Clint Murchison Sr

Clint Murchison Sr., born in 1895, was the son of a banker, John Weldon Murchison, owner of the First National Bank of Athens, Texas. Murchison’s instinctive mastery of banking and lending practices translated easily into an understanding of the new business of oil and gas exploration. Murchison is widely credited as the most financially sophisticated of the early oilmen. Murchison was instrumental in the initiation of a number of financial innovations in the oil fields, reportedly including the novel concept of reserve based financing. By 1919, Clint Murchison Sr., at the age of 24, along with his childhood friend Sid Richardson, founder of the Bass family fortune, had both become millionaires trading in oil leases in one of the early Texas boomtowns, Burkburnett, Texas. Through the early 1920s Murchison hit strike after strike. By 1927, Murchison came up with a new concept. Murchison built a pipeline to offer heating and light to local customers. Natural gas had been used to heat homes and factories in England for over a century, but had never caught on in the United States. Murchison expanded his operations into real estate development, railroads, and banking.