H. L. Hunt sat at the kitchen table, fidgeting with the straw boater in his hands, trying his best to avoid a look of boredom. Seated at the end of the table, his oldest son, Hassie, wore the slightest trace of a smile.
Lyda Hunt had felt her husband’s restlessness for days, almost as soon as H. L. and Hassie had returned from the oil fields to sit with them for what was surely going to be the family’s last baby. But that had been two weeks ago, in mid-July. And now, as Lyda sat in the path of the electric fan, her breathing forced, she felt the weight of her husband’s barely concealed exasperation, and reached a decision.
“June, you and Hassie need to get back to the field.”
“No, Mom, everything can wait,” H. L. protested, though not too strongly.
“No, it cannot,” she said, firmly. “Our business needs attention, so do go back. I have done this six times. You two get on with the drilling, and Margaret will take care of me and the baby.”
With that, H. L. Hunt exhaled, and stood up, and everyone relaxed. Very soon, he would be on his way, doing what he did best: Moving, acting, striving further in his journey to make his mark on the world. And Lyda, once again, would be the head of the household.
She had returned a month earlier, in the summer of 1932, from their new home in Tyler to El Dorado, Arkansas, where the family had lived for most of the 1920s. She wanted to be close to her physician, Dr. Murphy, and have her last baby in the comfort of the three-story brick English-revival house known as “The Pines.”
Within the hour, H. L. and the fifteen-year-old Hassie were on their way, the car moving past Lyda’s beloved tulip beds, its taillights disappearing behind the row of pine trees in front of the house. They would be back to work by the morning.
Lyda Hunt, pious, steady, and learned, stood barely five feet tall, and weighed 150 pounds when she wasn’t pregnant. Now, two weeks overdue and bloated closer to 200 pounds, her face seemed wan, and even getting up to her bedroom on the second floor was an effort. Her oldest daughter, Margaret, just sixteen but already a second mother to the youngest three Hunt children—the nine-year-old Caroline, the six-year-old Bunker, and the three-year-old Herbert—looked concerned as she followed her mother from room to room.
Later that night, after the children were put to bed and the kitchen lights were out, Margaret came into her mother’s room to check on her. Formally and unsentimentally, Lyda spoke directly to her daughter.
“I feel fine, Margaret, and I am sorry to put this burden on you, but people of forty-three do not customarily have children. So just in case anything should happen to me, the clothes I want to wear are in a suit-box in the closet.”
Margaret Hunt had never considered losing her mother before, but she was beginning to understand the gravity of the ordeal ahead. She returned to her room and slept fitfully until, early the next morning, Lyda summoned her in the dark, and urged her daughter to drive them to the hospital.
Through the quiet streets of El Dorado, a nervous Margaret negotiated the family car to the hospital, stealing frightened sideways peeks at her mother seated beside her, face contorted with pain.
Several hours later, on the morning of August 2, 1932, “Baby Hunt”—the name Lamar would come weeks later, with no middle name, as H. L. and Lyda had already worked their way through homages on both sides of the family tree—was born at the El Dorado hospital. By the end of that week, Lyda was out of the hospital and back in the home in El Dorado, nursing her baby, with Margaret helping in any way she could. By mid-August, Lyda and Margaret and baby Lamar were back in Tyler, in the crowded, three-bedroom home on Wooldridge Street where the Hunt family had settled after their move from El Dorado.
So Lamar Hunt’s story was just beginning, even as the legendary saga of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt and their family was well underway. In a land convulsed and crippled by the seismic financial and social trauma of the Depression, men fought for their survival and fortunes in the same breath. The cities of America knew the breadlines, and the long procession of migrants, looking forlornly for regular work. But across the South, in the small towns and hollers, the transitory phenomenon was even more noticeable. Men picked up and embarked for new surroundings at the hint of money.
And when the real strike came, in October 1930, the southwest United States was transformed. They came on horses, trains, wagons, and cars (the latter often getting stuck in the quagmires of the unpaved streets in the oil boomtowns of Henderson and Kilgore, Texas). There was no sense of how long the boom would last or who might prevail. So the temper of the times was bruised, breathless, and distrustful. It was in this world that H. L. Hunt thrived.
He had forever altered his own future and that of his family with his shrewd play on Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner’s seminal Daisy Bradford No. 3 well in Rusk County, Texas, in the dwindling fall days of 1930, cannily capitalizing on the largest oilfield discovery in the world at that time.
H. L. Hunt had gained and lost and regained his fortune by the time of Lamar’s birth, but he was by no means secure. Earlier in 1932, just a week after Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, a ransom note—written on wax paper, inside a burlap bag—was deposited among the azaleas on the Hunt property in Tyler. The note contained a threat to kidnap and kill one of the two oldest children, Hassie or Margaret, if H. L. Hunt didn’t bring a ransom to the Blue Note Club in Tyler. The threat was viewed as serious enough, and H. L. Hunt’s standing substantial enough, to call in the Texas Rangers, with Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas personally handling the case, and apprehending the would-be kidnappers.
The outsized adventure was entirely in keeping with the tone and tenor of the life of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, Jr. Born in 1889 in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, to a Confederate War soldier father and a college-educated mother, Ella Rose Hunt, who’d served as a nurse on the Union side. Home-schooled and precocious, H. L. Hunt, Jr., quickly became known as June or Junie to his family. A restless soul, he left home at age sixteen, returning only after his father’s death six years later. He’d learned a lot in those years, using his mathematical mind to its best advantage in both games of chance and in business. He’d also learned, on what was left of the frontier in the West, to fend and think for himself.
One of the stories he told his sons was about the night he won big at poker at a labor camp in California. After lying awake much of the night, H. L. concluded that in all likelihood he would be rousted while taking the only road into town the next morning. So he left then, in the middle of that night, avoiding the main road, and instead following the train tracks by the moon’s dim light, walking 15 miles due west to the next town, still holding his winnings.
When he returned to Illinois, to bury his father in 1911, he was becoming a striking, if not handsome, young man, with soft skin, a cherubic face, and crystal blue eyes. With his $5,000 inheritance, June decided to go to Arkansas, where H. L. Hunt, Sr., had fought during the Civil War. His father had told June that during the fighting in the Battle of Ditch Bayou, he saw “the richest, best-looking farmland you ever saw.”
H. L. wound up in Lake Village, Arkansas, a bucolic town built on cotton, and a refuge from the bustling Mississippi. The C-shaped lake seemed to jump out of the Mississippi River, just west of Greenville, Mississippi, and when H. L. Hunt arrived, taking up residence at the Lake Shore Hotel, he found a town and a tone to his liking. The town was dignified, cultured, and full of, in his own memory, “the comely ladies of Lake Village with their soft drawls.”
He bought a 960-acre plantation due south of Lake Village, and commenced with the life of a gentleman farmer, overseeing his property. Two years in a row, the rising tides of the Mississippi washed out his crop. But he persevered by other means, keeping his hand in the town dealings and winning a good deal of poker games at the Lake Shore Hotel, as well as high-stakes affairs across the Mississippi River in Greenville.
Soon, H. L. Hunt made the acquaintance of the prominent Lake Villager Nelson Waldo Bunker, proprietor of the town’s general store, postmaster for the village, and all-round lodestar of other community relations. The men hit it off, and soon enough, Hunt—always “girl-minded” in his own words—was courting Bunker’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mattie. That summer, Mattie’s older sister Lyda came home from her teaching job in Jonesboro. June and Lyda shared a few conversations in the Bunker parlor, and he quickly became convinced that he was courting the wrong woman.
Lyda was the third of Pap and Sarah Bunker’s six children. Recognizing her thirst for education, her parents had sent her to a boarding school in Little Rock and then Potter College for Women in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She returned to Arkansas and found work as a teacher in Jonesboro, 200 miles north of Lake Village.
H. L.’s courtship of Lyda, held in the dining rooms, ballrooms, and front porches of Lake Village, was an exercise in willfulness. He respected her intelligence, grace, and self-possession, and the sense that so many had of enjoying the grounded warmth of Lyda’s company. There was an earnest goodness to her that he found comforting, even civilizing.
Conversely, H. L. must have made a distinctive and convincing suitor. He was a distillation of the American virtues of honest craftiness, a keen sense of ingenuity, exacting thrift, and a disregard for pretensions borne of book learning and the trappings of high society. Possessed of a formidable mind, a certifiably photographic memory, and a strong sense of personal manifest destiny, he was a man serenely confident in his own abilities and specialness. His genes, he allowed to Lyda, were special and must be passed on to further generations.
They were married on November 26, 1914, and Mattie was the maid of honor. For a few years, H. L. and Lyda lived a life that was unremarkable, save for the traumatic shifts in fortune that H. L. experienced in the cotton business. Even as they were building a family—Margaret born in 1915, and Haroldson Lafayette Hunt III, or “Hassie,” born in 1917—June’s business acumen kept them solvent.
It was in 1921, while about to make yet another plantation deal, when June had a change of heart. He caught wind of the oil rush in El Dorado, 90 miles to the west, and decided after a mere few minutes of reflection to turn his attention to the burgeoning new business.
In the slapped-together oil towns, filled with card sharps and prostitutes, men and women possessed of empty bluster and a desperate need to make a score, H. L. Hunt confirmed something about himself. In matters of business, he was not merely smarter than most other men, he was more principled as well. Others might not have been able to cope with the convulsive uncertainty, but H. L.’s nerve was staunch. He could unabashedly ask for help when he needed it, confident in the rectitude of his mission. In his business dealings, he was content in operating at a profit in that space of chance where other prospectors and speculators might grow wary, wait for further signs of promise, and, in that moment, lose their opportunity. H. L. Hunt did not waver; he surged headlong into the fray, with an unshakeable will, and faith in his own powers of perception and instincts.
Over the next decade, June mastered the arcane art of oil drilling and the buying and selling of oil leases. Buying low, selling high, often keeping a share in leases that he would turn around and sell at profit, he became a premier wildcatter, with a reputation as an indefatigable worker and an honest debtor.
So by the fall of 1930, when H. L. caught wind of a test well being drilled near Kilgore, Texas, he had spent nearly a decade in the oil business. Driving over from El Dorado, he met Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner, and wound up with a crucial stake in the East Texas Oilfield. While the immediate effect of the immense strike was a dilution in the market, with oil prices falling from a dollar to 15 cents a barrel, June knew the long view was good: In a country where cars were being produced in record numbers, and where interstate transportation was booming, the business to be in was oil.
In 1931, he moved his family to Tyler, Texas. By now the Hunts had five children—Margaret, Hassie, Caroline (born in 1923), Bunker (born in 1926), and Herbert (born in 1929). Lyda Hunt was ready to settle down, and quite ready to stop having children. Lamar would be her last.
Margaret later joked that baby Lamar had exhibited the family’s trademark frugality even before he was born, delaying his arrival until August, when many of the (non–air-conditioned) hospitals in Arkansas offered a discount on their surgical procedures. Back in Tyler, Caroline followed the day nurse around the house, rushing to the kitchen when the woman asked for a napkin, only to realize that she’d meant for the girl to fetch a diaper. Fussed over by his sisters, doted on by his mother, Lamar Hunt had arrived in the world with an almost angelic disposition.
Two things happened in 1933 that would shape his early life. Having outgrown their first Tyler home, the Hunts moved into a regal white antebellum mansion on the end of Charnwood Street near downtown Tyler. With its white-columned front porch looking out at the massive magnolia tree abutting the front sidewalk, the home sat on the brick-lined “T” that marked Fanning Street meeting Charnwood. There was a wide yard on the side of the house, bordered by a rectangular walk and azaleas, room on the other side for Lyda to plant her rose garden, and servants’ quarters in the back, where the chef Gertrude and the young maid Pandora Waters were housed.
By then seventeen, Margaret had taken some of the parenting responsibilities from her mother, often tending to Lamar and the toddler Herbert, but when she left for college at Mary Baldwin in Staunton, Virginia, in the fall of 1933, H. L. Hunt recognized a need for more help. That fall, he wrote Margaret a letter in college:
While in New York I hired a Swiss governess, Eugenia de Tuggenier, for Lamar as I would like Mom to be less tied down to family obligations. Raising the first five of you has not left her adequate time for the traveling she enjoys and needs to do with you all to expose you to more of the world. I hired her on the basis of her impressive references, however, Miss Tuggenier’s previous experience had not prepared her for living in Texas. Upon arrival she expected to be threatened by Indians. Also, she has never before experienced devoted colored servants. Bunker calls her “Toogie” to her face which he manages to get away with although she is quite strict otherwise. “Toogie” is teaching Bunker and Herbert to speak French which I do not suppose will damage them. Toogie has some Flying Elephant books which the boys read out loud with her in French . . . Hassie wants to play football in school but Mom and I are not giving our permission. I never knew of a football player who didn’t end up with some permanent injury . . .
Taking residence at Charnwood, the governess shared a room with the infant Lamar, feeding him a bottle and singing him to sleep in French. That Thanksgiving, Lyda left to spend Thanksgiving with H. L., Hassie, and Margaret on the East Coast, while Toogie stayed in Tyler with the three youngest boys.
From an early age, Lamar proved to be keen and sweet; he loved chasing after his brothers and following after his sisters, and was a preternaturally patient and observant traveler. While she by all reports adored Lamar, the new surroundings strained Miss Tuggenier’s Continental sensibilities. One summer day in 1934, supervising Lamar and his siblings out in the yard at Charnwood, the stout Toogie fanned herself and proclaimed, “I would not trade one acre of Switzerland for all of Texas.”
In 1935, with Texas in the midst of a polio epidemic, the Hunts summered in Newport, Rhode Island, taking up residence at a house right off the Atlantic. As the family spent one of their days sunning on the beach, Caroline looked on at her littlest brother, and paused to take a picture.
She caught him that splendid day in his element, contentedly amusing himself in the wet sand, holding his toy boat, setting it in the water and snatching it back, utterly absorbed in play.
•
The same year that Lamar Hunt was born, the United States Caramel Company issued a set of thirty-two sports heroes cards, celebrating the famous athletes of the day. The makeup of the set provided a good index of the sporting popularity of the era: There were twenty-seven baseball players, three boxers, and two golfers. Zero football players. Had there been any, they surely would have been college stars. The National Football League, barely a decade old, consisted of eight franchises, including teams in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Staten Island, New York. The league did not have a championship game, divisions, or a uniform schedule. It was a pale echo of the college game. In 1925, when the Chicago Bears signed Illinois’s Red Grange following his last college game, the Bears drew more fans for Grange’s barnstorming off-season tour than the entire league drew for its 1925 season.
There is a conventional, and largely credible, history of American leisure that argues that, up until the middle of the twentieth century, spectator sports existed on the periphery of American society, as a diversion that knew and accepted its position. There was a time and a place for sports: weekends, mostly, and holidays; the quadrennial modern Olympics had developed a following, the World Series focused the nation’s attention for a week in October, as did the New Year’s Day bowl games, the Memorial Day running of the Indianapolis 500, Fourth of July doubleheaders, and Thanksgiving Day football games.
There were, as yet, no regular periodicals solely devoted to all sports. The Sporting News, the bible of baseball, would remain a baseball-only publication until the 1940s. Radio became more pervasive, giving the games a broader base, reaching beyond the shift workers and gamblers who were at the heart of sports fandom in the ’10s and ’20s. As movie theater attendance increased, even through the Depression, the opening short reels of sports coverage, often hosted by radio personality Bill Stern, helped create a new era of modern, mythic athletic heroes.
Outside of the large cities of the industrial Northeast, sports were still a decidedly parochial exercise, something to be done rather than seen. In Texas, baseball still ruled but college football was a passion of nearly equivalent widespread interest. The violent sport had swept the state, nourished by the widespread competition among the high schools and focused each fall on the seven major colleges comprising the Southwest Conference, all save the University of Arkansas within the state’s borders. H. L. Hunt had grown up playing baseball in Illinois, but he grew to love football and he observed, more than once, that he was perfectly happy to gamble on either.
At Charnwood, there were daily lunches and nightly dinners served in the spacious dining room, with large bowls of meat, potatoes, and vegetables for the family and H. L. Hunt’s numerous, unannounced guests (“he never called ahead,” recalled Herbert, “he would just show up with one or two people”). The older children sat at dinner, attentively listening while June weighed in on the business of the day, politics, and foreign policy. Lamar, because of his youth, still took meals in a high chair in the kitchen, developing a rapport with and a trust of the domestic staff.
H. L. Hunt was prone to definitive statements, a product of a time when the exemplars of American manhood were known to have little patience for ambiguity of any kind. At dinner, he would take a break from his daylong smoking of La Corona Belvederes but not his running commentary on the events of the day. “Dad didn’t do idle chitchat,” said Herbert. “If you were talking about something and it was nothing, you’d be interrupted. Dad took over.”
In the evenings when H. L. was at home, the family would often sit by the baby grand piano and listen to their father singing along with Lyda’s playing. While she loved the church hymns, he was fond of the popular songs of the day, often crooning to Fats Waller’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”
Lyda doted on all her boys, and both Lamar and Herbert used the same term of endearment, “Papoose Mooze” (or simply “Mooze”), in addressing their mother. There were crucial differences, though, between Lamar and his brothers. Both Bunker and Herbert had trouble reading, exhibiting traits that would generations later likely be diagnosed as dyslexia. And they were initially far more headstrong. After Herbert came down with pneumonia in the fall of ’34, H. L. wrote to Margaret, “We have to bribe him to take his medicine. It has gotten to where he is charging five dollars to take castor oil.” Around the same time, the confident Bunker took to walking by himself around Tyler and, during a vacation in England in 1936, he caught a bus to a movie theater by himself. By the time he got out of the show, the buses had stopped running, so he walked across London at night, the ten-year-old American boy searching for the familiar façade of a hotel.
By contrast, Lamar was more malleable in personal relations, in all ways the baby of the family. He was also precocious, with both words and numbers. He didn’t have the photographic memory of his father or Hassie, but he was adept at math and showed a gift for names and numbers. He also developed an early love of sports and games. Caroline remembered, even before his fifth birthday, that Lamar was rattling off the names of his football and baseball heroes.
While all of H. L. and Lyda’s children grew up feeling loved, there was a distinct sense of reserve in the family. Husband and wife slept in separate rooms; no one in the family was overly demonstrative. Margaret once relayed that her father had referred to her as “beautiful” on the day she was born, and “never gave me another compliment.” H. L.’s pride was the young Hassie, who bore a haunting resemblance to his father (they won a father-and-son lookalike contest at a fair in the early ’30s) and who, from the age of thirteen on, accompanied his father in the oil fields. But even Hassie was reproached when he once kissed his mother. “Stop that!” ordered H. L. “Don’t be kissing people.”
The Hunts did not talk a lot about their feelings. And, as it happened, there was a lot to not talk about. The gas leak in the house at El Dorado that led to the death of their fourth child, the month-old Lyda, in 1925. The growing spells of erratic behavior that Hassie suffered later in his teenage years. Then there was the chaotic fantasia that was H. L. Hunt’s personal life.
Through the ’20s and ’30s, in Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas, he was known as an honest businessman. But in his personal life, H. L. Hunt—quite secretly at first, then later more or less unapologetically—was a bigamist. After baby Lyda’s death in 1925, H. L. told his wife that he was setting out for an adventure in Florida, to capitalize on the Florida land boom. Down in Tampa, he met and courted a young woman named Frania Tye, to whom he identified himself as Major Franklin Hunt. They were married in a civil ceremony later that year. For the next decade H. L. Hunt traveled incessantly. He spent less than half his time at either home, and it wasn’t until 1934, after H. L. had brought Frania Tye and their children to Dallas, that his two lives intersected.
One day, he brought Hassie with him to meet Frania Tye, providing a scant explanation as to her identity. When Frania Tye finally did what she’d long threatened—calling Lyda and divulging H. L.’s other life—there was little outward change. Ever stoic, Lyda reached out to Frania and offered to adopt her children. But even with this titanic breach, nothing was said. After the initial revelations, even more remarkably, Margaret Hunt never discussed the matter with her brother or anyone else in the family. “We never talked about it,” she explained in 1989. “We still don’t talk about it.” Caroline would remember later, “I never heard my father and mother exchange an unpleasant word to one another.” Instead, those that knew H. L.’s secret navigated around the wreckage and simply pretended it didn’t exist. Lamar would grow up knowing about none of it, and he wouldn’t find out until far later in his life.
But it would not be accurate to say he was unaffected. In 1935, Lamar Hunt’s financial future was secured by the prudent insistence of Margaret. She had learned about Frania Tye and the second family on a train trip with Hassie to the Jumbo Gold Mine that H. L. had purchased in Winnemucca, Nevada. Later in the fall, dining with her father in New York on a weekend away from college, she did not confront him with the knowledge of a second family, but she did inform him, “Daddy, I think you need to set up trust funds for the kids. Hassie and I have a business but the kids don’t have anything. Suppose something should happen to you . . .”
He agreed, and in December 1935, H. L. and Lyda Hunt set up trusts to benefit their six children. It insured that Lamar Hunt, upon reaching the age of eighteen, would be a multimillionaire.
Later, Lamar would have precious few memories of Tyler. He remembered playing in the yard outside the house, he remembered the pecan tree in the front yard, and he remembered the ice storm that threatened to kill the tree, and looking through the parlor window at his father, who was negotiating a wheelbarrow with a small fire in the tray, rolling it around under the tree to melt ice off the branches. And Lamar remembered the next morning, when the ground beneath the tree was black with dead birds.
In Tyler, Lamar was often along for the ride, joining the family for a drive out to the train station in Minneola, where the train would stop to bring Margaret to Dallas. The boys would flatten a penny on the rail and delight in picking up the hot copper wafer after the locomotive had passed. Children flattened pennies on rails all across the country; but in the Hunt family, H. L. hastened to point out to his children that it was illegal to destroy U.S. currency.
The standard dress for oilmen was khaki pants and khaki shirts. But H. L. invariably wore crisp white shirts, setting himself apart from his peers. When in town, he’d leave right after breakfast, head down to the People’s National Bank Building, then return for lunch. At dinner, Lyda and the staff were always prepared for the unannounced guests, and the children were prepared to stand up during the meal and face a quiz about state capitals or American history or Texas heritage.
From the kitchen, where he was fed by the servants, Lamar could hear it all: the political and business talk from the dining room in front of him; the discreet knocks on the back door, as drifters and out-of-work locals asked Lyda Hunt for a small portion of food. The complex tapestry of human interaction was right there, including the ineluctable truth that the black domestic workers, to a great degree, made the household run smoothly.
Lamar could only have picked up shards of the big events of the time: the family’s shock at the 1937 New London Gas Explosion, caused when a school tapped some of the gas from a Hunt Oil line; the continued concern over kidnapping threats; the endless discussion of the oil business and how it did and should work; and, always, in the background, H. L. Hunt speculating on his prospects.
One of the singular passions of H. L. Hunt was his love of numbers. “He loved to gamble because it was percentages,” said his nephew Stuart Hunt. “He had one of the most active minds of anybody I’ve ever seen. Winning money was the way to keep score. The challenge was what he played for. He understood percentages. Everything he bet on, cards, dice, horses—his success was in his mathematical ability to calculate the odds. He never bet on hunches; he called himself a ‘card locator’ because he remembered the cards that had been played. He had the guts to bet them if he had them, and he always bet with the odds.” (Which is not to say he didn’t believe in intuition. Family lore was rife with stories of H. L., in transit to a new drilling site, stopping by the road en route to search for four-leaf clovers. When naming his companies, he was partial to six-letter names beginning with P, which led to Placid Oil and Penrod Drilling and Panola Gas.)
While Toogie was taking care of the young Lamar, Lyda was free to tend to her rose garden, and to oversee H. L.’s complicated mathematical system for betting the horses. In a 1935 letter to Margaret, Lyda mentioned:
I have been his sole handicapper working hours on end to dope out the horses he would bet on. His system has been quite successful, but I have become exhausted by the endless lists of numbers. I told him that I would not go on doing this anymore and that he would have to hire somebody. I resigned. So when you return for vacation, do not be surprised to find the downstairs guest bedroom converted into an office for Messrs. C. O. Johnson and John Lee, who work full time on Daddy’s horse racing venture which we should probably name Hunt Horses, which does not begin with a P and therefore will probably not be very lucky.
The French lessons continued for more than a year, then ended abruptly. H. L. grew weary of his youngest boys being more fluent in a foreign language than they were in English. In 1936, H. L. came home and summoned the family dog, Willie. The dog didn’t come, until Lamar, not yet four, came into the parlor and called “Ici, le chien,” and watched as Willie bounded toward him.
“That’s it,” said H. L. “I can’t even call my own dog.” Toogie was let go, and more duties to take care of Lamar were passed off to Caroline, by now in her early teens, and the bright young kitchen servant, Pandora.
The family would remain in Tyler through the fall of 1937. At a picnic at Tyler Lake one day, the family lapsed into a discussion about whether the dog Willie knew how to swim. H. L., quite sure of the dog’s innate aquatic ability, picked him up, strode to the lakeside, and threw Willie into the water, watching him paddle back to the shore as five-year-old Lamar looked on in fraught concern. The shock and initial fear would linger in his memory for years.
Later that same fall, Lamar and Herbert joined Lyda, Margaret, and Caroline for an Alaskan cruise. After putting the boys down for a nap one afternoon, and locking them in their stateroom, Lyda, Margaret, and Caroline went ashore at one of the stops. When they returned to the room, the boys had disappeared and a porthole door was open. Lyda was aghast with fear, until she heard the boys giggling just down the hall, in the adjoining room. Lamar was sincerely contrite when he realized he’d given his mother a serious scare. “I’m sorry we scared you, Papoose Mooze,” he said. “We would never scare you about kidnappers.”
By now, H. L. Hunt’s oil holdings were immense, and his travels were taking him more frequently to Dallas. It was where he did most of his banking—Nathan Adams at the First National Bank having granted him the crucial $50,000 loan that allowed him to maximize his play at the Daisy Bradford No. 3. Tyler, off the train line and increasingly out of step with the rapidly changing realities of Texas business, had a population of 28,000 people. Dallas, always striving to improve and grow larger and more modern, had become the hub of southwest business. It had gleaming skyscrapers and a population nearing 300,000.
It was H. L. Hunt’s considered opinion that Margaret, now twenty-three and having graduated from college, would find a more suitable mate in Dallas than in Tyler. So on December 22, 1937, the family bought a property in Dallas. By Christmas Day, they were in the process of moving.
They would spend the beginning of 1938 in a new city, in a house that for the next eighteen years Lamar Hunt would know as home.
This, too, came at a crucial time. As one family member put it, “The rest of the family grew up in the oil patch. But he really ended up growing up in a metropolitan city.”