Murchison’s son, Clint, founder of the Dallas Cowboys, ended the family fortune in drugs and squalor and then Christian rebirth.
He tracks the early friendship of the mathematically brilliant Murchinson and the politically shrewd Richardson, boyhood friends from East Texas who eventually went their separate ways. He starts with Cullen, doggedly determined to find oil with “creekology,” a form of geological intuition that probably had nothing to do with the deep structures thousands of feet below the surface. He has worked up strong narratives for each character and many other side characters such as Glenn McCarthy and George Strake. “In time,” he writes, “their salad days dissolved into a sordid litany of debauchery, family feuds, scandals and murder, until collapsing in a tangle of rancorous bankruptcies.” Burrough writes much better than that sentence indicates. First editions can be bought online for $1.99.) Burrough has mined these sources, graciously acknowledging them, and plowed through the Cullen papers and others to tell a century’s worth of Texas oil history through the biographies of these four and their families. (Cullen bought 100,000 copies and distributed them across the country. Sid Richardson was notoriously secretive, but Burrough has dug up new information from an anonymous “old family friend.”ĭespite Roy Cullen’s enormous philanthropic contributions to Houston, especially the University of Houston, no one has written a biography since the first one he commissioned in 1951. Janet Wolfe’s big biography of the Murchisons came out in 1989, and Harry Hurt’s masterful depiction of the Hunts was published in 1981. Burrough admits that this is an “engineered” book, one that he and a former editor-turned-agent cooked up three or four years ago when a former and not-big-rich oilman was president.
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