Mr. De

"He had a complete interest in living."

"He had a vast sense of selfimportance, and was too tough to have had it whipped out of him."

"He was the most stimulating man who ever lived in Dallas."

"He was the vainest son of a bitch that ever lived."

So spoke Texans last week about a short, plump, bigheaded man named E. (for Everette) L. (for Lee) DeGolyer, who towered among the people of Texas and who, last week, surrendered to bad health, shot and killed himself at 70.

In the big world of Texas, where oil millionaires are a breed of cliche, and in the great world of oil commerce beyond,

Mr. De (as they called him) was--with all his $30 million--a different kind of millionaire. Born in a sod hut in Kansas, he became a world-famed geologist, helped found the famed oil-hunting Amerada Petroleum Corp., amassing his millions along the way. Seeking still greater independence, he left Amerada and in 1936 founded the consulting firm of DeGolyer & McNaughton, soon made a new name for himself as a man of integrity and accuracy in the infinitely painstaking business of oil exploration. His uncanny, top-of-the-head appraisal of oil property came to be accepted in Texas as the last word.

Pulling the Switch. But many a Texan was puzzled over Mr. De's refusal to become merely another Cadillac-comforted caricature. He pursued learning as others pursued the black gold. "So you're the Texan who can read," remarked a cynical reporter one day in the library of De-Golyer's impeccably furnished Mexican-style palace in suburban Dallas. Standing in the huge, 15ft-high room choked to the ceiling with some 20.000 volumes--which ranged from rare editions of Copernicus and Francis Bacon to the best sin gle private collection of works about the Southwest--Mr. De assumed a country-boy pose, pshawed that he bought the books for the pretty red bindings, never read a thing. Tough, stubborn, quizzical, Mr. De delighted in pulling such switches; he could sound in turn like a reactionary, a radical, an ignoramus or a bohemian. As an unpredictable intellectual, he singlehandedly derricked the foundering Saturday Review of Literature out of a hole in 1941 with a check for $22,500 (and when Editor Norman Cousins offered to have papers drawn up, replied: "We shook hands, didn't we?"). Later, when Cousins turned up in Dallas to speak at a meeting of the pacifist Society of Friends, local right-wingers tried to set up a boycott, went to Mr. De for support. Snapped he: "You'll see my answer in the morning papers." In the morning paper was the news that he would introduce Cousins at the Friends gathering.

Conversation Wing-Ding. Of all things, Mr. De perhaps loved best a good wingding of a conversation; in one evening's discussion he dwelt perceptively on Diego Rivera, the habits of alligators, Dickens, the Oklahoma legislature, fine printing, Arabian oil, academic freedom, the winter treatment for banana trees in Dallas patios. And what he most abhorred, in his vain way, was weakness--especially weakness of the intellect. Aging, the sight of one eye totally gone, he began to suffer the blood-draining anguish of aplastic anemia. He feared that somehow his mind soon would be affected, found the thought too much to bear.

"There are two kinds of millionaires," Mr. De used to say. "The silver-spoon boys and the rabbit's-foot boys." He classed himself with the rabbit-footers.

But among many Texans who stopped last week to recall the vision of the small, strong man with blue eyes, there was the knowledge that there were not two, but three kinds of Texas millionaires: silver spoon, rabbit's foot and Mr. De.

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