The hardest lesson of all, however, was learning to walk. At first, he could only propel himself clumsily in a cage on wheels, his artificial limbs moving jerkily, as if they had a will of their own. Gradually he got the hang of it, and was able to move with slow but measured steps, aided by crutches. Some months later he abandoned the crutches, at the cost of skinned elbows and bruised ribs when he lost his balance. In a year he could walk with ease and confidence, climb stairs slowly, and bend at the waist to pick up a book from a low shelf without falling on his face. But it took four years before his infirmities and the prosthetics to overcome them became such second nature that he no longer had to think about them. He could then devote his thoughts and energies to making a living, free of the comfortable insulation against real life that the veterans hospital provided.
At five o’clock one humid Texas morning in early 1951, Forte eased out of bed, dressed, and walked out of the ward that had been his home for more than five years. In one hand he carried the canvas bag with the few possessions he had accumulated during his long hospital stay. Outside, just as Otis Creech had prophesied, after the long dark night of infirmity, the sky was filled with sunshine.
APRIL 1994
“Will” Governor Thomas (“Cherokee Tom”) Traynor said, settling back in his chair and sipping his twenty-seven-year-old bourbon appreciatively, “I’ve come to ask you a favor.”
“Sorry,” Gwillam Forte replied, shaking his head. “No can do.”
Traynor’s glass paused in midair. It wasn’t the response he had expected. He and Forte had been friends and political allies for nearly twenty years. Forte’s Sunshine Industries, Inc., had helped bankroll Traynor’s successful campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms and the governorship of Texas for the past two and, he hoped, for the senatorial race five years hence, in the year 2000. The old man on the far side of the polished ebony desk had always been his mentor, protector, and goad to higher office, for they shared common principles and outlook. He couldn’t understand why Forte would turn him down now, before he had even heard him out.
“I’ll tell you why,” Forte said, reading the question on the younger man’s face. “You and I know each other pretty well. We’ve never had any important disagreements, and we’ve never double-crossed each other.
We’re friends. So you don’t need to come in here asking for favors, Tom. Just tell me what you want, and it’s yours, because I know you wouldn’t ask for anything I wouldn’t want to give.”
Cherokee Tom relaxed. That was more like it. Still, what he had in mind was no simple favor. It involved the expenditure of a lot of money-millions of dollars. Not that old Will didn’t have them to spare . . .
Gwillam Forte had, as Traynor knew, walked out of the veterans hospital in Houston almost half a century earlier, with little more than hope and two wooden legs to sustain him. In his bank account was a meager $4,200, accumulated from disability payments and poker winnings over the previous five years. In his mind’s eye, however, was the vision of a rapidly expanding Houston propelling him to riches.
For five years he had watched the city growing up outside his hospital window. He had read in the daily press of the postwar baby boom, of the growth of the suburbs, the expansion of American industry beyond the confines of the old cities. Already the government was being pressured by the highway lobby to build a huge network of roads to foster interstate commerce and the future defense of the nation. The auto industry was surging to provide the vehicles to fill those highways, and all the while the railroads were stagnating, their traffic being drawn away by automotive and air transport. The one thing all three methods of transportation had in common was a dependence on oil- even the railroads had switched by then from coal to diesel power-and the oil came, largely, from Texas.
At first, Gwillam Forte had decided that oil was the business for him to get into, and he read voraciously on all aspects of the industry-exploration, production, refining, transportation, marketing, and governmental regulation. But he soon came to the conclusion that the small capital he could scrape up and the knowledge he could bring to a highly technical business would be insufficient to make much of a mark for a long, long time. On the other hand, oil was bringing people and prosperity to Houston, and every indicator-especially its strategic location at the confluence of supply and distribution-pointed to its emergence as the oil capital of the United States, perhaps of the world. It would grow from the sleepy, backwoods town it was in the late 1940s into a city, and Gwillam Forte intended to grow right along with it.
The essence of his strategy was to forecast real-estate movements, get in fast before the smart money concentrated on a particular locality, and sell out before prices peaked. With his winnings, he would seek out undeveloped areas in the direction the city was moving, wait until the trend was established, and sell out again, striving always for modest profits and rapid turnover.
As he anticipated, his profits were small. But thanks to the unceasing flood of oil money into Houston, and the magnetic attraction of the industry for petroleum workers and service industries, his turnover was very fast, and his marginal profits multiplied. His negotiations were facilitated by a skill he had acquired during the war. Aboard ship Forte, attracted by its excellent coffee, had been accustomed to spending off-duty hours in the radio shack. There he had picked up international Morse code, easy enough for one with his musical ear. After he became a businessman, he found his knowledge of code a priceless business tool. With a speed key installed on a ledge in the kneehole of his desk, he could exchange confidences with a competitor come calling, then act on it through instructions relayed to his staff by key, long before the rival could slip away to a telephone and commit the same duplicity against him. In this wise he had made many a real-estate coup whose timing competitors found uncannily precise. Within ten years, Forte was worth several million dollars, and Houston had not yet begun its period of most rapid growth, which would follow the Arab oil embargo of 1973, nearly a decade later. When it came, Forte was ready to parlay his tens of millions into hundreds.
His system was simple. He concentrated on lands near the periphery toward which the city, amoebalike, was constantly advancing. He never bought expensive land, on the theory that property bought at a dollar a square foot would double in price before land bought at a hundred dollars, while at the same time the mere magnitude of the holding would diffuse the risk. When he sold such properties, the profits were only partially reinvested in lands where the next upwelling of investment would occur. The bulk of his earnings he devoted to longer-term, less obvious schemes.
Houston’s future prosperity would be based, he was confident, on a one-crop economy-not the traditional cattle business, which even then was relying less on open range than on scientific feeding in small farms, but oil refining and the manufacture of petroleum byproducts. The city’s accessibility to the oilfields as well as to the Gulf of Mexico and world markets beyond made it the ideal middleman. The cost of transportation of petroleum products to those markets would in large measure determine their profitability. Since water transport was, and always would be, the cheapest, it stood to reason that the best possible land investment in the Houston area was on the Houston Ship Channel, that waterway constructed between the city and the Gulf of Mexico, nearly fifty miles away, which gave promise of making the inland city an important American port. He acquired large tracts of such lands, concentrating on parcels that included the right of way of highways, pipelines, and railroads, when they were still cattle range. Once in his possession, he seldom sold them outright. Instead, he exchanged such lands for equity in the manufacturing and processing companies to be located there. Their advantageous location, he was certain, would give them the competitive edge that would ensure their-and Gwillam Forte’s-prosperity.
And so it transpired. By 1985, when he was still a robust man in his middle fifties, Gwillam Forte was one of the richest men in America. He wasn’t particularly conspicuous, for while he enjoyed good living, beautiful women, and the exercise of personal power, he was not identified as the leader in any particular field of commerce or finance. He had interests in a dozen oil companies, but controlled none. He owned a chain of newspapers, including the giant Houston Herald, but the chain ranked only number four nationally. He had stock in more than forty companies in Houston alone, but except for Sunshine Industries, Inc., it was usually as a minority shareholder. Thus he diluted his risks, avoided managerial headaches, and escaped the scrutiny of government beagles sniffing about for easy game. To selected charities, he gave bountifully if not ostentatiously, insisting on being listed anonymously to avoid being tapped by professional fund-raisers who would pocket the larger part of any donation.