H.L. Hunt, poker player billionaire

By the time their eighth child arrived on Feb.11, 1889, the Hunts were running out of names as well as room. The couple called the boy Haroldson Lafayette Jr., never dreaming he would prefer to go by his initials and someday would be the richest man in America.

Tutored at home by his mother, H.L. Hunt was reading at the age of two. Although he went to school only to play with friends at recess, he got a good education for the times.

At 16 Hunt worked his way west doing odd jobs for meals and traveling money. He might have ended up a victim of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, if a semipro baseball team had not invited him to Nevada for a tryout.

Hunt returned to Illinois in 1911 to bury his father and to collect a small inheritance, which he used for a down payment on a plantation in Arkansas. Convinced the conquered Confederacy was a doomed wasteland, the elder Hunt had left the same state soon after the Civil War.

After ten years in the cotton fields, Hunt was on the verge of hard-earned prosperity. But reckless speculation in cotton futures cost him his shirt, and at 32 he was flat broke.

Instead of cursing his luck, Hunt borrowed 50 bucks and headed for the nearest oil boom. He knew absolutely nothing about the brawling business but instinctively recognized a golden opportunity.

At first the savvy amateur turned a tidy profit buying and selling oil leases. Realizing the really big money was hidden underground, he began drilling his own wells. Weekend poker winnings covered expenses and enabled him to keep searching for the elusive black gold.

Hunt was an amazing card player, so good that sore losers often swore he cheated. In fact, he did not have to resort to sleight of hand to fleece outclassed opponents but relied instead on a photographic memory. He could automatically recall every card and the order in which they appeared.

Hunt also enjoyed more than his share of luck in the Arkansas oilfields. By 1930 he had brought in several gushers and was on his way to making his first million.

In the fall of that year, Hunt was among the hundreds of fortune hunters drawn to East Texas by the news of Dad Joiner’s phenomenal find. The frenzied purchase of promising leases in and around the old wildcatter’s rig left him with just a hundred dollars to his name.

Despite his pitiful bank balance, Hunt raised enough cash to buy out Joiner. Then he lined up the financing not only to develop the field but to fight the more than 300 lawsuits that resulted in a ten-year court battle.

The East Texas bonanza put Hunt over the top. By the Second World War, he had become the biggest independent operator on earth and owned more oil reserves that the Axis nations.

In the late 1940’s, Hunt reigned over a private empire that included three oil companies, a major refinery, a chain of 300 gas stations and a food company. With a weekly profit that averaged a cool million, he bought real estate in every major city in the South along with ranches, cotton plantations and citrus groves.

A resident of Dallas since 1938, Hunt lived on White Rock Lake in a mansion that was the spitting image of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. But wealth alone was not enough to win the acceptance of local society.

The Big D elite, who prided themselves on their good deeds for charity, were shocked by Hunt’s outspoken contempt for donations to the downtrodden. Expressing the opinion that handouts eroded the will to work and the self-respect of the poor, he proudly confessed that he was “more interested in the acquisition of wealth than its disbursement.”

Until 1948 H.L. Hunt was virtually unknown outside the inner circle of Texas multi-millionaires. But a fullpage photo in Life magazine with a caption certifying him as the richest individual in the country put him under the national microscope.

Hunt used the media attention to promote his new mission, a one-man crusade against communism. He bankrolled a broadcast blitz against the Marxist menace that peaked with the program “Life Line” heard on 531 radio stations.

In the hysterical aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, critics held Hunt responsible for the murder of the president. The accusation ignored his support for the Democratic ticket in 1960 and a 1965 statement that the death of JFK was “the greatest blow ever suffered by the cause of freedom.”

Before his passing in 1974, H.L. Hunt felt success had robbed him of what made life worth living -- an old-fashioned challenge. “There are times when I’ve wished I’d wake up stone broke. It would be a great adventure to see how good I was, to see if I could create lots of wealth again.”

Order your copy of “Texas Depression Era Desperadoes” by mailing a check for $24.00 to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.