No one doubted it, and no end lay in sight. There was plenty of raw land, and land begat money, and money begat fortunes, and fortunes begat Dallas. The power was intoxicating.
One morning, the elixir that had been so intoxicating left a bad taste and a hell of a hangover. Dallas Real Estate awoke and discovered that, virtually over-night, the good times had all loaded up and gone. No one had seen them slip out of town. A grand and glorious market had passed away sometime in its sleep, and not everyone at the funeral would be a pallbearer. So many had turned in that night as rich men and women. They opened their eyes and felt the shackles of debt draping heavily around their shoulders. It had been daylight for such a brief time. Then darkness. Pure, unadulterated darkness.
Real estate magnates called it building ahead of demand, but their crime had been to dramatically overbuild North Dallas and suddenly discover that banks no longer had construction loans to pass around. Interest rates were on the rise, and speculators were caught in a deadly financial trap, paying fourteen percent interest, and sometimes more, for property on which they were unable to build. Raw land became raw again. Dollar signs had faded from the fields of splintered promises. Boom to bust, riches to rags, power to poverty, good fortune to good riddance. The game of speculative real estate was simple. Buy land and flip it before they had to pay for it, and they all kept flipping it back and forth. Each time the price grew greater, and the odds went up. Whoever got caught with the final flip of the land last lost. A lot of men lost.
Irv Deal had been devastated by the sudden downturn of the real estate market. His world had crumbled around him, and the loss hit his personal life harder than his business life. He could ride out a slump. He had done it before. But real estate in Dallas had unexpectedly turned south, then exploded in his face, and left him trying to develop luxury apartment complexes and shopping centers when the buyers had all left the sellers grimly holding their “For Sale” signs. The ashes and debt were suffocating.
Money always had a curious way of finding Irv Deal. Money, he knew, wasn’t out looking for him anymore. Money had dried up and left him scrambling for one more roll with somebody else’s dice. His only salvation, he decided, would be to find another business where he could invest the funds he still had tucked away in the bank and crawl back to profitability again.
Irv Deal was standing at a financial crossroads filled with potholes and lined with detour signs, financial cul-de-sacs, and dead ends. What’s next? he wondered. He had no idea. But for a man who had mastered the science of running a sound and profitable business, something would turn up. It always did.
During Christmas of 1974, Irv Deal, with time on his hands and nothing better to do, wandered up to a holiday party hosted by Frank West. He ran across Pat Holloway, an attorney who ran with fast company and owned, or at least handled, the legal work for drilling funds. Deal and Holloway had been friends for years.
Well, they may not have been close friends, but they knew each other well enough to discuss the ups and downs of a business market gone awry.
Deal looked the way he felt, forlorn and downcast. What’s worst, he was standing around and drinking far too much, and he was drinking alone, a sad predicament, which, throughout the Dallas business community, was generally frowned upon and regarded as an unforgivable sin. In Dallas, when players got together for any occasion, the broke supped from the same cup as the rich, and it was virtually impossible to determine who had received their next check and who had written his last one, who had chicken and who was left with the feathers.
Holloway strode across the room. He was charismatic and had a commanding presence, especially at a social gathering. “What’s wrong?” Holloway asked.
“The real estate business is just terrible,” Deal answered, his shoulders slumped, his face shaded by the dim lights in the room. “I’m going broke,” he said. “The business is out there dying and taking us down with it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hang on much longer.”
“Real estate will bounce back,” Holloway said.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“It always does.”
“I don’t want to wait for it,” Deal replied. “It looks to me like the oil business is the place where I need to be. The price is going up on a regular basis. There seems to be a lot of money to be made, and the rewards far outweigh the risks. I need to get myself in the oil business, Pat. It’s as simple as that. The trouble is, I don’t know how to get there. You run drilling funds. You’re on the inside of the oil business. Tell me. How’s the best way for me to become a player in the oil business?”
Holloway had no intention of encouraging a man down on his luck and looking for the next big play. It bordered on being criminal. A man like that was grasping for straws and easily tempted by the illusion of dollar signs. Sure, the rewards of oil were greater than the risks. Always had been. But, as he would say, the inherent dangers of a man losing his financial ass were just as plausible and infinitely more probable. The hidden costs could strangle him.
Holloway said as kindly as possible, “Irv, you don’t know a damn thing about the oil business. Let me tell you, it’s an entirely different world from the one in which you’ve always lived and worked. Building apartments is one thing. You’re damn good at it. Drilling for oil is quite another. Frankly, the oil business can eat you alive.”
It was as though Irv Deal had not heard a word the attorney said. “I like oil,” Deal replied. “Oil is money. And I can’t say that about real estate these days.”
Pat Holloway took a drink and let the warm whiskey slide down his throat. “I think you might be making a big mistake,” he said.
“Maybe I am.” Deal smiled. “But I’m a big boy,” he said. “I’ve made mistakes before. I’ll ask you the same question again. How’s the best way for me to get into the oil business?”
“Well, if you’re dead set on making the biggest blunder you’ve ever made, you need to get yourself a good geologist,” Holloway said. “Just do whatever he says, and let him find you some prospects. If you don’t know what kind of shit you’re looking for, you won’t stand a chance. The oil patch has chewed up a lot of beginners and spit them out in all directions. Without a good geologist, you might as well be drilling a water well. Your only hope is to tie yourself to some old boy who knows what he’s doing.”
“Okay,” Deal answered. “If I decide that oil is really the direction I want to go, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Pat Holloway watched him walk away. He doubted seriously if Irv Deal would remember anything at all about the oil business by morning. Maybe he was wrong. But he just could not picture the suave, cosmopolitan Irv Deal out on a rig, his face spackled with mud, dirt, and grime. He laughed quietly to himself and poured another shot glass full of whiskey. Pat Holloway forgot all about Irv Deal.
Max Williams quietly and quickly began changing gears in his life and his business. He was still smitten with an unabashed and unbridled passion for raw land. The surface of the landscape lying within the shadows of Dallas skyscrapers had been good to him for years, but now he was once again more interested in what he might find buried deep within the recesses of the good earth than what he might earn by selling the top of it. A change of heart. A change of plan. A change period.
When real estate in Dallas headed over the far edge of the earth, Max Williams began moving quietly in another direction. Business had turned sour. He hadn’t. He had seen others become depressed with a slumping economy that offered few promises and little hope. But, as he said long ago, sometimes something bad simply puts you in a place for something good to happen. He had grown
