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Hunt joined a crowd of people trying to push the car into an upright position, but in the process he badly wrenched his back. The pain was so bad, he could barely move. A doctor gave him a steel back brace and ordered him to remain in bed for the next six months. It was just days later, on the night of November 19, while lying in the brace in Tyler, that ominous rumblings reached Hunt’s beside: Dad Joiner was unhappy.
Every month, it seemed, he would track down Hunt and ask for an advance or a loan. Hunt gave it to him, usually with a little lecture on the importance of saving, but even though Joiner continued testifying on Hunt’s behalf in the lease-challenge lawsuits, it was clear Joiner resented it. He had discovered East Texas, not Hunt, yet he was the one obliged to beg for money.
“Mr. Joiner,” he said, “I think efforts are being made to get you to sue me. I hope you don’t fall for that.
Joiner looked at Hunt for a long second. Tears appeared in his eyes. “My boy,” he said, throwing an arm over Hunt’s shoulder, “I would never do a thing like that. I love you too much.
But the more Hunt thought, the more he became certain what Dad Joiner’s tears actually meant. They were tears of sadness. He was going to sue.
Hunt’s all-nighter prevented Joiner from seizing or freezing his wells, but the lawsuit still threatened everything. Joiner claimed fraud. He charged that Hunt had lied to him about the Deep Rock well and had bribed Deep Rock’s superintendent; the former was probably true, and the latter certainly was. Valuing the leases at fifteen million dollars, Joiner argued that he should have gotten three to five times what he had received; if a judge agreed, Hunt was staring at three million to five million dollars in damages. While Joiner put his best face forward for the press—“I have nothing against
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Hunt was in a dangerous position. Joiner was still a folk hero to many in East Texas, and the Deep Rock “bribe” would look very bad to a local jury. As the January 1933 trial date approached—lawsuits moved quickly in those days—rumors swirled fast and furious, that Hunt was promising Joiner big money to settle, that he had unearthed dirt from his past, that threatening phone calls and letters had been sent to various Hunt men involved in the original deal. What happened next has never been explained. On January 16, 1933, just as a crowd of reporters and oil scouts took their seats in a
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“Much has been written about the Joiner deal,” Hunt wrote years later, “and some with overly active imaginations have implied machinations all the way around, but the fact is it was a sound deal for both Joiner and me, and Joiner received through the cash, notes and production payments more funds than he would have received by trying to operate the properties in the face of his legal difficulties.”1
Few plunged into the backwoods chaos with the fervor of thirty-five-year-old Clint Murchison who, having grown up in East Texas, knew the piney woods well.
But proration loomed as the real killer;
As one of his peers put it, “It’s my oil, and if I want to drink it, it’s none of your damned business.”
Murchison fought back with a maze of paperwork, repeatedly switching the ownership of questionable oil from one of his companies to another. By the time the Railroad Commission realized what had happened, it would take months to rebuild its case.
“A fine person—I liked him very much—but Clint was a hot oiler in every respect. Clint didn’t want any rules. He had made a fortune by disobeying the rules.
When Ardrey asked how much he wanted, Murchison replied, “All I can get.” He left with a one-million-dollar loan, the promise of more to come, and a crucial new ally; he called Ardrey “the Big A.”
He finally stopped carping about proration, claiming he saw the wisdom in preserving Texas oil fields, and most oilmen assumed his days as a hot oiler were over.
It was East Texas and other fields discovered during a single five-year window—1930 to 1935—that created the state’s great family fortunes.
Only the sharp executives at Houston-based Humble, while slashing their exploration budget, remained actively in the market for new reserves. Its men, led by the geologist Wallace Pratt, instituted a new policy that emphasized the acquisition of proven oil fields, that is, fields found by others.
It was Humble’s new policy, in turn, that laid the foundations of the three greatest oil fortunes in Houston.
The Humble deal made Cullen and West two of Houston’s richest men. Cullen wouldn’t have to work another day in his life, but he was only fifty-one and retained the itch to find more oil.
Humble secured the biggest prize of all in 1933, the rights to drill beneath the million-acre King Ranch, a vast coastal prairie of more than thirteen hundred square miles stretching from Corpus Christi nearly all the way to the Mexican border; it was the largest oil lease in American history.
Tom O’Connor himself, had made clear to any number of oilmenhe wanted nothing to do with the kind of chaos and controversy he saw playing out in East Texas.
“You tell this feller, Cullen,” O’Connor warned, “that if they change one damn word, or dot an ‘I’ or cross a ‘t,’ they can tear up the paper.” Cullen signed the contract exactly as written.
To reduce his risk, Cullen sold a half-interest to Humble for fifty thousand dollars.
“There’s a mile-deep pool of oil down there,” he said. “This will be one of the biggest oil fields ever discovered.”
much of the oil sold to the federal government and refined as jet fuel.
In West Texas roustabouts who worked for poor boys like Sid Richardson called the work “bean jobs,”
He knew no one in Texas, nor the first thing about the state’s geology. But he had a car, and for two long years, while he scraped by buying and selling a few oil leases around Houston, he drove the backroads of East Texas and Louisiana looking for signs of an oil-bearing clay known in the Mexican fields as Lagarto-Reynosa.
Humble, however, turned him down. So did Gulf. And six other large companies. “You’re out of your mind,” one scout told him. “There’s no oil over there. You’re on the wrong side of Conroe.”
He offered to “checkerboard,” that is, give up alternate tracts of his land, to any driller who would poke a single hole in his ground.
There were only three problems. He had no rig, no money to get one, and, despite ten years in the oil business, only the vaguest idea how to drill a well.
“Mr. Strake, I can fix those boilers for you,” one of his men offered. “You can? ” “Yes, sir, if you’ll turn your back a minute.” The man picked up a shotgun, aimed at the screens, and, with three rapid shots, shot them all off. “Nice shooting,” Strake said.
As he did, he received a call from Humble’s Wallace Pratt; alone among the majors, Humble was willing to bet Strake was sitting on a bonanza.
In a matter of months Richardson went from the penthouse to the outhouse—literally. He moved out of his top-floor suite at the Blackstone Hotel into a forty-dollar-a-month maid’s room.
If he was out, the soda jerk, a man named Jack Collier, answered the pay phone, “Sid Richardson’s office.”
In desperation he resorted to poor boying, paying his men with groceries and the promise of an eventual paycheck. During the Depression poor-boys like Richardson paid drillers and toolies ten to twelve dollars a day in oil, if it was found. If it wasn’t, they received whatever a driller could come up with. Richardson, who kept a chronically overdue account at the general store in Kermit, became reknowned for paying his men in bread, eggs, or milk—whatever they needed to eat.
Estes and Scarborough ranches in northern Ward County.
Yet they couldn’t simply foreclose; his assets were minimal. They could either write off their loans and take a huge loss, or find a way to make Richardson a success.
It was in far northern Winkler County, two miles from the New Mexico border.
Where Richardson found the confidence to place such a massive bet remains a mystery to this day, even to his family.
In the 1930s the main switching station for long-distance telephone calls made from West Texas was in the dusty town of Mineral Wells. According to Bass’s story, Richardson became friendly with two of the telephone operators there. In Bass’s words, he performed “stud service” for these young ladies in return for information they overheard.
They were the first wells in what became known as the Keystone Field, not the largest oil field in Texas, but a good one,
“Sid said to Collier, ‘If you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?’ And Collier said, ‘I’d like to own this drugstore.’ And Sid said to him, ‘You do.’ He had bought it for him.”
