Hugh Roy Cullen

Hugh Roy Cullen, an authentic capitalist hero. Furnished with a fifth-grade education, he became one of the richest men in the world. He struck oil for the first time near Houston in 1928 while his wife and children—dressed in their Sunday best—looked on. He went on to make three more major finds in the next seven years and was one of several people the press called King of the Wildcatters. Cullen’s crowning achievement was finding the Tom O’Connor field, which was a mile-deep, billion-dollar pool of oil near Victoria. As Cullen grew rich, the U.S. economy entered its darkest years. Cullen voted for Hoover and opposed FDR at every turn. He offered his own version of the New Deal by building “the big white house,” a huge mansion on six acres in River Oaks that required a staff of fourteen servants. In 1932, while the house was under construction, Cullen formed the Quintana Petroleum Company—named for a group of abandoned shacks that had been a flourishing port on the Brazos River when Houston was an inland village—and took his wife, Lillie, and five children to Europe. In 1936 Cullen began to feel that something in life had gone awry, and he started trying to divest himself of his fortune. Over the next twenty years he gave away more than $200 million to the University of Houston, the symphony, and various hospitals. Cullen’s biographers attribute this onset of philanthropy to the death of his oldest child and only son. Roy Gustav, a young husband and the father of two sons and a daughter, was killed on a drilling rig in 1936. The fate of Lillie Cranz Cullen, who was the second-oldest child might also have had a profound effect on her father. She was an American heiress who was swept off her feet by an Italian playboy who called himself a baron and would eventually have three wives. Paolo di Portanova and Lillie Cranz Cullen married on December 16, 1932, and eight months later, on August 16, 1933, she gave birth to their first child. Lillie di Portanova’s three younger sisters - Agnes Arnold, Margaret Marshall, and Wilhelmina Robertson- served as executors of their father's estate and all married middle-class men who fit easily into the family business and eventually became pillars of Houston’s financial and philanthropic communities. Harry and Roy Cullen, Roy Gustav’s sons, had also turned out to be sensible people; both went to the University of Houston