After Los Angeles I was sent East to the Fessenden School in Massachusetts, because Big Howard figured it would open the door for me to Harvard. It might have, if I’d been interested in going to Harvard, but I wasn’t. By then I wanted to fly airplanes. That was one of my two great ambitions, right from the beginning.
I was at Fessenden when I first flew, but even before then there were barnstormers down in Texas flying Jennies and Avros and other old World War I crates. I didn’t get to go up in any of them; my first flight was actually a present from my father. In Cambridge one time he asked me what I wanted most if Harvard won the crew race against Yale, and there happened to be a barnstormer there with a seaplane, offering rides for five dollars. I said, ‘A ride in that seaplane.’ Harvard won by half a length and my father made good on his promise.
During that flight I was breathing down the back of the pilot’s neck, jumping around, yelling, ‘Go faster, sir! Please go faster!’
The back of his neck got redder and redder. Finally he turned and said, ‘Sit the hell down! I ain’t about to kill myself for some dumb rich kid.’ He was from the Deep South. When we landed he cooled off a bit, but he told me something then that I didn’t forget for a long time. ‘When a man knows his job,’ he said, ‘let him do it.’
I took that to heart. But the trouble, as I found out, is that most men don’t know their jobs.
I was only at Fessenden for a year, and then I went out to California again and studied engineering for a semester at Cal Tech. That was when my mother died. I took the train back to Houston, and Big Howard wanted me there with him, so I transferred college to Rice Institute.
I was nineteen years old when one day the dean called me out of a physics class.
He didn’t mince words. He said, ‘Young Mr. Hughes, brace yourself. Your father’s died.’
Big Howard had had a heart attack. He was in his office – he’d been partying the night before – and he keeled over, dead on the spot. He was only fifty-four.
How upset were you by his death?
Very, although I hid it for many years. I’m just beginning to understand, at the age of sixty-five, how profoundly my whole life was influenced by my father.
The most obvious way was that he made me rich. Not so long after he died I inherited most of Hughes Tool – everyone called it Toolco, and still does – because Big Howard had bought out Walter Sharp’s share in 1912, after Mr. Sharp died, from the Sharp family.
After the funeral I was still in something of a daze, but it began to clear when the family lawyer called me into his office. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘I guess you realize that since your mother’s passed away too, and you’re an only child, that you’re your father’s principal heir.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I kind of figured that.’
But those were just words; I didn’t really know what it meant, and the lawyer was smart enough to realize that. So he explained to me that, in theory, I now owned seventy-five percent of Toolco.
‘What do you mean, “in theory”?’ I asked.
‘You’re a minor. Nineteen years old. The laws in Texas are a little peculiar regarding inheritance when a minor is involved. You and the rest of the family will have to get together and work things out.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘give me a little time to think about it.’
He was glad to do that, and we went into a waiting period, during which I began to make a fool of myself in almost every way possible. I wanted to stand in my father’s shoes, wanted people to think that I was a chip off the old block. I got my hands on a lump of money, cash that my father had kept around the house for emergencies – a considerable sum of more than twenty-five thousand dollars.
I carried the cash around with me in a briefcase. I spent some of it in a showy way, shopping at Levy’s and Kiam’s in downtown Houston, and then one day I bumped into this oilman, a wildcatter named Shepard who had done business with my father. I’d seen them together on several occasions – my father had a little place near Galveston where he and his friends used to go fishing on weekends. Shepard was an old roughneck who’d struck it rich a couple of times and then blown it on dry holes. He had one of those Southern faces, with the cross-hatched neck and the red leathery cheeks with the veins showing, and a certain blue-eyed brutal quality.
Shepard invited me up to a room in the Bender Hotel for a crap game. A few of the other men had also been friends of my father’s, but I should have spotted them for what they were. It was certainly no friendly game. If I knew it at that time I wouldn’t own up to it, and they hit me for better than twenty thousand dollars.
I had a cramp in my gut when I left that hotel, and I had to stop dead in my tracks when I got outside the room. I doubled over, held myself around the middle until the knot went away and I could limp out of the lobby. I’ve talked to people in Las Vegas since: Nick the Greek and other professionals have shown me how a man with a slick pair of hands can do anything with dice or cards and you’d never see it. There’s a certain poetry of motion there, but I wasn’t feeling very poetic with twenty thousand bucks down the drain.
These men went on operating in Houston, and a couple of weeks later some other loser complained, and they were taken to court. One of them confessed, or had it beaten out of him, that they’d also taken twenty grand from me with a rigged deck.
I was called into court to testify. It didn’t take me five minutes to decide that no man who called himself a Texan would snitch on even outright thieves like these. Besides, they’d been my father’s friends.
I told the judge, ‘No, sir, Your Honor, it was a straight game, and I don’t remember how much I lost but it wasn’t anywhere near twenty thousand dollars.’
The other losers had been bought off, and my testimony allowed these men to go free.
My friend Dudley Sharp – he was my father’s partner’s son, and we used to pal around together – told me I’d made a mistake. ‘These men should have been jailed or run out of the state.’ And some other people even accused me of cowardice.
Soon it became time to deal with my inheritance and how the Tool Company was going to be divided and run now that my father wasn’t at the helm. As I said, I was the heir to 75% of it, if I could get over the problem of being under twenty-one. I tried to think what my father would have done, because that’s what I wanted to do.
He had always said to me, ‘Don’t have partners, son, they’re nothing but trouble.’
That made things clear, and I decided to try and buy out the rest of the Hughes family – various cousins and uncles who owned the other 25% – and gain total control. A rough estimate was made of the company’s worth and it came to something under nine hundred thousand dollars.
But the first thing that happened was that the rest of the family challenged that figure, said it was far too low, and it looked like the thing could drag on forever once the accountants and the lawyers got their noses into it. By the time they’d gone through litigation the fees would have made us all poor.
I thought things over. I may have been a nineteen-year-old kid but I was able to look ahead into the future. In 1925 I believed in technology and I believed that the automobile industry was still in diapers. Henry Ford was just going into mass-production. If you put ten million more cars on the road, I thought, you’d need gasoline to make them run. You needed crude oil to make gasoline, and you needed the Hughes drill bit to find the crude oil.