John Cypher - Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch: A Worldwide Sea of Grass

BOB KLEBERG AND THE KING RANCH

BOB KLEBERG
AND THE
KING RANCH
A WORLDWIDE SEA OF GRASS

by John Cypher

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

COPYRIGHT @ 1995 BY JOHN CYPHER

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Fifth paperback printing, 2010

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Cypher, John.
Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch : a worldwide sea of grass / by John Cypher.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-292-71187-7 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-292-74593-3 (e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-78959-3 (individual e-book)
1. Kleberg, Robert Justus, 18961974. 2. RanchersTexasBiography. 3. King Ranch (Tex.)History. 4. King Ranch, Inc.History. I. Title.
SFI94.2.K58C96 1995
338.7636213092dc20
[B] 94-22454

FOREWORD

I AM A LIFELONG rancher and I plan to tell a ranchers tale, avoiding, if I can, the garrulousness associated with my kind. It is about my employer, King Ranch, and the brains and heart at its focus, Bob Kleberg, how he guided it into a period in its 140-year history that made it unique to American agricultural enterprise. Mine is the oftentimes fruitful, sometimes tragic, story of that era, why and how the ranch grew from a typical South Texas range cattle operation, albeit quite a large one, to a global agribusiness conglomerate managed by this cattleman genius. He organized ranching ventures in nine countries, along an earth-circling cattle trail from Australia to Africa to Latin America, over a span of fifteen years, expanding and consolidating them in his remaining five.

Then he mounted for his ride to Valhalla, leaving to his extended family his worldwide legacy to do with as they willed. Piecemeal, over the next decade and a half, they sold off the bulk of it. From Texas to Texas in less than forty yearsan empire that ended as suddenly and as breathtakingly as a stampede. The worlds few international agricultural enterprises tend to permanence. His must have been unique for its brevity.

My forty years with King RanchDecember 1948 to precisely December 1988spanned this unparalleled epoch. Much of my career I was the assistant to Bob Kleberg, the chief executive, architect, and overlord of his 15-million-acre domain. So my story will be about the ways he went about his work and how I and others provided him sets of hands to accomplish it.

The focus will largely be on the period in Mr. Klebergs life that brought me into his orbit, from the early 1950s to 1974. To provide this view of the pace he set for himself, I must jump across time zones and continental boundaries in not seeming but actual disarray; that was the way life was during those tumultuous and fascinating decades.

In a day we shifted through all five gears: from hours upon boring hours waiting on telephone connections (the international fax was down the road a bit), to the exhilaration of being boosted into the substratosphere in the posh comfort of a Grumann G-2 jet (surely one of the nobler technological utensils)or bouncing in the back of a Toyota four-wheeler over an unfenced semiarid plain, or under the canopy of a steaming rain forest, or holed up in a palm-thatched lean-to to let a sudden downpour pass, or doing our laundry in camp water dirtier than our shirts.

But it was worth the toss, as our Australian mates say. For in these seemingly haphazard circumstances, Bob Kleberg eventually reached a moment and a place where he got out of the Toyota, walked out a way, folded his arms across his chest, andeyeing mainly untended land that he had walked over, dug into, smelled, assessedprojected on the screen in his mind a picture of fat cattle grazing tall grass. By just watching the back of his head under the faded Stetson, we too witnessed a transformationraw land into beef. Then those of us around him pitched in to turn his visions into creations of splendid proportions, the King Ranch chain of foreign operations.

At the end of most of the chapters, I have included a diversion, an intentional one. Bob Kleberg bore the burden and reaped the benefits of the King Ranchs near-legendary name, symbolic of our countrys unique western culture. It became almost a clich that visiting the ranch was the best glimpse one could get of American ranching life; it wasntmany attributes of King Ranch business were not typical of the livestock norm. In the early 1950s, Bob tried to explain this to Miss Edna Ferber when he denied her request to come and settle down at the headquarters to do, in her words, a book on a typical Texas ranch. Her interpretations of the word typical, as she detailed them in her best-selling novel Giant, Bob and Helen were forced to live with for over a decade.

More recently in the public mind, the TV series Dallas became the stereotype of the family-owned Texas spread. Some of our visitors have appeared downright disappointed that they didnt step into an evil empire where Kleberg pursued Kleberg with invective, stiletto, and gun.

The upshot of these commonly held erroneous beliefs was that they brought us a steady stream of visitorsthere were few days when from one to several hundred did not pass through the front gate. Bob was generous in the extreme with his time with them, accommodating his schedule to them at every opportunity. Strangely, most of his management people did not follow his example; they were more likely to shy away, making excuses that their business of the day was too pressing to interrupt even when the visitor might be on the ranch to study their particular field of work. So it most often fell to me to break into whatever I was doing to look after them, and as it turned out, I, along with the boss, benefited from these worldwide contacts. The friends I made are my lifetimes richest reward.

Their backgrounds were as varied as their numbers: presidents and princes, reigning monarchs and deposed ones, ministers, business leaders, artists, entertainers, learned doctors, students, neer-do-wells sent off on world tours to get them out of the family hair, lots and lots of attractive ladies. I have chosen a few among them to represent this important facet of King Ranch life. Rather than being typical of the flow, these are some of the ones who interested me.

They often appeared on very short, sometimes no, notice, and thats the way Ill introduce them hereas interruptions in the flow of events in Bobs and the ranchs routine.

So together lets explore American ranching, the finest our world has ever seen, as it unfolded in an immeasurably exciting way under the hand of the man who was, for over half a century, at its pinnacle.

JOHN CYPHER

BOB KLEBERG AND THE KING RANCH

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNING, CENTURY II

I HAD HAD ABOUT ALL I could takemy hide, thin at the outset, had been peeled away in layers, my nerve ends exposed; I was a cadaverous zombie for lack of sleep. From the time this trip had begun two weeks ago, relations between my boss, Bob Kleberg, and me had jutted up and down the graph like the daily stock market averages, changing every fifteen minutes, markedly declining. Too many people with too many agendas were bidding for the old boys attention, while he by turns was distracted by his three older grandchildren, an assortment of pretty girlfriends, and an assortment of bottles.

Lifting off from Kingsville on a spring day in 1974, Bob had aboard his jet his Brazilian partner, Dr. Augusto Antunes, and the doctors assistant, Ambassador Barbosa da Silva and his wife, King Ranch do Brasil president Francis Herbert, and his granddaughter Helen Alexander. Landing in Houston, we exchanged the Barbosa da Silvas for a ravishing Mexican friend named Sandra Riverolenext leg, to Manhattan. By the time we had unpacked, a cadre of glittering types had ascended to the King Ranch suite on the thirty-seventh floor of the Pierre Hotel, drinks aplenty, a move to the 21 Clubheavy food, heavy conversation, to bed at 1:30, one of the earlier nights.