Business & Finance: Oil Gets Together

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He and a friend pooled their resources and invested them in Oklahoma oil lands.

This first venture, at Kiowa, was lucky. It netted Sinclair $100,000, a nice sum but nothing in comparison to what was coming. By 1909 with luck and judgment he made a million buying, developing and reselling oil lands. Independent, working mostly alone he continued on this line until 1926 when he consolidated seven small companies into Sinclair Oil & Refining Corp. The company grew and prospered apace. Fleets of tankers roamed the seas carrying the name Sinclair. This alert, grinning, hard-headed man's influence was felt in Moscow, Lisbon, Africa, while his company became integrated, rivalled some Standard Oil units.

Then came a break in Harry Sinclair's luck, a mistake in judgment. His Teapot Dome lease made in 1922 provoked a scandal which came to light in 1923. For five years a complicated battle raged in the courts. Harry Sinclair faced the bar of a Federal Court five times in those years, always smiling, debonair, sure of himself. His mood changed to dejection one night in May 1929 when he entered the District of Columbia jail to serve six and one-half months for contempt of the Senate and for jury shadowing, charges arising out of his long battle to escape the more serious accusation of bribery.

Through the long years when his liberty was at stake Harry Sinclair never neglected his company. He travelled with a staff of secretaries and assistants; received reports, laid plans, dreamed probably as much about developing Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corp. as he did about keeping out of jail. Beside his brother through these humiliating times stood Earle Westwood Sinclair, president of Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corp. since 1921. Trained as a banker in the Southwest where oil is the basis of most wealth, Olde Brother Earle came to know the petroleum business as well as his own. While Brother Harry was packing pills in the Washington jail, he carried on, the company prospered. He still administers many of the company's affairs with vigor while Brother Harry travels, negotiates, tries to build his career's monument.