Young Mr. Long would bring home a law book, drive through it in furious haste while his phenomenally retentive memory seized every really salient detail, “and then I would abstract the hell out of it, dictating to my wife, who would type it out for me.” With barely enough money for housing, carfare, short rations, and such essentials as paper and pencils, it is none the less probable that these were the least troubled, most nearly contented and carefree days the couple would ever know. Before year’s end he was admitted to the bar, and returned to Winnfield with Rose to begin practice. He soon realized that despite local successes, the ambitious goals he had set for himself could be attained only in a much larger field. So he moved to Shreveport, which was just at the threshold of a tremendous boom following the discovery of oil in the nearby Pine Island areas. By accepting royalty shares and acreage allotments for legal services in examining titles and the like, Huey was on the threshold of becoming very wealthy, when he and the other Pine Islanders discovered that they could not send their black gold to market unless they sold it at ruinously low prices to owners of the only available pipeline. Long’s implacable hostility toward the Standard Oil Company had its inception then and there. As first step in a campaign to have pipelines declared common carriers, he became a candidate for the Railroad (now Public Service) Commission and was elected. The brothers Long presented a solid front on this occasion, Julius and Earl working like beavers to help Huey win. George (“Shan”) had moved to Oklahoma by that time to practice dentistry. Only once thereafter were they politically united, and that was when Huey ran for governor in 1928. Commissioner Long made his first state-wide stump speech the following year at a rally and picnic which six candidates for governor had been called to address. He had not been invited to speak, but asked permission to say a few words--and stole the show! One must picture him: a young man whose bizarre garb was accented by the fact that since he was wearing a bow tie, the gleaming stickpin with its big diamond sparkled from the otherwise bare band of his shirt front. The unruly forelock of rusty brown hair, a fleshy, cleft chin, and a general air of earnest fury all radiated anger. His blistering denunciation of the then governor as a pliant tool of the Standard Oil Company, and his attack on the state fire marshal, an anti-Long politico from Winnfield, as “the official barfly of the state of Louisiana” captured all the next day’s headlines.