Company (later Texaco). Even in the rough-hewn oil industry, Cullinan had a reputation for abrasiveness. He was considered one of the hardest men ever to work the fields. In 1902, when a fire erupted at Spindletop, Cullinan took charge of the firefighting operation and barely slept for a week, scorching his eyes and searing his lungs as he struggled to extinguish the flames. When the fires were out, Cullinan collapsed, slept for a spell, then conducted business from his hospital bed, his eyes bandaged shut.
Erickson matched Cullinanâs drive. He rose quickly in the company. Cullen was so impressed that, in 1924, he promoted Erickson to the head of the office in Ericksonâs ancestral homeland of Sweden. But a Swedish law at the time dictated that any head of a company must be at least 35 years old. Erickson was only 27, so he quietly added eight years to his age.
The new executive had more urgent problems than his birth year. The Swedish operation was losing money fast. Employees were stealing from the company, and Russian competition was driving down the price of oil. Erickson put a stop to the theft, introduced new management techniques and slowly pulled the company out of the red. âI have been working many nights, Saturdays and Sundays,â he wrote Henry back in the States. âItâs a hell of a lot of work.â By April, 1926, the Swedish office had had its best month ever, selling 1.1 million barrels of oil, an increase of 33% percent over the year before. âCullinan was pleased,â he wrote his brother. â[And] wait until he sees May and June.â But âBuckskin Joeâ only pushed his protégé harder. He sent a man from the New York office, âa former clerk,â Erickson wrote waspishly, who didnât speak Swedish and didnât know how the business was run, in order to âspyâ on Erickson. âThe thing is so absurd, they make me wonder if they are in their right mind,â Erickson wrote.
Stockholm was expensive, and by the mid-1920s, Henry and Eric were both feeling financial strain. âI am not sure Iâll be able to keep up the payments as we are finding it a little tough going,â Eric wrote his brother on May 26, 1926, about one of their investments. The dream Erickson first entertained in 1914, while sitting on the Texas-bound train headed for the Beaumont fields, was slipping from his grasp. His marriage to a Swedish native named Elsa - âa girl who [speaks] English, having lived in South Carolina, well-traveled, a good sport, the companionable typeâ - only increased the pressure to perform.
In 1926, he took the plunge heâd been preparing for since the Texas oil-fields. He gave up his salary and went independent, risking his savings on starting a small petroleum company. Erickson built the firm using his skills as a salesman and a punishing work ethic, then sold it off to one of the majors. He immediately took the profits and started another company. It was a strategy that any American oilman would have recognized: Maximum risk for maximum reward. âEach well, whether successful or unsuccessful,â said William Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, âprovided the stimulus to drill another.â After a few years, Erickson sold his latest venture and doubled down, plowing the money into the construction of an oil terminal in Stockholm. When the terminal was completed, tankers from South America or the Middle East began to dock and unload their oil, which Erickson sold to the Nordic and central European markets.
At the start of the 1930s, the Third Reich was rising to power in Germany, and Erickson was building yet another oil company, which he named Pennco. He and Elsa spent their summers in the bay town of Krokek. During the rest of the year, he traveled widely to negotiate oil contracts â from Teheran to Bucharest to Tokyo. When Stalin needed a Westerner to supervise the building of a refinery in Baku,