The Best of the Texas Century—Business
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Skyscraper of the Century
It isn’t the tallest building in Houston, but the Williams Tower certainly stands out from the crowd. Way out. In fact, the 64-story skyscraper—better known by its former name, Transco Tower—isn’t anywhere near downtown. That’s what’s so great about it. Its location proved that business and commerce didn’t have to be confined to the city’s center, and prosperity could and did exist outside the loop. (That would be Loop 610, for those of you unfamiliar with the city.) Completed in 1983, the tower was developed by Gerald Hines, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, and built right across the street from the Galleria; with its magnificent 88-foot granite arched entry, an adjacent 3-acre park with a 64-foot-high waterwall, and a helipad and revolving light atop its roof, it signifies Texas opulence at its best. Runner-up: Reunion Tower in Dallas—thanks to the TV show Dallas, the state’s most recognizable skyscraper. Patricia Busa McConnico
Dynasty of the Century
Sid Richardson was a venerable wildcatter, discovering fields in East and West Texas and accumulating such wealth that Life magazine recognized him as America’s first billionaire. A crusty, publicity-shy figure, he preferred playing cards with his friends to mingling with the public. When he died unmarried in 1959, he bequeathed his fortune to his nephew, Perry R. Bass, who maintained the family’s considerable oil and ranching holdings through the early eighties. In 1983 he passed control to his son Sid. Sid and his brothers have taken decidedly different paths than their father and great-uncle, expanding the empire through diversification—first collectively, through Wall Street takeovers and buyouts engineered by financier Richard Rainwater, and then individually, in a variety of projects that included reviving the downtown of their hometown, Fort Worth. Their cumulative net worth—$12.8 billion, according to Forbes—makes the Basses Texas’ richest (and, arguably, most powerful) clan. Runners-up: the Hunts, whose wealth, conservatism, and abiding interest in football helped to shape the Dallas we know today. Joe Nick Patoski
Boom-and-Bust Town of the Century
The financial capital of the oil-rich Permian Basin, Midland has seen its fortune ebb and flow since wildcatters first arrived in the twenties. Black gold transformed it in the fifties from a small ranching town to a city whose skyline could be seen thirty miles away, but its financial stability has never been certain: Its economy slumped in the sixties; flourished during the Arab oil embargo of the seventies, when it was one of the richest cities per capita in the U.S.; and then bottomed out in the eighties, when crude hit $10 a barrel—a devastating depression from which it has never fully recovered. Runner-up: Laredo, which has long been dependent on the peso’s unpredictable value; prosperous in the seventies and in economic free fall in the early eighties—when its unemployment rate reached 27 percent—it is now, thanks to NAFTA, the nation’s second-fastest-growing city. Pamela Colloff
Raider of the Century
Greenmail. White knights. Poison pills. How quaint those phrases sound today even though they entered the lexicon just fifteen years ago. At the time, takeovers were so new and threatening that Congress fought over legislation designed to prevent them. Now they’re commonplace and seldom hostile, which they definitely were in the past. And the reason for these changes in practice and in attitude is T. Boone Pickens, Jr., of Amarillo. There were plenty of corporate raiders in the eighties, but Boone was the only one with a philosophy. All he was trying to do, he said, was earn money for his shareholders; corporations were getting too fat, management was getting too rich, and the time had long passed for American business to shake itself free of complacency. And he was funny. He referred to one CEO of a Fortune 500 company as “so old he shouldn’t buy green bananas.” Boone himself soon lost his luster. His company’s stock sank, and he became embroiled in several ill-advised public spats that made him seem petty. But today, whenever someone talks about the need to be lean and mean to survive in a competitive world, you’re hearing a bit of Boone’s legacy. Runner-up: David Batchelder, because after learning the takeover game at Pickens’ knee, he set up his own company and tried to take over Mesa from him. Gregory Curtis
Environmental Battle of the Century
In 1978 Mary Evelyn Stokes Johnson filed a $3.5 million suit against B. F. Goodrich, Neches Butane, Texas—U.S. Chemical, and 26 other companies with petrochemical plants in the Golden Triangle, alleging that the pollution emitted by the plants had caused her husband’s leukemia. Carlos Dwight Stokes died when he was 25; although he had never worked in any of the plants that dot the coastal region around Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, he (like everyone else in the area) was constantly subjected to their by-products. Her suit was settled in 1984, but the issue never was. Over the years, more and more cases of leukemia were reported in the region, and it became known as the Cancer Belt—a moniker that sticks today. Runner-up: The fight over the proposed nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca. Patricia Busa McConnico
Visionary of the Century
Some people are visionaries about the future of business. Others are visionaries about the future of society. Arthur Temple, Jr., was a visionary about both. In 1939, the year that Temple came to work for his family’s timber company after dropping out of college, East Texas resembled a patchwork of feudal estates. Timber barons housed their workers in ramshackle company towns and paid them with company scrip that could be used only at the company store. Temple saw that the system was both inhumane and inefficient—and could not last. He paved the muddy streets of Diboll, gave the workers deeds to their houses, and began to build sleepy Southern Pine Lumber Company into an industry giant. He advocated the construction of reservoirs that would provide recreation for the region and defeated rival owners who objected that the lakes would inundate timberlands. One by one, Temple’s rivals shut down or sold out, and the names of their company towns began to disappear from the map. Under Arthur Junior, Southern Pine became Temple Industries, merged with Time Inc., and eventually was spun off as Temple-Inland, a Fortune 500 company. Runner-up: Erik Jonsson, the co-founder of Texas Instruments, who as mayor of Dallas helped restore the city’s good name in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination and led the campaign for the Dallas—Fort Worth International Airport. Paul Burka
International Agreement of the Century
In 1942 the United States government signed an agreement with Mexico called the Mexican Farm Labor Program Agreement, otherwise known as the Bracero Program. With the American workforce depleted by World War II and straining to fill jobs, the program was the first attempt to regulate Mexican braceros (“strong-armed men”) who crossed the border into California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas by guaranteeing them adequate housing and food and providing a minimum wage of 30 cents an hour. Texas farmers lobbied Congress against having to provide and pay so much, while Mexico, convinced that Texas was a hotbed of racism, forbade its laborers to work in the state legally until 1947 (though during those five years many workers crossed the Rio Grande anyway). By the fifties, both sides had relented, and they participated in the program until it was terminated in 1964. Runner-up: the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994 and promoted trade and investment among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Brian D. Sweany
inventorInventor of the Century
No pocket calculators. No digital watches. No 32-inch televisions. And, yes, no computers, Internet, or e-mail. None of these would exist if it weren’t for Jack Kilby. Kilby, who grew up in Kansas, moved to Dallas in May 1958 to work for Texas Instruments. Two months later, with TI’s employees on summer vacation—Kilby wasn’t eligible because he hadn’t been with the company long enough—he was working alone in his lab when the idea hit him for the integrated circuit, or silicon chip. Now 75, the man who revolutionized electronics and ushered in what has been called the second Industrial Revolution still reports to work at least one day a week to TI’s Kilby Center in North Dallas. Not bad for a soft-spoken engineer who received only one job offer when he graduated from the University of Illinois. Runner-up: Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., who in 1909 patented the Hughes rock bit, a breakthrough in oil-field technology that could tear through rock ten times faster than previous designs. Brian D. Sweany
Rags-to-Riches Story of the Century
It’s a good thing that Ira Yates, Jr., wasn’t big on advice. With both of his parents dead before he reached the age of thirteen, he found himself on his own, working as a cowboy and buying cattle when he could. Against the advice of friends, he bought a foundering dry-goods store in Rankin in 1913. Within two years he had turned the business around, bringing in $5,000 a month. Yates, however, longed to return to the land, so in 1915, he took the opportunity to swap a 16,640-acre spread in Pecos County for the store plus some cash, even though a friend warned that the land was so inhospitable that “a crow would not fly over it.” A decade later, on October 28, 1926, Yates became an instant millionaire when he struck oil. His field became one of the most prolific in the world, producing more than 1.6 billion barrels of crude by 1997. Runner-up: Columbus “Dad” Joiner, the wildcatter who made and lost two oil fortunes before striking it rich in Rusk County with the Daisy Bradford No. 3. Brian D. Sweany
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