The Bachelor

The legends about him were legion. Dun & Bradstreet, so the story goes, once characterized him: "Estimated worth, $500,000,000. Pays bills promptly." Yet he had been broke so often, he once quipped, that "I thought it was habit forming." Always on the go, he kept three sets of suitcases in his two-room suite at the Fort Worth Club, packed with clothes for three different climates--hot, cold and medium.

Folksy, derrick-sized Sid Williams Richardson, unlike some of his fellow Texas wheeler-dealers, never hunted publicity, often quoted one of his favorite maxims: "You ain't learnin' nothin' when you're talkin'!" His dry, country humor and his ability to translate a complex business or political situation into plain horse sense made him a number of friends, but never found him a wife. When needled about his bachelorhood, Richardson explained his private theory about life: "Do right and fear no man; don't write and fear no woman. They're all wantin' a landin' field, but mine's fogged in."

The Trader. Richardson was born in the East Texas town of Athens in 1891, the seventh son of a farmer and cattle raiser. Encouraged and coached by his father, Sid began trading, at 17 made $3,500 by shrewd cattle dealing. For a year and a half he attended Waco's Baylor University and Abilene's Simmons College, left after telling friends that he saw no reason to spend his time in the library when there was so much money to be made on the outside. He served a three-year apprenticeship in the oil business as salesman, scout and leaseman, left the oilfields to return to his first love, cattle raising. His herd died of tick fever, putting him $6,000 in debt to the Athens bank. After another hitch in the oilfields, Richardson returned to Athens a year later in a brand new Cadillac, "swung around the square so's all the bench warmers would see me good," and then went to the bank and paid back the cash. Then he drove out of town again.

He drove right into a million dollars when he began trading in oil leases, was wiped out in 1921, when oil prices tumbled, made another fortune and went broke again early in the Depression, when overproduction in the East Texas fields brought posted prices down to 10-c- a barrel. He lived on credit, unable to pay either his office rent or his $8 monthly dues at the Fort Worth Club. In 1932, as oil prices began to rise, Sid came out of hibernation.

Credit on the Barrel. Wangling money, equipment and labor on credit, Richardson began wildcatting, brought in West Texas' famed Keystone field. "It was luck," he recalled, surveying his pyramiding debts, which chased right after his skyrocketing wealth. "I did it by jumping up in the air six feet and holding myself up by my own bootstraps."

Richardson's interests soon moved beyond oil. He advised F.D.R. on oil production during World War II, traveled to SHAPE in Paris in 1952 to help persuade

Dwight Eisenhower, old Texas friend, to run for President. (They had met shortly after Pearl Harbor, when Richardson invited Ike to share his compartment on a war-crowded train.) When Old Friend Robert R. Young was fighting for control of the New York Central, Richardson and Wheeler-Dealer Clint Murchison, his partner in many ventures, teamed up to buy the 800,000 shares of Central stock that assured Young's victory. Richardson also dabbled in chemicals, drugstores, cattle ranches and race tracks (he gave profits from California's Del Mar track to Boys, Inc., an organization to combat juvenile delinquency), liked to say that he would still be trading "when they bury me."

Last week, still trading and still playing, Sid Richardson, 68, went to bed at his vast St. Joseph Island retreat in the Gulf of Mexico, died in his sleep.

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