When We Were Kings
Once upon a time, their ranch was the grandest, not only in texas but also in the world, captained by visionaries and bound by blood. Those days are over.
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Suddenly, the King Ranch family was full of millionaires, and many of them—those from Tio’s generation—were far different from the five Klebergs who made the pact to keep the ranch together. The new clan began to find a world of opportunity beyond the King Ranch gates. Many, including Tio’s two brothers, moved to the more exclusive neighborhoods of Texas cities and made their living as investors or venture capitalists. One heir became a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Another owned a contemporary art gallery in San Antonio. Another became a champion equestrian rider in Florida. Because of the luck of inheritance, the ranch’s largest individual stock holder, with between 5 and 10 percent of the stock, was Richard Sugden, a doctor in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Sugden’s mother was Mary Etta Kleberg, the daughter of one of the original five Kleberg children. Mary Etta had spent much of her childhood on the ranch, married a Naval officer, and given birth to Richard, her only child, who was raised mostly in California, Wyoming, and overseas. When she died, he received all of her stock. “Imagine what Captain King’s reaction would be if he knew that a doctor at a Wyoming ski resort owned more of King Ranch than anyone else,” marvels one family member.
Many members of the older generation were worried what the infusion of money would do to the family. John Armstrong, an esteemed family member who became president of the ranch after Jim Clement retired, said in a 1980 interview, “If the next generation is content to live off their income, then we’ve lost it.” Although a handful of new heirs used their dividends to buy smaller ranches for themselves, the vast majority never visited the King Ranch except for hunting trips in the winter and for the family’s “Summer Camp” reunion and annual business meeting, where, according to one family member, “everybody got to play cowboy for a week before returning to their real lives.” In their group photograph taken at Summer Camp, they seemed to embody the best of the American aristocracy, with pointed noses and high cheekbones and graceful smiles. The only one who looked a little out of place in those photos, with his great curlicue mustache resembling the Running W brand, was Tio Kleberg.
By the late eighties Tio was the only member of his generation willing to stay on the ranch. (Another fifth-generation family member, Martin Clement, who lived in Kingsville, supervised the Big House, which was used as a lodge for visiting family members and special guests.) Tio, who was ßuent in Spanish, had received his nickname as a teenager from the Kineños, who thought he had the same drive as his great-uncle Bob (tio is “uncle” in Spanish). Like Bob Kleberg, Tio was always looking for ways to help the ranch prosper in difficult times. He knew that the ranch had to find something to replace the oil royalties that for so long had bolstered the King Ranch cattle operations, especially during droughts. (A single summer drought could cost the ranch up to $3 million.) At family meetings Tio said that the ranch should become more of what he called a “resource-management business” as opposed to strictly a cattle business. He suggested that cotton and milo farming be increased at the ranch and that more than half of its land be leased to commercial hunting opertions. (Because of the ranch’s reputation as a paradise for trophy wildlife—it is home to white-tailed deer, Nilgai antelope, quail, and feral hogs—corporations such as Dresser Industries and Triton Energy were willing to spend $8 an acre for a lease, sharing the scrubland with the cattle.) To the surprise of many of the older, more conservative family members, Tio said that Uncle Bob’s prized Santa Gertrudis could be made better. Taking a huge gamble, Tio hired breeding experts and budgeted about $4 million for fertility studies, DNA mapping, and breeding programs. He and the managers introduced a new composite breed called the Santa Cruz, which some experts said was leaner and more fertile than the Santa Gertrudis and which Tio himself claimed would one day become the dominant breed on the ranch.
In other respects, however, Tio was unabashedly old-fashioned. In his direct, ranch-raised speaking style, he liked to talk about “doin’ things the King Ranch way—doin’ it right, doin’ it with quality.” He made a point of riding horseback through every pasture. He did not miss a roundup. According to those who worked with him, Tio followed the old family creed that a cattleman never left a herd until all the cattle work was finished. “He didn’t just go out there, watch for a while, and then get in a car and drive away,” says one former King Ranch board member.
“He was just like his father—a servant to that land,” adds Bruce Cheeseman, the archivist and historian at King Ranch from 1988 until 1997. “He believed a family leader should be there to answer the phone in the middle of the night if there was a problem. He believed the family had an obligation to take care of the Kineños. And he believed the family had a responsibility to Kingsville.” Tio always made sure to allocate about $150,000 of his department’s annual budget for Kingsville civic projects, from Fourth of July parades to livestock shows, and he helped develop a plan to revitalize the downtown. He sat on the board of the local university and the local hospital; Janell was a longtime member of the local school board. When the family’s board of directors decided in the mid-eighties that the ranch could no longer support so many Kineños—an estimated seven hundred of them worked on the ranch—Tio was ordered to make the cutbacks. He had to look into the eyes of the descendants of the original Mexican villagers who had followed Captain King into Texas and tell them there were few jobs left for them and fewer for their children. Most of the Kineños were phased out through an early retirement program. Tio had the homes of the oldest Kineños—homes they had lived in since birth—moved off the ranch, relocated in Kingsville, and given to them as a reward for their service.
TIO WAS NOT A SAINT. HE WOULD LOSE his temper at meetings when he thought the family committee was losing its focus, and his straightforward manner occasionally offended relatives. One morning a prominent shareholder came into the kitchen at the Big House and said, “Room number two is too bright in the morning, and the peacocks wandering the grounds are making too much noise.” Tio grinned and said, “This is a ranch, not your home. You’re supposed to get your ass out of bed.” Other shareholders didn’t agree with Tio’s ranching methods. Some thought he had blundered badly during a drought in the late eighties when he decided to lease pastures in North Texas and move much of the ranch’s breeding herd there. Tio had gambled that he would be able to wait out the drought up north and avoid selling the herd at a loss. But the drought lasted three years, costing the King Ranch several million dollars in unrecoverable feed costs and pasture leases. There were other family members who believed that Tio had wasted King Ranch money on the introduction of the Santa Cruz; privately they said he was trying to draw attention to himself. Others thought he wasn’t controlling the hunting program adequately, and a few believed that he should have developed a better quarter horse breeding program.
“It doesn’t matter where we are living,” says Richard Sugden. “We have our opinions on what can make King Ranch better. We are an honest family and we ask a lot of pointed questions and we don’t hesitate to express our thoughts. I guess it’s in our blood.” Tio didn’t win any friends in the family when he said once to a family group that no one cared to come to the ranch to learn how the cattle operation worked. Tio says that during his tenure, only one family member ever came, and he was someone who was looking for tips on how to run his own ranch. “But let’s face it,” Tio adds with a shrug. “In this job you’re always going to do something that will piss off someone in the family. There are still members of this family that hate the idea that we farm on this ranch, and there are some who’d like for the ranch to be one big pristine national wildlife preserve, barely touched by human hands.”
Regardless of family disputes, says Bruce Cheeseman, “I always assumed that the family felt a sense of gratitude to Tio and Janell for being part of the community and for staying there during the entire godforsaken summer while everyone else got to live elsewhere and take vacations and cash their dividend checks. Who could have guessed the day would come when the family would not support the very person who had been so loyal to them?”
But by the nineties, the values that were once so important to the King Ranch family no longer translated to the bottom line. To keep the profits rolling in, King Ranch, Inc., was turning into a highly competitive multinational agribusiness and energy corporation. And in such a corporation, where success is gauged on the financial returns of its investments, a family’s heritage only goes so far.
WHAT CHANGED THE KING RANCH as much as anything—and what ultimately led to Tio’s downfall—was the family members’ growing preoccupation with their stock dividends, coupled with the entirely legitimate fear that oil and gas production on the ranch would start declining as early as the year 2000. The family also knew that the number of King Ranch heirs was rapidly multiplying: More than two hundred family members were projected to be holding stock by the year 2021. “That’s a lot of baby heifers for one mother cow to nurse,” says Helen Groves, one of the family matriarchs. If the dividends were going to remain high in the future, the King Ranch had no choice but to reposition itself and diversify its businesses.
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