Business: Richfield & Sinclair

Tom B. Slick was a frenzied wildcatter from Pennsylvania whose boomtime oil financing became the wonder of the Southwest. He held lawyers, geologists and physicians in equal scorn and died of overwork in 1930, bequeathing his name to two oil fields, a withered oil town and Slick-Urschel Oil Co. In Oklahoma last fortnight the name Slick disappeared from the oil business through a merger of Slick-Urschel with the new Transwestern Oil of Oklahoma.

Last week in Los Angeles a bigger & better merger brought a smarter oilman than Tom Slick triumphantly into the news. After five years of patient maneuvering, poker-faced Harry Ford Sinclair had got what he wanted in California— a major oil distributing system in that State. He got it by agreeing to share it with silver-bearded Chairman Henry Latham Doherty of Cities Service Co., just as he got his great holding company, Consolidated Oil Corp., on shares with the Rockefellers in 1932. Oilman Sinclair's triumph was the acquisition of working control of Richfield Oil Co. in a reorganization whose long-drawn negotiations began as soon as Richfield went into receivership in 1931.

In 1931 there was a report that Harry Sinclair had been elected board chairman of a West Texas Company called Rio Grande Oil, which had a branch in California. Rio Grande soon slid to the brink of receivership and Oilman Sinclair denied that he had anything to do with the company. Just ten months later, however, Harry Sinclair's new Consolidated Oil Corp. acquired control of Rio Grande with the help of Elisha Walker's Interstate Equities Corp. in a deal which has since aroused the curiosity of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Thus, at about the time Richfield was succumbing to overexpansion and mismanagement, Sinclair got his first sizeable foothold in the California market.

Meanwhile Richfield's 5,000 service stations and rich reserves had caught the eye of "Cities Service's Chairman Doherty, who bought large blocks of Richfield stock & bonds, offered to exchange Cities Service shares for Richfield shares, even paid Richfield's state gas tax when the foundering company's $85,000,000 book assets included practically no cash. Later, however, when the banking creditors' committee, bondholders' protective committee and unsecured creditors' committee were pondering a Doherty reorganization plan, Oilman Doherty looked into Richfield's books more closely, withdrew the plan and apparently washed his hands of the whole business.