by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Jim West thought Cullen had lost his mind. “They’ve drilled so many wells out there that there isn’t room to put down another hole,” he protested, “even if there was any oil left, and there ain’t.” Laying out a map, Cullen pointed to a spot he wanted to drill near the field’s southeast corner. West asked when he planned to inspect the site. Cullen said he didn’t intend to. “You’re gonna lease it without even looking at it?” West asked. “Are you crazy, Roy?”
“We have geophysical reports on the entire area,” Cullen said. “Looking at it won’t add anything to that. It won’t mean anything.”
“Well, it will to me!” West barked. “I’m going out there!”
“Go ahead, Jim,” Cullen said. “I’d go with you, but I’ll be too busy getting ready to drill it.”
West returned from his inspection trip more determined than ever to stop his partner from drilling. “You’ll have to tear down old derricks to find a place to drill a hole,” he said. “You’ll have to fill in the slush pits. That field is like a piece of Swiss cheese!”
Cullen ignored him. The two men were temperamental opposites, and he suspected their partnership wouldn’t last long. Out at Humble, his men cleared away the old derricks and readied a drill site. As they drilled down toward the Miocene, Cullen began studying the old wells nearby. Most had filled with salt water. Poring over well logs and his library books, Cullen understood that three thousand feet below the field lay a band of blue mud, what the drillers called gumbo. Below that was five feet of salt water, followed by more gumbo. It flooded the wells, and previous drillers had given up trying to get through it.
This was the first challenge a deep driller on the Gulf Coast faced, but Cullen thought he had found a way through it. Once the drill bit sank into the lowest layer of gumbo, he instructed his tool-pusher to set their casings, an outer pipe that shielded the hole from water, all the way down through the salt water to the gumbo. It worked; both the salt water and the gumbo were kept out of the well. Free to go deeper, Cullen hit a pool of pure “pipeline” oil—oil so free of impurities it could be pumped directly into a big company’s pipeline.
But Cullen was determined to go even deeper, into virgin dirt beneath the Humble Field. That, however, brought him face-to-face with the most serious obstacle a deep driller could encounter, the dreaded “heaving shale.” Jackson shale, as geologists termed it, lay about thirty-five hundred feet below most Gulf Coast fields, a tier of crumbled rock that pressed in around a drill bit, freezing it. No driller had defeated it, and with other shallow fields to attack, few had tried very hard.
Cullen ordered his driller, Dalton Brown, to “thin up,” that is, pump water into the hole instead of drilling mud, the better to clear the broken shale from the drill bit. After what Cullen characterized as “a startled glance,” Brown tried it, and the drill began to spin more easily. Still, a thick “bridge” of shale lay at the bottom of the hole, and they needed to get through it. Cullen had his plan ready. It was late at night when he instructed Brown to use the drill bit as a pile driver, lifting it and dropping it onto the shale bridge in an effort to break through. He kept water pumping into the hole to keep the drill bit spinning freely. It took several hours but it worked, and by midnight, when Cullen lay down by the derrick to grab some sleep, they had penetrated the slushy, oil-bearing sand underneath, the sought-after Yegua sand. Four hours later Cullen heard Brown shout: “Wake up, Mr. Cullen. I think she’s coming in!”5
In the dim predawn light Cullen rose to see oil and gas spewing so violently from their hole that the four-inch flow line, which connected the well to a storage tank, had come loose and was wildly slashing the air. Cullen dashed to the storage tank, leaped atop it, and held the thrashing line until his crew could tie it down. It was the kind of daredevilry other operators might have avoided, but Cullen did it time and again, and his crews loved him for it. Years later, Lynn Meador remembered a dangerous blowout a Cullen crew encountered in Fort Bend County. One spark meant an explosion that would kill them all, but Cullen, who could easily have directed operations from the safety of his car, stayed in the thick of it on the derrick floor. When one young man panicked and ran, Cullen, covered in black oil, grabbed him by the belt and pulled him back. It took all day to maneuver a half-ton cement collar onto the well to cap it, and Cullen stayed through all of it.
“That was one of the many performances of his that have made those who know him admire him,” Meador said. “He was never a man to tell his employee, ‘You do this.’ When there was a dangerous task to be done, it was ‘Follow me.’ ”
Cullen brought in a series of big producers from the Yegua sand at Humble, opening the way not only for the field’s renewal, but the renewal of other Gulf Coast fields as well. It was his victory over the “heaving shale,” however, little known to anyone outside the oil business, that brought him the kind of recognition only a fifth-grade dropout could appreciate. Seven years later, in 1935, the University of Pittsburgh’s engineering department, after launching a quiet investigation into the factors that led to deeper drilling in Texas, awarded Cullen a doctor of science degree for his achievement.
After Humble, Cullen headed back to Blue Ridge and hit another series of big producers. At night he and Lillie sat out on the veranda in their rockers, sipping iced tea and talking about the children and their lives. Cullen was almost fifty by then, graying at the temples, and the money in his bank accounts indicated he was a millionaire, not that anyone noticed. Unlike so many other independents, he had so far resisted selling his wells, despite Jim West’s constant agitation to do so. In the fall of 1929, sitting there on his back porch in Houston, Roy Cullen was a happy man. However, 1930 would be another year.
THREE
Sid and Clint
I.
While Roy Cullen remained close to his home and family, working in the worn, discarded fields around Houston, wildcatters across the state were finding oil in new and uncharted areas. As at Ranger and Buckburnett in the 1910s, their discoveries triggered scrambles to amass acreage that overnight turned drowsy country villages into rollicking boomtowns: at Mexia, east of Waco, in 1921; at Luling, east of Austin, in 1922; then a series of gushers that pushed the oil frontier deep onto the empty plains of West Texas. The boomtowns became moveable feasts for young, energetic Texans who scurried from gusher to gusher, furiously buying and trading leases, drilling a well or three, then moving on to the next town when the frenzy died down.
For the first time a handful of wildcatters began to get seriously rich. Those first Texas oil millionaires, however, often found keeping their fortunes was tougher than making them. The classic case was a Massachusetts rubber heir named Edgar B. Davis, the mammoth 350-pound dreamer who found oil at Luling. Typical of the oddball adventurers drawn to Texas during the 1920s, Davis enticed Luling’s city fathers to help him drill for oil following a séance with the noted mystic Edgar Cayce. Combining his savings with theirs, Davis drilled a dry hole, then another, then four more. Finally, on a steamy August afternoon in 1922, his last dollar spent, his office furniture sold, his telephone disconnected, Davis drove into the countryside to see how his seventh and last attempt was faring. He pulled up and stared. A geyser of oil was shooting into the Texas sky.
The Luling field stretched for twelve miles, and after drilling dozens of wells along its length, Davis sold out to Magnolia for twelve million dollars in 1926, roughly three hundred million dollars in today’s dollars. He then embarked on a spending spree that has gone down as one of the strangest in the history of Texas Oil. He first threw a barbecue outside Luling, said to have been the largest in Texas history, to which he invited every citizen in three adjoining counties. Then he began handing out bonuses to his crew, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check to each of five men. He built clubhouses for Luling—one for whites, one for blacks—then gave his hometown back in Massachusetts a check for one million dollars.
His fortune was already streaming through his fingers when, on a trip
to San Antonio, Davis ran into an old friend, a onetime newspaperman named J. Frank Davis. Frank was down on his luck, so Edgar, on a whim, suggested he write a play. They came up with a topic, reincarnation, and Edgar pledged to finance the whole thing. In no time Frank Davis banged out a three-act drama he called The Ladder. It followed a group of characters from an English castle in 1344 through three reincarnations, the last in New York circa 1926. It was by all accounts a spectacularly awful play, which did nothing to dampen either Davis’s enthusiasm for it. Edgar enlisted a Broadway producer and staged tryout performances that summer in Detroit and Cleveland.
Despite reviews that were at best lukewarm, Davis insisted on conquering Broadway. The Ladder opened at the Mansfield Theatre on October 22, 1926, with a stalwart cast led by Antoinette Perry and Hugh Buckler. It was a colossol flop, but Davis paid to keep the play open for two long years at a cost, it was said, of $1.5 million. It was the beginning of the end. As his money ran low, the state of Massachusetts sued Davis for back taxes. He couldn’t pay, and the Depression wiped him out. He went bankrupt in 1935. A writer for The New Yorker found him living in Luling in 1948, broke, a man in his late seventies passing his last days playing bridge. He died in 1951, forgotten.
In the 1920s Texas was littered with men like Edgar Davis. Most remain forgotten. Some made millions. A few would make history.
II.
Neck-deep in this adrenalized rush were two lifelong friends, keen-eyed country boys from the town of Athens, sixty miles southeast of Dallas. During their boyhoods Athens was a dirt-road-and-buggy village deep in the East Texas pines, three thousand or so farmers struggling to pry cotton from the infuriating sandy soil. The area had been settled only in the 1840s, and by 1900 its first family was the Murchisons, whose patriarch, Thomas Frank Murchison, migrated from Mississippi to East Texas and finally in 1855 to Athens, where he clerked at the general store.b T.F., as he was known, soon started his own store and, after years of loaning money to men who couldn’t pay their bill, founded Athens’s first bank in 1890. The two-story brick building went up right on the square, adjacent to the Murchison store.
T. F. Murchison had six children, and when he died in 1902 he left everything to his three sons. Over time the second boy, John Weldon Murchison, took control of the bank. Wed in 1893, John and his wife, Clara, raised eight children in a Victorian home that took up an entire block on Tyler Street, known as the “street of plantation homes.” A whiff of the antebellum clung to all the Murchisons. Though he hadn’t fought in the Civil War, T.F. liked to be called “Colonel Murchison,” and he famously had little use for Yankees, easterners, or railroad men, attitudes that permeated his clan. In a town where dusty overalls were the rule, the Murchison children and grandchildren could be seen walking to the private Bruce Academy in polished shoes and tailored woolen clothes. The Murchisons “were sort of snobby,” one family acquaintance recalled. “They thought they were better than the rest of the people in Athens because they were Murchisons.”1
Except, that is, for John and Clara’s third child, small, homely Clint, saddled with the body of a snowman—big head, beanbag nose, no neck to speak of—and a face like a dish of melted ice cream. But what Clinton Williams Murchison lacked in physical appeal he made up for with a mind that whirred like a Swiss timepiece. Headstrong and independent, disdainful of his father’s stuffy ways, young Clint was Tom Sawyer with an abacus, the kind of seven-year-old who skinned squirrels and sold the little pelts for nickels. He loved the outdoors, spending lazy afternoons fishing with a Negro man outside town, ignoring the disapproving clucks of his neighbors. While his brothers took jobs at the bank, teenaged Clint was drawn to the excitement of the Athens lifestock pens, where roving traders wheeled and dealed for the best prices on cattle and horses. He found the give-and-take thrilling, and as a teenager he made extra money trading livestock.
He was joined by an older boy named Sid Richardson, whose father, a bar owner who also owned a peach orchard outside town, was one of the bank’s customers. Clint and Sid established a lifelong friendship during impromptu cattle-buying jaunts into Louisiana, where they purchased cows they sold for meager profits. Prewar Athens, in fact, was home to any number of teenagers who would one day emerge as Texas millionaires, many of them Murchison’s running buddies. Several worked alongside him at the Richardson orchard, betting their earnings against one another in running games of poker and gin rummy that, in many cases, would still be going on fifty years later.
In 1915, when he turned twenty, Clint joined his brother Frank at Trinity College, a Presbyterian school in Waxahatchie, south of Dallas, whose graduates typically joined the ministry. Chafing at the classroom structure his brother embraced, Clint took to organizing craps games; when school officials found out, Clint found himself on the first train back to Athens. Downcast, he reluctantly took a job at the bank. A natural with numbers, he could add, subtract, and multiply large sums in his head while other tellers did it on paper, but he found life in a teller cage just that, a cage. He complained he could make more money in a week trading cattle than he made at the bank in a month. Finally, to his father’s consternation, he quit. Within days America entered World War I and Clint, impatient and eager to see the world, enlisted.
Assigned to a motor transport division in the Quartermaster Corps, Murchison longed to go overseas. It was not to be. He was shuffled between army camps in Texas, Arkansas, and finally Michigan, where, on the war’s completion in November 1918, he was handed his mustering-out papers. He was twenty-three by then, eager to tackle the world and certain of his plan. He was heading to Fort Worth to work with a young oilman who had bombarded him with letters of the money to be made in North Texas, his old peach-picking pal Sid Richardson.
III.
For a man who would one day be proclaimed America’s richest citizen, who at his death controlled more petroleum reserves than three major oil companies, Sid Williams Richardson left few footprints on history. He attracted no biographer. In life he earned exactly one magazine profile of note, and while he gave newspaper interviews over the years, they consisted largely of aphorisms and apochryphal stories. Oil-industry histories ignore him; a mammoth, 1,647-page history of American oil exploration, 1975’s Trek of the Oil Finders, mentions Richardson all of three times. A lifelong bachelor who lived before the age of prying reporters, Richardson disdained letter-writing, preferring the telephone or making assistants author important communications. One protégé, the evangelist Billy Graham, once said, “Sid Richardson told me years ago, ‘Don’t put anything in writing. If you use the telephone, they can never use it against you.’ ”
Since his death, Richardson’s heirs have adorned several Texas universities with Sid Richardson buildings: there is a Sid Richardson Hall at the University of Texas, a Sid Richardson College at Rice University in Houston, a Sid Richardson Physical Science Building at Baylor University in Waco, and a Sid Richardson Science Center at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Yet his family went out of its way to obscure the facts of Richardson’s career. A portrait of Richardson hangs in the Permian Basin Hall of Fame and Museum in Midland, but Richardson’s is the only biographical file at the facility that is restricted—reviewable only with the family’s approval.
Much of what’s known about Richardson’s early years comes from stories Richardson himself told to friends, family, and the occasional reporter—any listener knew to take them with a grain of salt. He came from humble beginnings, that much is sure. Born in 1891—his mother named him Sid Williams after an itinerant evangelist—Richardson was one of seven children born to Nannie and John Isadore Richardson; three of his siblings died before the age of seven. A 1903 directory lists the Richardson residence as the family saloon a half block west of the square. Family lore suggests the business was so profitable it made neighboring stores envious. The reality was probably not so rosy. In later years Richardson joked that his family was so poor he sometimes slept on the pool table. Friends joked that Richa
rdson, a heavy drinker in his youth, had probably passed out.
Family stories suggest that Richardson, unlike his friend Clint Murchison, was not exactly a go-getter. When he was sixteen he took a dollar-a-day after-school job at a cotton compress, but was fired for laziness. According to Athens lore, Richardson had a reputation for failing to pay his debts; one story has it that a drugstore manager told his soda jerks they would be fired if they sold Richardson one more Coca-Cola on credit. In later years, some of Richardson’s favorite stories were of the ways his father tried to straighten him out.
At the age of eight, Richardson said, his father gave him a downtown lot to learn about business. When John Richardson offered to take back the lot in return for a bull, Sid took the bull—only to realize he now had a large male cow with nowhere to put it and no cows with which to breed. “My Daddy taught me a hard lesson with that first trade,” Richardson once said. “But he started me tradin’ for life.” When he was eleven, another of Richardson’s stories goes, his father suggested it was time for him to own a horse.
“Great,” Sid said. “When are you gonna give it to me? ”
“I’m not going to give it to you,” his father said. “You’re going to buy it from me.”
Sid said he worked all summer crating peaches to raise the money, but once he purchased the horse he discovered it was blind.