NOTABLE INDUSTRY FIGURES
“ RED” ADAIR
His full name was Paul Neal Adair, but the world knew him simply as “Red” Adair.
Born to a decidedly not-well-to-do family in Houston on June 18, 1915, Adair worked in a drugstore and later as a railroad man before World War II, when near the end of the conflict he learned ordnance disposal. After the war, he went to work for Myron Kinley, who specialized in dousing oil well fires. In 1959 he started his own company, and until he sold it in 1993, was involved in putting out more than 2,000 oil and gas well fires, on land and offshore.
Adair gained an international reputation in 1962 when his company contained a giant gas well fire in Algeria nicknamed the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter. Flames shot into the air as high as a 45-story building until Adair and his men extinguished it with an explosion that depleted the oxygen around the fire.
In 1968, John Wayne played Adair in Hellfighters, a movie inspired by the Houstonian’s success in defeating the spectacular Algerian fire. Adair continued to battle big blazes throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s. In 1984 his company put out a huge offshore fire on a rig off Rio de Janeiro. Four years later Adair oversaw the squelching of a giant fire on the Occidental Petroleum Company’s Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea. The famed firefighter’s last big job came in 1991, when his company took on some of the oil well fires set in Kuwait by the Iraqi military near the end of Operation Desert Storm.
Two years later, Adair sold his company and retired. The 89-year-old oil field legend died in 2004.
HUGH ROY CULLEN
Hugh Roy Cullen never made it past the fifth grade in school, but he did a pretty good job of teaching himself.
Born in Denton County in 1881, but reared by his mother in San Antonio, by the time he was 12, he had a candy sacking job paying $3 a week. At night, he studied.
Five years later, he began working as a cotton buyer in Schulenberg. On a cotton-buying trip to Oklahoma, he met Lillie Cranz, a rancher’s daughter. They married when she turned 21, and the first of their five children was born in 1905.
When Cullen began his career, from an economic standpoint, cotton reigned king in Texas. But that changed after the Spindletop well came in early in 1901. Moving to Houston in 1911, Cullen continued in the cotton business while also venturing into real estate. However, he could not escape hearing and reading about how men were making fortunes in the oil business.
Turning from bales to barrels of crude, in 1921 Cullen made his first big oil strike. Seven years later, he partnered with another wildcatter, “Silver Dollar” Jim West. They worked together until 1932, when Cullen formed Quintana Petroleum.
Cullen’s good fortune in the oil business revolved around his propensity to keep working fields that his competitors believed had played out. In seeking oil where others thought there to be none, and in developing new ways to do it, he repeatedly proved that a modest public school education did not seem to hinder his ability to understand the geology books he read. All his self-study paid off manifestly. In 1936, as many struggled simply to get by during the world’s worst economic depression, Cullen was well on his way to being one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
Then, that same year, his son died in an oil field accident. From that, he learned one more thing: There’s more to life than simply making money. By 1938, Cullen and his wife Lillie began focusing on philanthropy. They poured millions into the causes they believed in, including higher education, hospitals and cultural amenities.
“Giving away money is no particular credit to me,” Cullen would later say. “Most of it came out of the ground…and while I found the oil in the ground, I didn’t put it there. I’ve got a lot more [money] than Lillie and I and our children and grandchildren can use. I don’t think I deserve any great credit for using it to help people.”
Cullen died in Houston on July 4, 1957.
GLENNH. MCCARTHY
Glenn H. McCarthy was a Texas oilman straight out of central casting. In fact, he supposedly was Edna Ferber’s model for oil baron Jett Rink in her novel Giant.
Whether the Houston wildcatter was Ferber’s only inspiration is something for literary scholars to sort out, but McCarthy’s biography reads like fiction.
Born in Beaumont on Christmas Day 1907, McCarthy got into the oil business at eight, hauling water in the oil fields where he father earned 50 cents a day as a roughneck. His dad later tried to make it as a wildcatter but succeeded only in getting McCarthy more interested in the same line of work.
After a rowdy and uncompleted college career revolving around his football prowess, McCarthy quit school, married, and decided to take up where his father left off as a wildcatter. Either more astute than his old man or just plain luckier, he struck oil 38 times from 1932 to 1942. Eleven of those strikes marked the beginning of new oil fields. Soon he was a millionaire many times over.
A Texan of Irish heritage who was never reluctant to swing his fists while in his cups, McCarthy in 1949 spent $21 million building a grand hotel in Houston, the Shamrock. Three thousand guests, many of them arriving from Hollywood on a special train McCarthy paid for, showed up for the hotel’s grand opening.
At the peak of his entrepreneurial career, McCarthy owned two oil and gas companies, two chemical companies, two banks, a radio station, a chain of newspapers, a magazine, a movie production company and of course, the soon-famous Shamrock Hotel.
In 1955, McCarthy sold his hotel to the Hilton chain, and in 1987 the company decided to shut it down and convey it to the Texas Medical Center, which had it razed. The wildcatter’s wildcatter died the day after his birthday in 1988.
J.R .EWING
Texas’s best known oilman, who bore a striking resemblance to Texas-born actor Larry Hagman, lived only on the little or large screen, but millions of viewers all over the world came to love him no matter his conniving, ruthless nature.
From 1979 to 1991, J. R. could be seen every week on CBS’s hugely popular series, Dallas. The show, which ran for 14 seasons and included 357 episodes, was a prime-time soap opera portraying a stereotypical Texas oil dynasty.
John Ross Ewing, just “J. R.” to his family, friends and enemies, was the oldest son of John Ross “Jock” Ewing. Born on his family’s Southfork Ranch north of Dallas in Parker, Texas, in 1935, he had two younger brothers, Garry and Bobby. Well, there was half-brother Ray, the love child resulting from his father’s fling with an Army nurse during World War II. Oh, and a step brother from his mother’s other marriage.
J. R. partied his way through four years at the University of Texas at Austin and served in the Army during the early years of the Vietnam War, but from birth he had been groomed to take over the family energy business, Ewing Oil. Unfortunately for J. R., his daddy liked Bobby more than him, which added to the show’s conflict.
In 1971, J. R. married Sue Ellen Shepard, a gorgeous former Miss Texas. Not content with one pretty woman, the hard-drinking J.R. had numerous affairs, divorcing and remarrying Sue Ellen. For a while, he was married to Cally Harper.
As if a screenwriter was plotting his life, which of course several were, J. R.’s story took numerous twists and turns. But one thing remained constant: He would do anything to win at the oil game or to get anything else he wanted. And he genuinely loved his son, John Ross Ewing III.
Though J. R. is shot in a classic cliff-hanger end-of-season episode in 1980, he recovered and lived on through many wild ups and mostly downs until 2013, when he finally died at the end of a revived Dallas series. Fittingly, they had his memorial at the Dallas Petroleum Club.
LUCIEN FLOURNOY
A $5 bill got Lucien Flournoy started in the oil business.
A native of Greenwood, Louisiana, he dropped out of LSU in 1939 and hitchhiked to Corpus Christi to work as a roughneck. His sister, a school teacher, loaned him $5 to tide him over until he could land a job.
Eight years later, Flournoy founded a drilling company in Alice that became Flournoy Production Company. He and several welders started out in 1947 with a drilling rig they had designed and built. They called it “Old Bread and Butter.” From that, the company grew into a major independent oil and gas operation, primarily doing business with drillers and producers in Texas and Louisiana.
“My mother was mighty disappointed that I’d dropped out of school, but I was tired of being broke and wanted to make some real money honestly,” he recalled. “That was in 1939, and good paying jobs were not easy to find.”
After a brief stint in the Army Air Corps early in World War II, he indeed started making that “real money.” In 1957, he moved beyond drilling and became a producer.
“The oil business was essential to the development of our society,” Flournoy said not long before his death. “The consumption of energy distinguishes our country and other advanced economies from so-called Third World nations …. After all, people throughout the world do not truly reach middle class until they have a means of transportation, electricity, appliances, and climate control within their houses. All those things depend on energy.”
While most oilmen are on the conservative side of the political spectrum, Flournoy had been a life-long Democrat who contributed a substantial amount of time and money to the Texas Democratic Party. He served two terms on the Alice city council and later as mayor. A generous philanthropist, among other efforts, he funded a scholarship program at Texas A&M Kingsville, donated a half-million dollars to the Boy Scouts, and paid off the mortgage for a women’s shelter in Corpus Christi.
Flournoy died at 83 on March 27, 2003 in Corpus Christi.
MICHEL T.HALBOUTY
Michel T. “Mike” Halbouty, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was born June 21, 1909 in Beaumont.
The famed Spindletop well had ushered Texas into the oil age only eight years before Halbouty’s birth, and Beaumont continued to boom. Just a tyke, he entered the oil business making four bits a day hauling water to the oil field.
That early experience convinced him the oil industry was for him. He got a degree in geology at Texas A&M in 1930, followed by a master’s degree in the same field.
Graduating in one of the worst years of the Great Depression, Halbouty got a job on a Yount-Lee Oil Co. surveying crew and fell in love with the oil business.
Soon, Halbouty began building his legend. Only 22, at a drilling site on High Island, he took one more core sample from a hole the more experienced rig boss believed was a duster. Apparently not impressed with Halbouty’s academic credentials, the foreman tossed him off the rig into a mud pit. Halbouty climbed out of the pit and drove straight to the home of company owner Miles F. Yount.
Yount was not particularly excited to see one of his most junior employees, especially since he was throwing a party for the former prime minister of Poland. But, by saying he would stake his job on the outcome, Halbouty finally managed to convince his boss that the rig in question would hit oil. Yount gave the OK to keep drilling.
The well came in, as did many other wells in the new field. The find got Halbouty a big raise and a new title, but when Yount died two years later, Halbouty moved on. He worked for Glenn McCarthy for another two years before going out on his own in 1937.
Following World War II military service, Halbouty focused on wildcatting. He found a lot of oil and made a lot of money.
An outspoken giant in the industry and generous benefactor who served on many non-profit boards, Halbouty died in 2004 at 95.
CLINT MURCHISON
Born in Tyler on April 11, 1895, Clinton Williams Murchison, Sr., developed the financial savvy that would make him one of Texas’s richest and most powerful oil men not by going to college as his parents had hoped, but by working in the bank his father owned.
Following service as an Army lieutenant in World War I, Murchison and his lifelong friend, fellow East Texan Sid Richardson, traveled to the booming Burkburnett oil field as lease “hounds.” Soon transitioning from buying and selling leases, he began drilling for oil on his own holdings. That made him a millionaire five times over by the time he sold his North Texas interests in 1925.
Four years later, Murchison founded the Southern Union Gas Company, which grew into a giant utility supplying natural gas to Texas and four other Southwestern states. When the giant East Texas oil field was discovered in 1930, Murchison became a major player in that part of the state.
Murchison opposed government regulation of the oil industry, which figured in the name of the next corporation he formed – American Liberty Oil Co. But when excessive production in the prolific East Texas field knocked the bottom out of oil prices, sending the value of a barrel of crude plunging to only a dime, he became more conservation minded. Still, he remained adamantly opposed to state and federal production controls.
After World War II, Murchison expanded his holdings to all of North America, organizing the Delhi Oil Corporation in 1945. A subsidiary, Canadian Delhi, developed extensive natural gas sources in Alberta. Murchison built a 2,100-mile pipeline from there to supply the densely populated northeaster, U.S. He also had a natural gas operation in Australia.
Following a series of mergers and acquisitions, the last company Murchison controlled was Kirby Petroleum. In addition to his energy companies, Murchison owned numerous other businesses, from life insurance firms and banks to building material supply companies and ranches.
One of his three sons, Clint Murchison, Jr., owned the Dallas Cowboys for many years. The elder Murchison died in Athens on June 20, 1969.
SID W. RICHARDSON
Only eight, future oil tycoon Sid W. Richardson got an early lesson in business from his father.
The elder Richardson gave his son a downtown lot in his native Athens, in East Texas. Next he asked the youngster if he’d take a bull in trade for the real estate. Little Sid thought that sounded like a good deal, but he soon came to realize that one bull isn’t much use to a cattlemen unless he has some cows to go with it.
“My daddy taught me a hard lesson with that first trade,” Richardson later recalled, “but he started me tradin’ for life.”
Nine years after getting skinned in that first deal, when Richardson graduated from high school in 1908 at 17, he had earned $3,500 trading cattle that year. Back then, that was a lot of money.
Richardson never lost his interest in, and affinity for, trading cattle, but after several years of college with borrowed capital he turned to a new business model in 1919—drilling for oil. Within a year, at the ripe old age of 28, he and partner Clint Murchison were millionaires.
The next business lesson Richardson learned the hard way was that commodity prices don’t hold. When the market for oil temporarily tanked in 1921, his fortune went into a decline that lasted until the early 1930s. After that, he went on to become one of the richest oilmen in the nation.
From churches to hospitals to art, he supported a wide range of causes. Also a power-broker, his friends ran from shoeshine boys to Presidents. Just about everyone called him Mr. Sid.
Summing up his formula for success in the oil and cattle business, he said, “I guess my philosophy of business life is: Don’t be in too big of a hurry, don’t get excited, and don’t lose your sense of humor.”
He might have added “keep your mouth shut.” An unassuming man who never married, he kept his own counsel, seldom allowing media interviews.
Richardson died at his ranch on St. Joseph’s Island across from Rockport on September 30, 1959.
H . L . HUNT
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt parlayed his poker winnings into what became a Texas oil dynasty.
Born in Illinois in 1889, he quit school after the fifth grade and knocked around the country doing everything from lumberjacking to cowboying before he decided to visit Ditch Bayou, in southern Arkansas. His father had fought in a Civil War battle near there, and had later told his son about the rich soil in the vicinity. With money he netted through gambling, the younger Hunt bought a cotton farm.
He married in Arkansas in 1914 and went on to have six children. But just like a pine-covered tract hiding deep reserves of oil below, there was more to H. L. Hunt than external appearances, including being a bigamist with a second family and more children.
In 1923, buying leases on credit, Hunt got his start in the oil business during a boom in El Dorado, Arkansas. He later maintained that he had made $600,000 within two years. In time, that amount of money would seem only like pocket change to Hunt, who went on to become one of the two wealthiest men in the nation, a billionaire many times over who at one point earned an estimated $1 million a day.
What got Hunt to Texas was the 1930 discovery of a huge oil pool in East Texas. Having acquired Columbus “Dad” Joiner’s Daisy Bradford No. 3 and a lot of land around it, by 1932 Hunt operated a pipeline and 900 wells in East Texas. Two years later, he founded the Hunt Oil Co. in Tyler.
Hunt, who later moved his family and company to Dallas, continued to make money through oil and investments. But if there is such a thing as an ordinary billionaire, he was not one. Most of the time, he acted like he was down to his last dime, traveling coach and often packing his own lunch. Once, he stopped at a roadside watermelon stand and convinced a farmer to sell him a 75 cent watermelon for 50 cents.
“I hate to get skinned on any deal,” he told the lawyer who was with him.
Hunt died on November 29, 1974 but the Hunt Oil Co., now known as the Hunt Family of Companies, remains in business.