The Oilman's Daughter Read Free Page A

stories about an M.
A. Wright meeting with politicians. Then she called the Tulsa
library, which sent her an article with a picture of an M. A.
Wright who had been an executive at Exxon.

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    His name was not Marcus Arrington but
rather Myron Arnold Wright, and he had been born in Blair,
Oklahoma, in 1911. As a child he’d moved with his family across the
state from one tiny town to another, from Altus to Shattuck to
Waynoka. Wright was industrious even in his youth, selling
newspapers as a boy and working his way through Oklahoma State,
where he captained the tennis team while earning a degree in civil
engineering. After graduating in 1933, he passed on a municipal
engineering position in favor of an $87.50-a-month job as an oil
field roustabout for Carter Oil, a division of Standard Oil of New
Jersey.
    It was a gamble for an educated young man in the thick of the
Great Depression, eschewing the security of a civil servant’s job
for life on an Oklahoma pipeline gang, living in a $4-a-month
bunkhouse. At the time, the oil industry in the United States was
suffering as a result of market surpluses, a situation compounded
by the country’s broader economic woes. When the business started
to pick up, though, Wright’s engineering background proved
valuable; college graduates with technical skills were few and far
between on the oil patch. He soon moved into management, and the
company relocated him from Oklahoma to New York City.
    Mike, as his colleagues called him, held executive jobs at two
Jersey subsidiaries and eventually became the production
coordinator for Jersey itself, overseeing the company’s expansion
in Libya. He earned a reputation, as a profile in the company
magazine
The Lamp
described it, of a corporate everyman
who “enthusiastically tackles the mountain of paper that daily
rises on his desk” and made his way through half a dozen cups of
coffee before lunchtime.
    Wright was “a full-briefcase man,” in the words of one
associate. “He always does his homework and always knows what he’s
talking about,” another executive explained. “There’s no magic
about getting ahead in a corporation,” Wright told an interviewer,
“but you do have to work harder than the fellow next to you.” In
hiring, Wright said he looked for similar qualities, judging “how
hard a man works, for one thing, and his determination to succeed.”
But he also looked at a man’s “character, his integrity, basic
honesty, his personal life—all of these things are also extremely
important.”
    Wright and his wife, Izetta, an Oklahoma native he’d married
just out of college, settled down in Scarsdale, New York, as he
climbed the ranks of the company. Wright was active in a local
civic group and kept up his tennis game. He passed the summers in
Colorado Springs with his family and filled his office, one visitor
said, “with paintings of Indians and the Old West.” The oil
business over which he presided, meanwhile, was shedding its cowboy
past and growing into a transnational colossus. In April of 1955,
around the time that Ethel Louise Williams boarded the bus for
Tulsa, world oil output hit a record high, with U.S. production
averaging 6.9 million barrels a day. At age 44, Wright “had the
looks of a streamlined John Wayne,” as one interviewer put it, and
had climbed his way to the top of the industry that powered the new
American empire. 
    In 1966, Wright was named the CEO of Humble Oil, at the time the
country’s largest producer of crude. That same year he was made
president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. He’d already
served on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Water Commission,
and by the late 1960s he was named to the board of governors for
the U.S. Postal Service by President Richard Nixon. On his desk he
kept a ceramic tiger representing Humble’s famous slogan, “Put a
tiger in your tank.”
    In demand on the business speakers’ circuit, Wright hired on a
sharp young