As a tribute to a legendary Irish-American businessman and philanthropist of the early 20th century, the 2016 Edition of Derricks of Destiny, celebrates one of the most remarkable eye-witness accounts of life in America, when the fledgling oil and banking industries wore younger clothes. Already a skillful writer of world renowned books, Samuel Bayne then turned his pen to sketching an anecdotal history of events as he remembered them, from a truly incredible career in the days of the wildcat oil booms in a United States that was less well developed than she is today. Not satisfied to live the life of a highly successful oil tycoon and oil-well supplies’ magnate, Our Man Bayne had the pioneering energy and ambition to then turn his hand to banking and finance. And what flair, skill and understated charisma comes through his autobiographical account of how he became one of the world’s wealthiest men. As part of Ireland’s 2016 remembrances, the 2016 Edition of his all but forgotten autobiography has been re-edited and re-written in parts, as a tribute to a man who turned his business skills to the advantage of Ireland in 1879, when we were again in the grip of genocidal starvation and famine. For Sam Bayne, his religious principles formed the core humanitarian strength with which he reached out across the artificial boundaries of tradition, to lend a helping hand. The banking legend he became in his own life-time, spoke to the community service he regarded as central to the mission of banking and finance. The network of feeder banks he set up in the growing communities of neo-metropolitan America, helped to unlock the early promise of a Nation that was to emerge as the world’s most powerful economy. In his world travels, he gives us a lasting snap-shot of what a Western traveler might have encountered in Japan, China, India, Russia and Europe, as the world sat on the brink of our first major war. Close with your right, open with your left, and pound it every time you hit a high spot, was the advice Sam Bayne gave to his friend Teddy Roosevelt during the latter’s Presidential campaign. One of the hidden jewels of New York’s colorful history jumps off the page, when Sam Bayne describes how President Roosevelt conducted himself during the time he occupied the post of New York’s Police Commissioner. Surely an example for all modern day Police Commissioners! In 2016, Ireland celebrates with the wider world, the centennial anniversary of a war of independence that echoed America’s war of independence in many ways, both happy and sad. Sam Bayne’s love and affection for the magic of Ireland and her shared traditions, speaks to the increasingly multicultural privilege of being Irish, part-Irish, or Irish-American, in a bigger world that tends for the most part, to like the Irish, our Blarney, and our passionate ways. Apart from respect for the reader’s untainted enjoyment of Derricks of Destiny Re-Edited , the placement of the 2016 Foreword at the back of the book is also because the 2016 editorial contributors are not Irish for nothing! The perfect holiday gift: An Insider’s Snap-Shot of America in her teens.
