County,” Williams replied. “Down in Pearsall.”
“That’s in the Austin Chalk.”
“It is.”
Ray Holifield shrugged. “You’d be better off to get yourselves some leases down on the coast or out in the Permian Basin of West Texas,” he said. “The chalk’s not where it’s at. Never has been. Certainly isn’t now. They don’t call that worthless chalk the field of broken hearts for nothing.”
Max Williams had no idea what to say. For a moment, he just stared at Holifield. Here he was, standing face to face with a man who had been hired to find him an oilfield in the Austin Chalk, and already Williams was being told that he had made a mistake, maybe even a grave mistake. A wiser man might have decided to cut and run. But Max Williams had never seen a game he didn’t think he could win. Basketball. Raw land. Oil. It was all the same. Play it out, play as hard as you can, and let the scoreboard sort out the haves from the have nots. Irv Deal’s mind was in a quandary. Had he and Williams made a mistake? Had Edwin Cox led them astray? Did they have the wrong leases? On the wrong land? Or were they merely saddled with the wrong geologist?
Max Williams and Irv Deal decided to make their first tenuous foray into the Frio County brush country to confront the Austin Chalk. Williams was constantly on the road between Dallas and Pearsall and wherever the next investor might be. Deal remained in Dallas, his eyes riveted on the business end of the venture. He would never go to the trouble of embarking on those long seven-hour trek to the field, never see exactly where the oil leases had been located, preferred the slick pavement of city life to a harsh dust always blowing in the oil patch, and, somewhere along the way, neglected to raise great sums of money.
Irv Deal did have a couple of major deals working. Up north, he said. Up in Chicago. He wasn’t interested in collecting small sums of money. Why bother with living on the telephone, dialing number after number, knocking on doors, chasing down one investor after another for a few thousand dollars here, a few thousand more there, when he could finance the whole operation with an investment from one high-dollar source?
Irv Deal was quite content to remain in his Dallas office, hire the right crew, make sure that Windsor/U.S. had good, hard-working drilling experts on the rigs, oversee the spiraling costs of production, keep an eye on the numbers, manage the money, and run the operation. He was not an oilman, Deal said. He was a businessman. He just happened to be in the oil business.
Besides, Max Williams was a good salesman. He knew how to promote the wells. He loved escorting potential investors across the brush lands around Pearsall, scuffing the top of the ground with his boots, and explaining how the ground far below held fractures filled with oil. Max Williams was a good fundraiser. Williams could bring in the quick money. Deal would make the companies run smoothly. In his mind, Irv Deal had it all worked out.
Those who invested with Max Williams knew absolutely nothing about the oil business, other than it was a precious and valuable commodity. But they all knew him, and, if they bought at all, they were buying Max Williams. There was W. O. Bankston, one of the largest automobile dealers in Dallas. As the years passed by, he would always be ready to provide Williams with investment funds, as well as a list of new names when those last, few dollars for drilling a well still needed to be raised.
Mary Kay Ash and her son, Richard Rogers, came on board, she driving her pink Cadillac in a lifelong quest to make women more beautiful. A little oil could pay for manufacturing a lot of cosmetics. And Don Carter was not afraid of any investment as long as it didn’t interfere with his Rolls Royce dealership or his trucking firms, cattle ranches, and hotels. He would one day sell Home Interiors & Gift, which his mother had founded, for $470 million and bring the Dallas Mavericks into the NBA. Harold Clark had firmly cemented his reputation and made his first fortune in the home development business.
D. Harold Byrd’s father had married Mattie Carruth, whose family owned most of the land sprawling across North Dallas. When Dallas grew, their riches followed suit. D. H. Byrd, the father, had romanced the oil business once before. He journeyed to Overton in 1931 when Dad Joiner’s Daisy Bradford No. 3 well ushered in the great East Texas boom because the crippled, old wildcatter had promised to sell him some of his land holdings. Byrd found Joiner asleep in his tent. He waited. He was too late. H. L. Hunt wound up with the leases and the fortune. Not to be outsmarted by the likes of Dad Joiner, D. H. Byrd went ahead and drilled twenty-nine oil wells of his own. Twenty-eight of them had nothing at the bottom of the hole but more rocks. He became known far and wide as Dry Hole Byrd. But he married well. In North Dallas, dry dirt was about as valuable as oil.
To his eclectic collection of investors, Max Williams added Don and Corky Furr, who had made their considerable amount of money with Furr’s Cafeteria, as well as Ben and June Collier, who had flown to Dallas from Montgomery Alabama, to determine how much it would cost them to play a game that paid off in oil. To them, a drilling rig was little more than a toy with a hefty price tag. June Collier was an entrepreneur who would ultimately be named as one of the country’s top ten businesswomen.
When Ford began developing its Mustang in 1964, she and Ben submitted the winning bid to build the wire harness for the snappy little sports car even though they did not own or have access to a manufacturing plant. Ben Collier, who had been a weight lifter at The University of Texas, weighed more than four hundred pounds, was extremely athletic in spite of his size, sold an assortment of auto parts, and was regarded as a great salesman. Ford was moving swiftly and ordered twenty thousand wire harnesses in case the Mustang was a success. Collier hastily built a plant and, before the year ended, had manufactured wire harnesses for more than three hundred thousand automobiles.
Max Williams had met Ben Collier while playing tennis in a Dallas tournament. He and June seemed to be quite impressed that Williams had dared venture into the oil business.
“That’s what I want to do,” Ben Collier said,
“What’s that?”
“Run an oil company.”
Max Williams grinned. “You can’t run mine, he said, but I’ll let you put some money in it.”
Ben Collier nodded. That was close enough. He and June would be the first to step up and invest a million dollars in the oil exploration ventures of Max Williams, Irv Deal, and Windsor/U.S.
Chapter 9
For many, the search for oil was not merely a gamble. It was a game. And those with investment dollars believed in Max Williams. He shot straight with them, looked them squarely in the eyes when he spoke, always did what he said he would do, owned up to the mistakes he made, and began immediately to correct them. It sometimes cost him money. It never cost him his honor. An investor, who placed his faith and his money with Max Williams, said one Dallas banker, could go to bed and sleep well at night. Max took care of the dollars you gave him as though they were his own.
He had moved quietly into the harsh landscape of Pearsall, down where Interstate 35 reached toward the border with Mexico, about an hour’s drive southwest of San Antonio. In appearance, the countryside was little different from the empty, sun-baked ranchlands that sprawled around his West Texas home. Pearsall had once been known as Frio Town when the International-Great Northern Railroad roared through in 1882. Its first brush with oil greatly changed the complexion of Pearsall during the 1930s, insuring that the town fared better than expected when the dark clouds of the Great Depression hovered above the nation. By the time drillers uncovered pockets of natural gas in 1945, the town had paved streets, a hundred and twenty-eight businesses, and
