Two Oil Tycoons Called Same Town Home
The craggy face of Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison graced the cover of the May 26, 1954 issue of Time magazine.
The craggy face of Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison graced the cover of the May 26, 1954 issue of Time magazine.
Absent from the layout but with his old friend in spirit was fellow Athenian Sid Richardson. Both were born in the last decade of the nineteenth century – Richardson in 1891 at Athens and Murchison four years later at Tyler. The Murchisons soon moved to the Henderson County seat, where the head of the family continued a career in banking and the eighth of nine children trapped raccoons and skunks to sell their pelts.
Clint Murchison gave Trinity University the good old college try but lasted less than a semester. Caught shooting craps, the defiant freshman dropped out rather than sign a no-gambling pledge. He toiled as a teller for his dad until the day a bank examiner demanded a strict accounting of his till.
A lay-off a few years before had put 16 year old Sid Richardson on the road to riches. Losing a dollar-a-day job at the cotton compress, he wandered to Louisiana and found his true calling.
Richardson’s impersonation of a down-on-his-luck city slicker elicited so much sympathy from Pelican State farmers they practically gave him their prize calves. On the $3,500 profit from the sale of the charitable contributions, he was able to afford a year and a half of higher education.
Richardson sometimes pulled a stranger’s leg just for fun. Many years after his Louisiana escapade, a hot-shot magazine writer crashed a party planning to interview the “billionaire bachelor.” Introducing himself as his own chauffeur, he supplied the gullible journalist with a fictitious scoop on his reclusive boss.
While Lt. Murchison was winning the First World War, Richardson made his first killing in the Lone Star oilfields. He could not resist flaunting his new-found wealth by rolling into Athens behind the wheel of a shiny new Cadillac. As he recalled decades later with a big grin, “When I left, all those guys sitting on those benches around the square jumped up and followed me right out of town.”
Eager to show his boyhood buddy how it was done, Richardson whisked the skeptical veteran off to the Burkburnett field within days of his homecoming. When it took just 24 hours of buying and selling oil leases to quadruple their $50,000 grubstake, Murchison was hooked.
Each immediately launched his own drilling operation, and by the mid-1920’s the two wildcatters were filthy rich. Confident he could live comfortably on five million dollars, Murchison bowed out of the oil business at the tender age of 30. But he jumped back in the game in 1927 in order to take his mind off the tragic loss of his wife to jaundice.
The fabulous East Texas boom cut both ways for Richardson and most of his contemporaries. He made money hand over fist until the piney woods crude glutted the market in 1931 dropping the price to pennies a barrel.
“I had a monthly income of $25,000. Six months later, my income was $1,600 a month, and the bank was taking it all as payment on the $250,000 I owed. But by March 1932, the price of oil was up again. I had four ten-dollar bills and was ready to go.”
It was full-steam ahead for Richardson, who in 1935 opened the Keystone Field in Winkler County. He not only kept his head above water but became, according to an inside source at Chase Manhattan Bank, the first bona fide billionaire west of the Mississippi.
Murchison was never far behind, though exactly how far he would not say. Irritated by nosy questions about the size of his fabulous fortune, he once snapped, “After the first hundred million, what the hell!”
Murchison spread his risk after World War II by expanding his interests beyond the oil patch. He bought a New York publishing house in the belief that the baby boom was bound to increase the demand for textbooks. Foreseeing a work force with more leisure time, he purchased Field & Stream and a fishing-tackle manufacturer. By the mid-1950’s, the Murchison empire encompassed 48 companies with 50,000 employees.
The key to his success was a keep-it-simple philosophy, which a subordinate learned on an errand to Mississippi. He called Murchison at his downtown Dallas office to suggest there may have been more to the purchase of an insurance company than originally met his eye. “There’s nothing complicated about it,” the tycoon snorted. “A hundred thousand shares at $105. That’s $10.5 million, just a simple business deal.”
Sid Richardson feared the loneliness of retirement and swore, “I’ll still be trading when they bury me.” True to his word, he passed away in his sleep in 1959 on his private island five miles off Rockport.
In contrast, Clint Murchison learned how to take it easy in his twilight years. Prior to his passing in 1968, he ran a county store in his hometown and studied the comings and goings of migratory birds.
Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at haile@pdq.net or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549. And come on by www.twith.com for a visit!
