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Petroleum Industry and Trade - Texas
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.
IV.
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? ”
Murchison was shy and would remain so all his life; if he didn’t absolutely have to talk to someone, he avoided it. Though capable of warmth around family and friends, strangers found him standoffish and occasionally rude. In sharp contrast, Richardson presented himself as the essence of the Texas good ol’ boy, joshing, laughing, and cursing in a thick backwoods accent. In later years, if a subordinate or family member made a mistake, Richardson would scowl and call him a dunce or a knucklehead; then, just as his target appeared crestfallen, he would grab him around the shoulders for a hug. “Sid,” says one longtime friend, “could just make you feel great.”
In the summer of 1919 the hottest oil play in the country was centered around the raucous boomtown of Buckburnett, on the Red River border with Oklahoma. Richardson and Murchison, taking rooms at the YMCA, dived headlong into the thick of it, using their savings—and, it appears, a good chunk of money from Murchison’s father—to join the hectic trade in oil leases. It was a thrilling ride for two young country boys on the make, with muddy streets and prostitutes, wads of leases exchanged between grimy oilmen on every corner, and gunshots echoing in the night. Lease trading was all about oil field intelligence; the value of a lease fluctuated largely on rumor—that the land held oil beneath it, that a major oil company was set to drill an adjoining lease, that a nearby test well had come up dry. When completing a trade, Murchison and Richardson usually made