Hunt gave only a single interview, to The Dallas Morning News, in April 1948, then scrambled for cover. In short order, books began to appear: The Lusty Texans of Dallas in 1951, Houston: Land of the Big Rich the same year, followed by a series of Texas primers such as The Super-Americans, by *The New Yorker’*s John Bainbridge.Īt least initially, the Big Four were too canny to engage with snooping reporters. From 1948 until well into the 1950s their articles crowded every periodical of the day, from Time and Collier’s to glossy spreads in Holiday, and piece after piece in the Times. The Life and Fortune articles sent dozens of eastern writers scurrying into Texas for the first time, many eager to advance the stereotype of eccentric, nouveau riche Texas zillionaires tossing hundred-dollar bills like confetti. Until then Texas had been known mostly for cowboys, cattle, and braggadocio. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the Life and Fortune spreads, which triggered a seismic shift in the way America viewed Texas, especially its oilmen. Hunt headed on, thinking the man was taking a picture of the building behind him. Before Hunt could react, the man disappeared into the crowds. Suddenly a man rushed up, lifted a camera, and snapped a photo. When he reached Ervay Street, he stopped for a red light. He was on his way to a card game at the Baker Hotel. The first hint of impending change came on a cool, windy afternoon in February 1948, when Hunt, wearing an off-the-rack tan gabardine suit and gray fedora, emerged from the Mercantile National Bank building onto the sidewalk along Commerce Street in downtown Dallas. The Times identified him as a “Former Texas Oil Field Laborer.” Cullen got the only Times headline, when he announced the formation of his $160 million Cullen Foundation, at the time the single largest gift ever made by a living American. In their cumulative 231 years of life, despite Hunt’s historic purchase of the heart of the great East Texas oil field, Cullen’s groundbreaking philanthropy, and Richardson’s private dinners with the Roosevelts, the so-called Big Four had earned precisely three references in the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times. Outside the insular world of Texas oil, almost no one knew they existed. It wasn’t just that few people understood how wealthy they were. Hunt, Hugh Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, and Clint Murchison-had emerged as a handful of the richest individuals in America, and no one knew it. In the years after World War II, the first great Texas oilmen-H. Excerpted from The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, by Bryan Burrough, to be published in January 2009 by Penguin Press.
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