Read Online Bryan Burrough by The Big Rich: The Rise, Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes - Free Book Online

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