Bryan Burrough (7 page)

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.

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 Richardson, 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.

“Daddy, you cheated me!” he exclaimed.

“I did not,” his father said. “People will try to get at you any way they can, and you might as well learn now.”

John Richardson traded cattle in his spare time, and by his teens his son was trying it as well. When he wasn’t crating peaches, the younger Richardson began taking Clint Murchison along to buy cattle in Louisiana. Virtually every story told of Richardson and Murchison’s early years emphasizes what great boyhood friends the two had been. No doubt that became true. But Richardson’s career would be marked by an ability to befriend those who could help him most, and one suspects that sixteen-year-old Sid Richardson’s primary interest in eleven-year-old Clint Murchison was his father’s money. The elder Murchison, in fact, later lent Richardson several thousand dollars to buy cattle. Taking Clint under his arm wasn’t just a good deed. It was smart business.

In later years, Richardson’s favorite story of the cattle-buying expeditions with Murchison revolved around a trip the two made to Ruston, Louisiana. As Richardson told it, he decided to buy a natty suit and masquerade as a clueless city-slicker, a charade he insisted somehow allowed him to buy his cattle for cheaper prices. Whatever his tactics, Richardson and Murchison proved able cattle buyers. They found “trading” to be a thrilling pasttime. During his senior year of high school in 1909, Richardson claimed he made thirty-five hundred dollars in profits.

At some point the Richardsons briefly relocated to—or perhaps vacationed in—the West Texas town of Mineral Wells, where Sid’s sister Annie began dating a sharp young doctor named E. P. Bass, who was to have a profound influence on Richardson’s life. Bass had a medical degree from Tulane, and after the family returned to Athens, he married Annie Richardson, in 1909. Bass proved his merits after Richardson was badly injured when a buggy he was driving overturned, crushing one of his legs below the knee. As with so many Richardson stories, details of precisely what happened are sketchy. In a note to the Henderson County Historical Society in Athens, a nephew said the accident broke Richardson’s right leg when he was nineteen; in a 1954 interview, Richardson said he was fifteen and the injured leg was his left.

Whatever the case, doctors wanted to amputate the leg. But E. P. Bass managed to save it during an operation in which he removed two inches of bone and built a “trough” to connect the remnants. In time Richardson managed to walk unaided, but for the rest of his life he limped. “I practiced me a walk that wouldn’t make me limp,” he once said. “Took me a year. Now I take long steps with the left laig, short steps with the other. That swingin’ walk of mine is my own invention.”

In September 1910 Richardson enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, but after two semesters of classes he did not return. An Athens man was registrar at Simmons College in Abilene, so Richardson enrolled there, in the fall of 1911. A tradition on campus holds that he was a bright but lazy student, far more interested in whiskey than classwork. The dean of students, J. D. Sandefer, is said to have called Richardson into his office on several occasions after he returned to his dormitory long after curfew. According to this tradition, Sandefer repeatedly lectured Richardson that he was squandering his abilities. “You have the brains and the personality to do whatever you want to do, and be what you want to be,” he is quoted saying. “If you would just lay aside this foolish waste of time, and set your heart on being a man.”

There is ample evidence that Richardson was a heavy drinker, which may explain a tendency to engage in fistfights. Once, explaining why he disliked the game of golf, he quipped that the single time he played eighteen holes he drank an entire bottle of bourbon. Carousing had no further effect on his studies, however, because in January 1912, after only four months in Abilene, Richardson’s father died. There was no more money for Richardson’s education. His brother-in-law, “Doc” Bass, was dabbling in the oil business, and it was probably on Bass’s suggestion that Richardson decided to find work in the oil fields.

He began as a laborer, hauling pipe by day and apprenticing on derrick floors at night. Richardson never said where he first worked, but it was likely the new Elektra field west of Fort Worth in 1911. Some of his favorite stories emerged from this period. In one, he was working alone one night, shoveling coal into a derrick furnace, when he was suddenly surrounded by coyotes. He spent the hours until dawn atop the red-hot furnace, hopping from one foot to another, until rescued by the arrival of day-shift workers. In time his education attracted notice, and he was hired as an office boy for the Oil Well Supply Company in Wichita Falls. Richardson once said this job came to an end after he engaged in a fistfight with a bookkeeper. The fight, however, impressed one of his bosses, who decided to send him back out into the field, this time as an oil scout in Louisiana. Scouts are the oil industry’s happy spies, spending their days driving from well to well, checking production trends, gauging competitors’ strategies, and picking up rumors. It’s a job where charm and likeability matter more than subterfuge, and Richardson, a natural raconteur, was good at it.

A career in oil, however, was never Richardson’s dream. What he wanted to do was trade cattle. After two years in the oil fields he returned to Athens in 1914, borrowing money from Clint Murchison’s father to purchase a herd. The venture didn’t last long. As Richardson told a Fort Worth newspaper in 1954, “my herd died of tick fever, and I lost my taw. What’s more, I owed Mr. Murchison’s bank six thousand dollars. I went back to Wichita Falls to get me some oil money.”

Perhaps Richardson’s favorite story was returning to Athens one year—to the day—later. Scouting was good money, and Richardson entered the town square at the wheel of a new Cadillac. “I swung back around that dusty square twice so’s all the bench warmers would see me good, and then I marched into the bank and paid Mr. Murchison his money in cash,” he recalled. “Then I drove out of town again. ’Fore the dust had settled, all those old boys got off their benches and started for the oil fields. They said, ‘If that dunce can make so much money, we’ll go, too.’ ” One of those impressed was young Clint Murchison.

Richardson was waiting the day Murchison, still wearing his army uniform, stepped off the train in Fort Worth in the spring of 1919. Murchison intended to head next to Athens, but Richardson insisted they go right to work. The first thing he did was march Murchison to the Washer Brothers men’s store and buy him a pair of nice suits. “You gotta get outta that uniform right now,” Richardson said. “You wear that and when you go around to talk to people they’ll want to talk about the war. We aren’t talking anything but oil.” Murchison didn’t make it home to visit his mother for another six weeks.
²

Despite their common backgrounds, they were a mismatched pair. Murchison was energetic, impatient, and, like many country boys before him, intellectually insecure. His favorite book was the dictionary, which he employed to adorn his vocabulary with ever-larger words; during drives he loved nothing more than challenging a fellow traveler to query him on word definitions. Richardson, meanwhile, hated nothing so much as pretension. A nifty hat, a pocket square, a dropped name—anything could prompt a cutting remark from Richardson, usually delivered with a wry smile. When Murchison used a big word, Richardson would wrinkle his brow and say, “What’s that word again, Murk? ”