The Rich and the Poor
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing THE RICH AND THE POOR Br" BARRY GEWEN isn't hard to make a billion dollars. Take H.L. Hunt. All he required was $109 in cash, bulldog determination, a gambler's...
...Once on the road, he became a professional card shark known as Arizona Slim, and as a young man managed to win and lose a couple of small fortunes...
...Precocious (he read before he was three), pampered (he breastfed until age seven), and independent (he ran away from home at 16), Hunt early showed a gambler's temperament that never left him...
...Along with oil, Hunt discovered politics...
...If the Hunts were fictional characters, Texas Rich would trace the rise of the father and the fall of the sons...
...In time, however, he developed political views as daffy as his geology, though far less successful...
...When the price of silver reached $50 an ounce in January 1980, their paper profits totalled $3.5 billion...
...Hunt was as colorful as they come, a kind of Nietzschean superman in a J.B...
...Why not...
...It is a story not yet over...
...Here is Fuller on what it feels like to knock yourself out in a dead-end job working 54 hours a week at $2.85 an hour: "This job I do is degrading...
...Bunker Hunt roamed farther afield than his father, sinking $ 11 million into dry holes in Pakistan in the late' 50s prior to trying an even more out-of-the-way country, Libya...
...Whatever their limitations, Shriver and Eizenstat supported the programs Fuller praises, and sincerely backed efforts to eradicate poverty from the United States...
...His story is an irresistible one, and not merely because of the Alice-in-Wonderland sums involved...
...As a result of Reaganomics, she will have a harder time buying her acre of land, while he has an easier time buying his silver...
...I think about that when I am cleaning toilets in the bathrooms at the restaurant...
...What do they expect...
...The nation's largest banks, together with Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve, were obliged to intervene, bailing out the Hunts with a $1.1 billion loan that took as collateral mortgages on the brothers' vast holdings...
...If you are a busboy, be the best darn busboy there is...
...Nor is the North an option for her—she came from there to escape the savagery of a public housing project...
...Stetson hat, a billionaire and a bigamist, too...
...This is pretty much how Hurt has proceeded...
...Hear Them Calling My Name doesn't really hang together as a book...
...1 do for profit...
...Hunt dabbled in real estate for a while...
...The younger ones have few choices in life—the Job Corps, the Army or, possibly, crime...
...This enabled him to talk to some of the poorest people in the country, men and women who had fallen into the cracks between the Old South and the New...
...A nest egg he inherited from his father in 1911 disappeared in some bad land deals...
...Hurt devotes only the last six pages of his book to these tourniquet operations...
...The major oil companies had turned do wn the wild-catter's land on the basis of geologists' reports...
...That is pure bullshit...
...Healsogol married for the second time, albeit not in succession...
...Within two months, the price of silver had dropped by half, forcing the Hunts to come up with additional margin money to maintain their position...
...Fuller concludes his book with descriptions of some government programs he has seen that have been successful in helping the poor out of their trap, followed by interviews with Sargeant Shriver and Stuart Eizenstat...
...The result is a book as entertaining as it is informative, a window on a world—that of Texas oil millionaires—which has become almost as much a part of our national folklore as the plantation South and the wild West...
...16.95), Hunt distinguished himself from the thousands of other adventurers scratching around Arkansas and Texas during the '30s petroleum boom by hitting upon the world's biggest oil strike up to that time...
...Hisattitudewas: "Money as money is nothing...
...I do the workofthree people...
...All he required was $109 in cash, bulldog determination, a gambler's easy-come-easy-go attitude toward money, and luck—especially luck...
...Members of the Hunt family also took their share of North Sea and Alaskan oil, not to mention investments in natural gas, real estate, cattle, horses, and farms...
...Bunker and Herbert Hunt began their plunge into silver in 1973, with a purchase of 20 million ounces at about $3 an ounce...
...His children succeeded in piling up even bigger sums than their old man, before tipping the economy toward financial disaster with their silver speculations...
...Initially, his involvement was that of a typical self-interested Texas millionaire seeking to protect his fortune...
...Yet the financial security that would have satisfied most others merely bored Hunt...
...Vivian Rouse, for example, raises five children on a tenant farmer's income, living in a crumbling home that lacks even an outhouse...
...The fact would remain that what I am doing is cleaning a place for somebody to put his ass...
...It is just something to make bookkeeping convenient...
...Why not silver...
...Bunker Hunt owns 5 million acres...
...Hunt died in 1974, bequeathing to his 15 children, the offspring of three marriages, both his money and his Right-wing views...
...In El Dorado, it didn't take Hunt long to become a successful gambling hall owner...
...so did a considerably larger amount accumulated through real estate speculation during World War I. But whenever the bottom fell out for Hunt, he was always able to start over again...
...People always give you that old saying about being the best of what you are...
...Finally, in 1930, he closed a deal with an East Texas wildcatter, putting up only $ 109 of his own money...
...Then, with breathtaking swiftness, came the crash...
...The adults, many of whom had lost what little land they owned to debt and agribusiness, have no choice at all...
...No one really knew his true worth...
...The claustrophobia of being poor engulfs the reader, and some passages cut deep...
...Inevitably, he soon turned his attention to oil...
...By 1946, he was pulling in $ 1 million a week, and in 1965, following another huge strike in Louisiana, he officially became a billionaire, although the New York 7wie"seslimated his wealth at $ 1 billion as far back as 1957...
...Hunt had a simple philosophy for amassing money: "Drill, drill, drill...
...In 1978, Fuller, a black reporter for the Atlanta Journal, took an assignment to pose as an unskilled drifter looking for work...
...By late March, Bache, their brokerage house, was demanding $10 million a day, and on the 25th, they had a margin call for an astounding $125 million...
...Another time he explained: "Everything 1 do...
...He relied on a system that he called "creekol-ogy," and everyone else called luck...
...After thus turning instinct into a cool $100 million, he had relatively easy sailing—real estate, refineries and, of course, more oil...
...As he remarked upon arriving in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1921, in the middle of an oil boom: "All 1 need is a deck of cards and some poker chips...
...His fortunes waxed and waned...
...But the most fortunate of his progeny inherited his luck...
...It reads like a miscellany, with Fuller describing not only the poorest of the poor, but also racial demonstrations, meetings with public officials, and personal reminiscences...
...A year later, they owned 8 per cent of the world's supply and were still buying, trading on the futures they acquired for yet more of the metal...
...Hunt himself said: "If you know how rich you are, you aren't very rich...
...Hunt's idea of Utopia was a system in which a person's voting power was based on the amount of taxes he paid...
...On the 27th, the silver market collapsed and Wall Street trembled...
...Hunt didn't trust geologists...
...The Hunt brothers still stand a good chance of making a large profit from their silver speculations...
...Worse, through budget cuts that fall heaviest on the poor and tax cuts that benefit primarily the rich, it is taking money from Vivian Rouse and giving it to Bunker Hunt...
...The world Chet Fuller portrays in I Hear Them Calling My Name: A Journey Through the New South (Houghton Mifflin, 255 pp., $12.95) is less than a thousand miles from the Dallas of the Hunts, but it might as well be another planet...
...Nonetheless, Fuller's experiences do allow him to write with an immediacy that is both valuable and rare...
...Add to this cast of characters the hair-raising beginnings of America's oil industry along with some loony forays into the slimier bogs of the Radical Right, and an author need do little more than step aside and let the tale tell itself...
...Naturally, neither Republicans nor Democrats were eager to be identified with such notions and despite the large sums Hunt poured into extremist Right-wing causes throughout the years, his impact on government never extended beyond notoriety...
...Even if I wore a top hat, tuxedo, and cane, it would not change a thing...
...Life is less artistic...
...As Harry Hurt III tells it in Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days Through the Silver Crash (Norton, 446 pp...
...The present Administration is undermining those same programs...
...said a friend...
...Hurt writes that by 1970 the wealthier Hunts had so much money, they literally didn't know what to do with it...
...He unobtrusively presents what he knows and courteously refrains from theorizing where he does not have the facts...
...Despite the failure of his initial drilling venture, he kept at it, and by 1924owned 400,000 barrels, worth $600,000...
...Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was born in 1889, the last of eight children, into a family of prosperous Illinois farmers...
...By 1972, he was reduced to backing for President his own son Lamar—who wasn't even a candidate...
...No wonder they are happy to have me here...
...No one knew it at the time, but what Hunt acquired was a hefty chunk of an oil field containing over 4 billion barrels of reserves...
...He is harder on the two men, I suspect, than he would be if he were writing his book today...
...Now her one hope is to be able to save enough money to buy an acre of land...
...It is degrading...
Vol. 64 • July 1981 • No. 14
