by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
All through that steamy August Joiner and Laster worked to prepare the well—the Daisy Bradford No. 3, it was called—for a formal test, which would use a piece of equipment called a drill stem to suck up any measurable amounts of oil. Dozens of scouts began lingering around the drill site, standing off to one side to debate whether Joiner had found traces of oil or was simply faking it.
Finally, on September 5, 1930, everything was ready. Then, just as preparations neared completion that afternoon, a car drove up. A man got out, a hefty six-footer wearing a shirt and tie and a straw boater.
His name was H. L. Hunt.
II.
He was a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced—absolutely convinced—that he was possessed of talents that bordered on the superhuman. He may have been right: in the annals of American commerce there has never been anyone quite like Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. At a time when itinerant wildcatters like Sid Richardson couldn’t find time for a wife let alone a family, Hunt would build three, two in secret. If they made a movie of his life, no one would believe it could be true.
The man who came to embody all the myths of the Texas oilman, whose madcap family dramas would one day captivate a nation, was neither raised in Texas nor introduced to oil until well after his thirtieth birthday. He was born in 1889, the youngest of eight children reared by an aging Confederate veteran who had moved north after the war, to a farm in downstate Illinois, seventy miles east of St. Louis. His family called him June, short for Junior, and he was barely walking when his parents realized his intelligence bordered on that of a prodigy. In later years his siblings swore he could read the newspapers aloud at the age of three. His capacity for mathematics became a local legend; people marveled how the child could multiply large sums in his head. Early on, June’s math skill manifested itself in a fascination with card games, a passion he would indulge to his dying day.
His mother, Ella, doted on her youngest, lavishing him with praise and, as Hunt recounted with an odd pride in later years, breast-feeding him until he was seven years old. All the flattery and attention imbued Hunt with a keen sense of entitlement, a feeling that he possessed a unique intellect, exponentially more insightful than anyone he met, and this, too, became a lifelong trait. By the time Hunt was born his father, a stern but savvy man known as “Hash” Hunt, had built his initial eighty-acre farm into a five-hundred-acre spread, among the largest in Fayette County. June helped on the farm, but by his sixteenth birthday he was showing signs of restlessness. He and his father weren’t getting along. When June said he had no interest in college, his father and older brothers pressed him to become a bank clerk, a natural fit for a boy so good with numbers. But June had no more interest in a teller’s cage than young Clint Murchison a decade later. He yearned to see the world.
And so, one day in 1905, sixteen-year-old H. L. Hunt packed a deck of cards in his bedroll and ran away from home. From St. Louis he took a train into western Kansas, planning to try his luck as a laborer. He ended up a dishwasher in a railroad restaurant in the town of Horace. That lasted a month. From Kansas he headed on to Colorado, where he cut sugar beets. South of Salt Lake City, he signed on as a sheepherder. Riding the rails into Southern California, he took a job driving mule carts brimming with road gravel. Outside the town of Santa Ana, he took his first ranch job, again driving mule teams. For two years Hunt ambled from job to job as the spirit moved him, planting cattle feed outside Amarillo, lumberjacking in northern Arizona, and narrowly missing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—he had left the city just days before to try out for a semipro baseball team in Reno.
For a time his brother Leonard joined him. They ranged across the Pacific Northwest through 1908 and 1909, working the harvests in Washington, Montana, and then the Dakotas. When Leonard returned to Illinois to take a teaching job, Hunt headed north into Canada looking for work. He had just arrived at a small town outside Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, when he found the telegram from his parents. Leonard was dead; of what it wasn’t said. It was February 1910. Hunt returned for the funeral, then returned west for a year, until March 11, 1911, when he received the call that his father had died. Once again he went home.
In the days after his father’s funeral, Hunt finally confronted his future. He was twenty-two at that point, with a five-thousand-dollar inheritance, enough in 1911 to get him started in just about any business he wanted: farming, ranching, tavern owner, anything. He couldn’t sit still for college, he knew that. All Hunt knew was that farm life bored him. He had already gone west. Then, remembering his father’s stories of the lush farmland around a southern Arkansas town he had visited during the Civil War, he decided to head south. Like Roy Cullen, Hunt was proud of his southern heritage. The leisurely life of a plantation planter appealed to him, and in late 1911 he arrived at the town his father had remembered, Lake Village, in the heart of Arkansas’s best cotton country, just inland from the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.
Cotton prices were booming, and so was Lake Village, a bustling town on the shores of Lake Chicot. The population had grown to fifteen hundred in the last few years. Taking a room at the hotel, Hunt used most of his inheritance to buy a 960-acre farm called Boeuf Bayou five miles south of town, then headed to Little Rock to buy horses and mules. That first year his cotton crop was wiped out by the first Mississippi River flood in thirty-five years, but Hunt recovered nicely. Negros worked his land, allowing Hunt to spend much of his time playing cards. In time he made as much gambling as he did from the cotton fields.
Now in his mid-twenties, Hunt had grown to be a serious, solitary young man, quiet, focused, and disciplined. He had a clerk’s face, a soft nose, and wide-set eyes. He dressed neatly. He didn’t drink. Around Lake Village he was considered a touch odd, a deep thinker, a man who read the newspapers and could sometimes be seen writing poetry or song lyrics. Still, people liked him. He developed a reputation for honesty. When he borrowed money for a harvest, he repaid it on time. He dated a girl here and there, but for the most part he kept to himself, drawing about him a sense of mystery in the little southern town. When he was flush, Hunt took a train to the big-money poker games in Memphis and New Orleans, where he adopted the moniker Arizona Slim, a nickname he kept the rest of his life. Then, in the fall of 1914, Hunt’s mother died, and within weeks, perhaps unsurprisingly, he proposed marriage to a Lake Village girl who was very much like the departed Ella Hunt.
Then twenty-five, Lyda Bunker was a plain, plumpish schoolteacher from a prominent family, a quiet, stable woman who was about to be married to another man. Hunt had been seeing Lyda’s sister. Love came quickly, though, and both broke off their relationships to be married, in a simple ceremony at the Bunker home. The newlyweds moved into one of the Bunkers’ rental houses and began a family. Their first child, a daughter they named Margaret, arrived in November 1915. Two years later came a boy, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. They called him Hassie.
Hunt’s fortunes continued to rise and fall on cotton prices and his poker winnings, and Lyda, now with two mouths to feed, began urging him to find something more stable. “June,” she pleaded more than once, “why don’t you get a regular job?” But Hunt was addicted to the adrenaline he found dealing cards, parcels of land, and, when the war ended in 1918, cotton futures. That’s when his luck ran out. Believing the cotton boom was poised to end, he placed a massive bet that prices would go down; when they didn’t, he lost everything, including what little money he had put away. According to family lore, Hunt only saved his farm at a high-stakes poker game in New Orleans, during which he managed to turn his last hundred dollars into one hundred thousand dollars. He kept his land, but much of it was now hamstrung with bank liens, and when the recession he expected finally hit in 1920, the price of both cotton and land went into free fall. For the first time Hunt began to question his style of living. He turned thirty-two that year. He wasn’t a kid anymore.
His
epiphany, as Hunt remembered it years later, came in January 1921, as he was negotiating to buy land from a family named Noell. During a long afternoon of talks at the Noell home, Hunt found himself listening as one of the other men discussed the manic scene at El Dorado, seventy miles west of Lake Village in south-central Arkansas. Oil had been found there the previous spring, and thousands of people were flooding into town in hopes of finding more. It sounded exciting—far more exciting than another year of praying for cotton and land prices to rebound. Hunt stepped outside onto the porch and gazed at a setting sun. “What is it that you are trying to do?” he asked himself. “Are you going to bury yourself here for the remainder of your life? ” Why not rent out the land and try something new?
Hunt headed into Lake Village determined to raise enough cash to give El Dorado a try. Both town banks, however, strapped for cash themselves, turned him down. All Hunt could raise was fifty dollars from a trio of gambling buddies. It was enough. He took his pals and boarded the train to El Dorado. When they arrived, they disembarked into a roiling boomtown thronged with gamblers and prostitutes and hustlers of every stripe. From the steps of the train depot, Hunt peered down the muddy main thoroughfare, South Washington Street, which was packed with people. The town’s population had exploded from maybe a thousand people to something over fifty thousand in less than a year. There were no rooms to rent. People were sleeping in tents all over town; the last available berths, the barber’s chairs, rented for two dollars a night. Space was at such a premium that the city council had begun renting space on the sidewalks, tranforming the eastern side of South Washington into a row of outdoor grills dubbed Hamburger Alley. This, Hunt saw, was a place a smart man could make easy money. “All I need,” he muttered, “is a deck of cards and some poker chips.”
The next day Hunt hit the tables. The gambling halls of El Dorado teemed with professional card players, but there were so many new marks flooding into town, Hunt made a killing. Again and again he raked in big pots, three times taking the biggest game in town. He quickly amassed enough cash to buy his way into one of the town’s few hotel rooms, and within days he had enough to rent a shack at the foot of South Washington where he opened his own dingy cardroom. Within weeks he had saved enough to take over the first floor of a nicer building up the street, a large single room he packed with card tables, chairs, and floor areas to throw dice. Hunt’s ad hoc casino was a tidy, safe place in a violent, dirty town; he earned a good reputation and caused no trouble. Soon, though, the city council began a cleanup campaign, closing down the brothels and Hamburger Row.
This being Southern Arkansas in the early 1920s, El Dorado’s anti-vice campaign was augmented by the forces of the Ku Klux Klan. As Hunt told the story years later, a group of twenty or thirty white-robed Klansmen arrived outside his establishment one night that summer. “Shut this place down,” the leader yelled. “Shut it down or else… .”
Hunt stayed open, but once again he began thinking about a change in careers. El Dorado was an oil town now; it was natural that he would consider oil as a line of work. He decided to start small, throwing in with a partner and several friends to lease a half-acre plot outside of town; he secured a drilling rig by paying the overdue freight on an old rig abandoned beside the rail depot. In the first instance of what came to be known as the “Hunt luck,” that first well, the Hunt-Pickering No. 1, struck oil, a decent amount, before petering out several weeks later. Rather than buy a thirty-five-hundred-dollar pump jack to restart it, they sold the well to another independent, who promptly went out of business before paying. It was a dispiriting experience, but as Hunt noted years later, “it served the purpose of getting me started in the oil business.”
Closing the gambling hall, Hunt set his sights on establishing a viable oil company. He raised money from friends in lots of two hundred dollars, then had one of the casino’s floor men, a character known as Old Man Bailey, sweet-talk a farmer named Rowland into assigning Hunt a lease on his forty-acre farm in return for a twenty-thousand-dollar IOU—a sum far larger than Hunt had access to. Rowland grumped a bit, to the point that Bailey was obliged to take a room in his farmhouse to placate him. Hunt, meanwhile, began drilling in Rowland’s fields, and in January 1922 his second well came in strong, five thousand barrels a day. He soon started two more, and both proved good producers as well.
In early 1922, thanks to the efforts of local authorities and the Klan, El Dorado was safe enough for Hunt to send for Lyda and the children. They moved into a rented house on Peach Street, where a year later Lyda gave birth to a third child, a daughter they named Caroline. Hunt’s luck in oil ebbed and flowed. He hit a good well or two, then watched in dismay as production fell to a trickle. He began to borrow from the El Dorado banks, always repaying in full and on time. Soon he had drilled enough wells that he found himself with employees, who became known around town as “Hunt men.” When Hunt men had troubles of their own, their boss listened, nodded his head, and loaned them money. They proved loyal and indefatigable workers, in time helping Hunt hit a string of strong producers in the fields outside El Dorado.
In three short years Hunt had transformed himself from a gentleman planter into a professional gambler and then, finally, at the age of thirty-five, into a successful oilman. By the end of 1924 he controlled nearly four hundred thousand barrels of proven oil reserves, valued at roughly six hundred thousand dollars, about seven million dollars in today’s dollars. That year he moved Lyda and the children into a new three-bedroom brick home in El Dorado. Usually busy in the oil fields or, at night, at a poker game, Hunt was rarely at home. Lyda didn’t complain. A pleasant, religious woman, she struck up friendships with many townspeople, raising the children and pulling them to the Methodist church without their father on Sundays. About the only thing Lyda nagged Hunt about was money. He was always willing to bet their nest egg on a new well, while Lyda urged him to save. Their new house was as much a receptable for their savings as a place to live.
In February 1925 Lyda gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, a girl they named Lyda Bunker Hunt. But a month later a radiator in the new home malfunctioned, leaking fumes that smothered the infant in her crib. Lyda was devastated. Hunt did what he could to assuage her grief, whisking her off to New York for their first real vacation together, breaking ground on a big new house outside town and once again getting her pregnant. But in the weeks after his daughter’s death, it was Hunt who underwent the most profound change. Maybe it was the grief. Maybe at the age of thirty-five, it was an early midlife crisis. Maybe it had been his plan all along. Whatever it was, Hunt decided he had no interest in living out his days a country oilman in the Arkansas boondocks, monitoring oil flows and depositing checks.
Four months after his daughter’s death he suddenly sold all his holdings for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar promissary note, then had a bank discount it for cash. He was leaving the oil game, he told Lyda. With the money in hand, Hunt announced he was taking an extended trip—alone—to Florida. He said he was thinking of investing in the state’s postwar real estate boom, and maybe he believed it. But it wasn’t real estate he was looking for, as an operetta he began composing on the train to Tampa suggests. He called it, “Whenever Dreams Come True, I’ll Be with You.” “Up to the time I met you,” he wrote, “life was as drab as can be…. Something was missing for me. You are my love now forever …”
Leaving his pregnant wife and three young children behind in Arkansas, H. L. Hunt headed to Florida in search of romance.
III.
Her name, once he found her, was Frania Tye. She was twenty-one years old, and when she sat down on a park bench outside the Tampa Terrace Hotel that hot September afternoon in 1925, she had been in Florida for only a few weeks. Raised in Buffalo, Frania was the daughter of Polish immigrants; her father, a carpenter, had changed the family name from Tyburski. She had reached adulthood with no career plans or obvious skills, taking jobs at department stores and hair salons, but her dark beauty, enhanc
ed by an ample bosom and slender hips, probably persuaded her she wouldn’t need any. She was small, an inch over five feet, and spoke with the hint of an accent. As a teenager she had fallen in love with a Polish boy and followed him when he took a job in Cleveland. It didn’t last, though, and by the time she returned to Buffalo the only thing Frania knew for certain was that she didn’t want to stay in Buffalo. Eager for a new start, she persuaded her father to help her resettle in Tampa, where he moved her into a room at the DeSoto Hotel. The owners agreed to look after her.
She had just taken a job in a real estate office that day when she began talking to the older man sitting on the park bench. He said his name was Bailey, and just her luck, he was interested in real estate. Frania gave him her phone number. Later, she took a call from a man who identified himself only as “Hunt.” Mr. Hunt said he was interested in seeing some property. When he drove by to pick her up, Frania realized it was the man from the park bench. Not wanting to spook one of her first clients, she didn’t say anything. Together they drove out and looked at the property. Hunt said he’d think about it. When they returned to Tampa, he asked her to dinner. She politely declined. He called again a few days later. Once again they drove out to see the property, and this time when they returned Hunt asked her to his hotel room. She slapped him, saying she wasn’t that kind of girl.
