Showdown at Waggoner Ranch
(Page 3 of 4)
We were talking in Bucky’s office, a large corner suite on the second floor of the long, low W. T. Waggoner Estate Building just off the main highway in Vernon. Photographs of his wife and children occupied a bookshelf beside four footballs labeled “Coach Bucky Wharton”—gifts from former University of Texas coach David McWilliams, who’d invited Wharton to join him on the sidelines at several UT games. Bucky looks more like a Little League coach than a cattle baron. He’s not a large man, but his pleasant and unassuming manner and his quiet, considered confidence give him stature. His most arresting feature is his green eyes, which are reminiscent of the luminous eyes that made his grandmother, the original Electra, such a commanding figure. He usually dresses in jeans, a polo shirt, and cowboy boots; in the three times I was with him, he never wore a hat or tried to act like a cowboy. Though he wouldn’t talk about the lawsuit, he spoke freely about his bewildering transformation from New Mexico schoolboy to co-owner of one of the country’s most famous ranches.
In the late sixties Bucky attended the University of the Americas, in Mexico City. Shortly after leaving, he got his draft notice, at the height of the Vietnam War. He was a nineteen-year-old Army sergeant at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he learned that the lawsuits had been resolved and that he was heir to 50 percent of the W. T. Waggoner estate. The other half belonged to Electra Waggoner Biggs, through various trusts. The summer after his discharge, in 1970, Bucky decided it was time to move to the ranch and begin his real education. Settling into an apartment attached to Buster’s former home at Zacaweista, he enrolled at Midwestern State University, in Wichita Falls, and commuted between ranch and campus, pursing a degree in business administration while learning the ins and outs of the estate. “I worked for six months with various people in the oil and the ranching divisions,” he told me. “I worked a couple of weeks gauging wells. Joe Roberson showed me how to read the books. It was a crash course, but I learned more in those six months than I’d learned my whole life.” In 1975 he married Joline, a young woman he had met in Albuquerque seven years earlier. She joined him in the apartment, and they set to work remodeling the Zacaweista mansion, which had sat vacant for nearly a dozen years.
“It was in terrible condition,” Joline explained as she showed me through their home. “Houses back then were very dark, with low ceilings and small windows. We opened it up.” Today the home is bright and welcoming. The entryway is glass, and there is a skylight over the vaulted ceiling above the staircase. Instead of six bedrooms, it now has four. Buster’s card room, on the second floor, which was once walled in leather, now has the original wood exposed. An enormous picture window with a panoramic view of the ranch replaced the porthole-size window of 1910. When I asked Joline if they had found any memorabilia from Electra’s time, she laughed. “Not a shred,” she told me. “After Bucky’s father died, Lula [the last of Buster’s four wives] stripped this place. She took everything—the furniture, even the light fixtures.” Handsome and trim, Joline once competed in the New York and Paris marathons and still gets up before first light to run. Cowboys ambling from the bunkhouse to the cookhouse for their five-thirty breakfast see her loping across pastures, dodging bulls and pump jacks.
“The color of this ground is the color of the ranch,” Bucky told me as we bumped over the maze of rutted roads, he driving his Toyota Land Cruiser and talking nonstop and I jumping out to open gates. Even the water in Beaver Creek was red—a sign, Bucky said, that it was fresh and contained no gypsum. Bucky’s pride in this place was unmistakable. He pointed to an impenetrable thicket of mesquite and told me, “Thirty years ago we cleared that pasture, all the way to Beaver Creek. Now look at it! We’ve root-plowed, sprayed, pulled it up with a tractor, dug it up with a backhoe. It’s a constant battle.” Over these past three decades, Bucky has absorbed every inch of this ranch and most of its colorful history.
Traveling to the Four Corners line camp, where Guy Waggoner’s great home once stood, I tried to imagine that day in the twenties when Anne Burnett Waggoner, the fifth of Guy’s eight wives, decided she’d had enough. Guy had a weakness for the ladies; he once skipped town with the lead actress from a traveling burlesque show. Anne was the granddaughter of W.T.’s friend Burk Burnett and hardly the type to sit around waiting for a roving husband. One morning she packed, jumped in her car, and headed for town, not bothering to stop and open any of the ten gates on the way. “She finally pulled up in front of the Vernon drugstore, pieces of gate and fence hanging off the car,” Bucky tells me. “She left the motor running, didn’t even bother to shut it off, and walked to the depot and took the next train out of town.” When Guy moved to New Mexico, Tony Hazelwood, who hated his guts, showed his disrespect by storing oats on the home’s prized hardwood floors. The house eventually fell apart and was torn down. Its absence symbolizes the fate of the Guy Waggoner clan in the history of the ranch.
AFTER GUY DIED, E. PAUL AND BUSTER faced the issue of what would become of his shares in the Waggoner estate. Either Guy’s two children would become their partners or E. Paul and Buster would have to buy them out. They chose the latter. Meanwhile, W.T.’s widow, Ella, ran the ranch as dowager empress until her death, in 1959. Buster received income from his share of the estate, but he had no role in the ranch management and was happy to leave the ranching to E. Paul. Buster never liked cows; the only thing about the ranch he cared about was horses, especially his polo ponies. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice that E. Paul’s clan—especially his socialite wife, Helen—considered Electra’s line of the family to be tainted and Buster to be an irresponsible spendthrift, and they were plotting for the day when they could force the Whartons out.
Hunting big game in Africa and hosting extravagant parties at the ranch occupied most of Buster’s time. Millionaire ranchers from Argentina and the elite of East Coast society came in their private planes for weekends of polo and debauchery. “I can remember the Firestones and the Beverages and the cream of New York society flying in for those matches,” Don Ross Malone, a Vernon attorney and son of the former game warden for the ranch, told me. “My first job was walkin’ hots”—cooling down winded horses—”between chuckers. I got two dollars a match.” Cecil Smith, the world-famous ten-goal player, rode with Buster’s Waggoner Ranch team.
By the late fifties, forces were marshalling to ensure total control for E. Paul and his heirs. The cost of buying out Guy’s third of the estate had put a crimp in the flow of dividends, and Buster was running short of money. He borrowed a large sum from his nonagenarian grandmother, Ella, who later transferred the note to E. Paul. In early 1963 Buster filed a lawsuit, seeking a dispensation to sell shares, but he died before the matter was litigated.
By that time, Ella had died, at the age of one hundred, and her successor as trustee was John Biggs, the son-in-law whom E. Paul had groomed for the job. Biggs’ second in command was comptroller Killen Moore, a onetime Internal Revenue Service agent. After Biggs fell ill with cancer in the early seventies, Moore was essentially running things, and the board—which then consisted of Electra II and Bucky—appointed him trustee after Biggs died, in 1975. Behind his back, other employees referred to Moore as Rasputin. Quietly and efficiently, Moore began to purge anyone friendly to the Wharton half of the trust: Jim Hughes, who most people had believed would succeed Biggs as trustee; Joe Roberson, the auditor who was being groomed as comptroller; Bill McBroom, the head of the oil division; and Ross Malone, the game warden.
Moore astonished Bucky by trying to buy his stock in the estate. “Killen knew that Bucky was strapped with legal fees from the court battles of the sixties,” Hughes told me. “He offered him pennies on the dollar for his fifty percent share.”
“It was a paltry amount,” Roberson agreed. “He offered to pay Bucky’s attorney fees and pitch in an extra one million. Killen told Bucky, ‘Take this, go back to New Mexico, and live your life. You have no voice here and you never will.’”
Though their homesteads are only a few miles apart, the families of Bucky Wharton, the original Electra’s grandson, and Gene Willingham, Electra II’s son-in-law, might as well live on separate continents. They seldom speak and hardly ever socialize. At Christmas, they exchange gifts—by messenger. “I saw them together at a backyard wedding two years ago, but they stayed on opposite sides of the yard,” Jim Hughes told me. “It’s a weird deal. Gene’s got to drive within fifty feet of Bucky’s house every morning and again every evening to get to his own place. What must be going through his mind?” But the Willinghams aren’t talking—about the lawsuit or anything else.
Since Electra II’s death, in 2001, the board has been composed of these two men who rarely speak to each other. Gene is, by all accounts, gregarious and outgoing, a typical good ol’ boy who enjoys playing dominoes at the country club. He was teaching at Will Rogers Elementary School, in Houston, where Helen Biggs was also a teacher. They married in 1969. When Helen’s father died, in 1975, they moved to the ranch, where Gene gradually assumed the position of head of the family. By contrast, Bucky is reserved, private, and serious about his business affairs. He owns a bank, an oil company, and a cattle company, but he is happiest when he is working outdoors or having dinner with his family.
Waggoner Ranch cowboys like and respect both families and consider them fair and generous. “I’ll tell you one thing: Mrs. Biggs [Electra II] was the nicest person in the world to me,” said Jimmy Lee Smith, who cowboyed at the ranch for 38 years, rising from cowpuncher to foreman and ranch manager. “When my wife got sick with cancer, Gene and Buck got the company plane to fly her to M. D. Anderson. Mrs. Biggs called ahead and had the director meet us on the front step. They were super, super people.” Nevertheless, Smith resigned in 1997, tired of being caught in the middle of the power struggle. At that time, Gene wanted to sell leases to hunters and Bucky didn’t. The cowboys sided with Bucky, who felt that hunters left litter, cut fences, and left gates open. The dispute seemed to highlight Bucky and Gene’s contrasting attitudes—one loved the land, the other loved the money. As Smith put it, “They were a beer-and-champagne twosome.”
