TYCOONS: The New Athenians

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The K.K.K. The new Athenians, especially Murchison and Richardson, differ from their brother millionaires in that they do not dabble noisily in politics, propaganda, or welfare institutions. While they stick to business, they have their little luxuries but shun ostentation. Bachelor Richardson lives in the Fort Worth Club, has one of the finest U.S. collections of frontier paintings by Russell and Remington. Murchison shuttles between New York, Washington and a collection of city and country homes in a private DC-3, the Flying Ginny (named for his pretty second wife, Virginia, who accompanies him on many of his trips). He has a 25-room house just outside Dallas and a 3,300-acre ranch 65 miles away. When he wants to get farther away from the world, he flies to his 75,000-acre Acuňa Ranch in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains. It is comfortably furnished but it has no phone, is on no road, and can be reached only by plane. Murchison likes to hunt on his 1,000-acre island in the Gulf of Mexico. He and his wife are now putting the finishing touches on a $100,000 farm near his old home town of Athens. To landscape the 2,000-acre site, he has planted 10,000 pine seedlings and 10,000 strawberry plants. Says a friend: "Murchison does almost everything by ten thousands." But when the new Athenians really want to enjoy themselves, they make for the Koon Kreek Klub, an exclusive (i.e., mostly millionaires) tract of wilderness near Athens. There, Murchison, Richardson and such other Athenians as Oilman Ike La Rue and Lease Broker George Greer loaf around simple cabins in sports shirts or old clothes, play gin rummy for 1¢ a point, kid each other about their waistlines, and fish for bream (pronounced "brim" in Texas, and a member of the sunfish family). With guides to bait the hooks and take off the fish, it is perhaps the most relaxing form of fishing in the world; Murchison likes it because it gives him time to think.

Funny Question. Murchison extends the same open-shirted informality to his business. One sure laugh at stockholder meetings of his key Delhi Oil Co. is provided by a stockholder, a mailman who has made a small fortune. He plaintively asks the same question year after year: "Clint, when you goin' to pay a dividend?" Delhi stockholders, who get few dividends, can afford to guffaw at this. They all know that Murchison is interested not in dividends but in piling up the lower-taxed capital gains. He achieves them for himself and his stockholders by "spinning" new companies out of old ones.