Bryan Burrough by The Big Rich: The Rise, Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes Page A

crushing news: Humble Oil was building a pipeline of its own. Murchison didn’t have enough production to feed the pipeline himself. If other producers sold to the Humble line—as they would—he would face a massive loss.
    Then, walking down Wink’s muddy main thoroughfare one evening, Murchison had a thought: Why not offer gas heating and light to the locals? He already had the pipe; it took a matter of weeks to lay it down one side of the street. Residents were invited to tap into it anywhere they could, five dollars a month for a home, ten dollars for a business. Natural gas had been used to heat homes and factories in England for a century but had never caught on in the United States; most Texas oilmen simply allowed the gas they found to escape into the atmosphere. Murchison was amazed how simple the business was; once a pipeline was built, all he did was sit back and collect monthly checks. When other West Texas towns expressed interest in having gas lines of their own, Murchison incorporated the Wink Gas Company and built lines to Pecos, Barstow, and Pyote. A friend in Oklahoma said his town could use one, too, so Murchison sent work crews north and by mid-1928 had a pipeline furnishing gas to the towns of Kingfisher and Hennessey. He sent salesmen fanning out across South Texas and soon had contracts to supply gas to Navasota, Sealy, Bellville, Eagle Lake, and Columbus.
    In late 1928, after taking expansion loans from a pair of Dallas banks, Murchison moved into an apartment in a fashionable Dallas building called Maple Terrace; his roommate, a fastidious, nearsighted boyhood chum named Wofford Cain, ran the Oklahoma side of the pipeline business. The two would remain in business together for decades. In January 1929, in an effort to consolidate the chaotic piles of paperwork in his apartment and San Antonio office, Murchison leased space in the fifteen-floor American Exchange Building in downtown Dallas and, together with his brother Frank and Ernest Closuit, officially merged their far-flung gas operations into a single company they decided to call the Southern Union Gas Company. Murchison had big plans for Southern Union, the kind that occurred to few if any of his peers in Texas Oil. He wanted to make it a national company, with stocks and bonds sold in northern stock markets. Murchison would arrange and build the pipelines, Closuit would drill for the gas, and Frank Murchison was sent to Chicago to begin raising money.
    Clint and Closuit easily held up their end. During a New Mexico vacation that spring with Wofford Cain, Murchison found their next customers when he realized neither Albuquerque nor Santa Fe used natural gas. Instead of hunting and fishing, the two pals ended up spending weeks negotiating the acquisition of a small oil company that had found gas in the mountains near Farmington. Once the gas supply was secured, Murchison had little trouble obtaining a franchise to supply Santa Fe. Albuquerque was another story. A half dozen competitors sprang up to bid against him. At a city council meeting the mayor asked whether any bidder could supply a twenty-five-thousand-dollar cash bond to insure its financial viability. Everyone raised their hand. When the mayor asked for fifty thousand, Murchison and another man raised their hands. When the bidding went to one hundred thousand dollars, only Murchison raised his hand. He scribbled out a check and left with the franchise.
    As they walked outside, Cain shot him a glance. “We don’t have that kind of money in the bank,” he said.
    “We’ll worry about that when we get back,” Murchison said.
    Murchison operated this way the rest of his life; as the son of a banker, he knew he could always find a gullible loan officer somewhere. In this case he took a train directly to Dallas and met with one of his father’s oldest friends, Nathan Adams, president of First National of Dallas. Adams was a crucial building block in the budding Murchison empire and