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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 2, 1958)
ryone thinks ne warns money. h no one, Getty will be hrst to mowledge, is hesitant about asking nme. In a year he receives more n 30,000 letters putting "the touch" him to finance "a good thing." Wot too long ago a prospective part- asked for a mere !Uu million with in Dercent "guarantee" on Getty's fney. Most, however, want only "a dollars which you 11 never miss ause vou've got so much." fust how much Getty has is a mys- ya mystery even to himself, he ims. When vou run dozens of com ities all over the globe, Getty main- Ins, you never have an exact total their worth. But while Getty has been shy about Lnting his bankroll, there has been hesitancy on the part of others to timate it for him: anywhere from a ltry $700 million to well over a bil- m. This fiame of euessing-Gettv s- ld beean when Fortune magazine st catapulted him from relative ob- iritv to the head of the list of the irld's private business wealth. efore that and even now he shuns personal publicity. He is aided in this endeavor by a seven-year psence from the United States. Also, a temporary European (living most in modest Paris and London hotels), looks more like a French cabinet ember than a U.S. "dollarcrat." At 65 Getty has long, receding hair tat slinks toward the back of his head nd rests comfortably on his earlobes. lis thin lips contrast sharply with his Ull face. An air of European con ervatism comes from his neckties mostly dark colors); and his suits re set off by a white handkerchief asually stuffed into the breast pocket. lhat, probably, is the only aspect of etty that is casual. For when it comes to making honey a job that knows no time clock with Getty he approaches his work with the watchfulness of a store detective. The Getty emporium stretches out far-reaching tentacles so varied that a fellow businessman once said: "I don't see how that man even keeps track of what he owns, let alone what it's supposed to do." These tentacles, for example, in clude the Getty Realty Co., a vast property empire which counts among its listings New York's swank Hotel Pierre; the Minnehoma Insurance Co.; and the Spartan Aircraft Co., whose assembly line Getty shrewdly con verted after the war to turning out house trailers. But oil was the beginning, and con tinues to be the mainstay, of the Getty fortune. At the head of the list is the Getty Oil Co., and close on its heels are Tidewater Oil and Skelly Oil. The boss holds controlling interest in all of them. To give you an idea of their output, Getty now is building a $200 million fleet of tankers to ferry part of their production to refineries and markets all over the world. By owning the well, the refinery, and the transporta tion, he's at work from the time oil bubbles from the ground until it's pumped into your gas tank. Unlike the story-book heroes, Paul Getty's is no rags-to-riches tale. He came from a Minneapolis family whose head, George F. Getty, was a millionaire oilman who made his for tune in Oklahoma. When he died in 1930, he left the bulk of his estate to his wife and a modest half-million dollars to son Paul, who already was proving that money begets money. Long before the elder Getty died, young Paul had earned his first mil lion. After a University of California and Oxford education, he joined his father in oil speculating and almost immediately showed his wizardry. In the depression '30s, he began collecting the foundation stones of his empire by concentrating on the stock market maxim: "buy low, sell high." Since everything was low, Getty kept buying. When his own capital was tied up, he started tapping his mother's fortune to continue his infiltration of bigger oil companies. When war ended the depression doldrums, the shrewd investor was at the top of the heap. IAIhat might prove to be Getty's biggest coup, a move that ranks as one of the oil industry's great gambles, didn't come , off until the Spring of 1953. Driven by the need to supply his new, tremendous Tidewater refinery in Delaware, Getty competed for oil rights in the Neutral Zone, a barren desert owned by Saudi Arabia and oil-soaked Kuwait. Though rights in the Kuwait part of the zone had already been acquired by the American Independent Oil Co. in 1948, Getty outbid all others the following year for the Saudi Arabian half by giving King Ibn Saud $9Vfe million on the line, plus $1 million a year oh a 60-year lease to be applied against loyalties of 55c a barrel, and 25 per cent of his company's net profits in zone production. ' While competing oilmen scoffed at their chances, Getty and Aminoil be gan drilling on a joint basis, and four years and millions of dollars later they made a strike that's beginning to look like the jackpot of the Middle East. A rich field was found 3,500 feet below the sand at Wafra. When he returned to look over the situation in 1956, Getty decided to test his geological acumen in a try for a shallower strike on his own as an economical shortcut to new discoveries. With Aminoil on the sidelines and his competitors smiling at his rash ness, Getty scored again with a big strike at 1,200 feet, and started to build a refinery on the spot to convert the gushing wealth into heavy fuel. Aminoil admiringly followed him in drilling shallower wells, and now the chief problem has become one of how to get the oil to market profitably. With a characteristic, exuberant grin, Getty says this is just the beginning, and the burgeoning production of the Neutral Zone seems to bear him out. Half of the wells in the zone are being kept on a standby basis until adequate pipelines are finished and Getty's new refinery goes into full production. Even the zone's operating wells are producing more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day; and that, as one observer put it, "is only pinching its cheek." Getty's share alone last year came to almost 12 million barrels. Through the years, some of this fi nancial acumen even rubbed off on Getty's wives. (He's had five.) One of them, Louise Theodora Lynch Getty, organized a lucrative health - water concession, selling fluoridated water from Deaf Smith County, Texas, to Hollywood celebrities at $1.25 a gal lon. As if symbolically proving that oil and water don't mix, this marriage, like the others, ended in divorce. Four of Getty's five sons have a niche in the Getty empire. The fifth, Timothy, 12, died in August following a series of operations for brain tumor. Marriage, like all activities not di rectly involved in making money, al ways has had a secondary role in Getty's life. Because of his long ab sence from the United States, he has been practically a stranger on his 40 acre estate near Santa Monica, Calif. Its $4 million art gallery, open to the public, hardly has been viewed by its owner. Money producing and investing it has given Jean Paul Getty his pleasure. It has made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. And it. may have made him one of the loneliest, too. I 1 "vnMHi e i i o UI,U w .... .. jstoarnn? .3 ! " 111111 -jf VLr.. I ft fltlMI , s .'i- . wO tjj. , ., .! , ...il nt Wilminaton, is r And here are 461,500 barrels of Middle East oil about to be pumped onl r r .0il "ew Delaware refinery. 15 miles south n ashore at the Delaware refinery from the supertanker S. S. George F. Getty. This b rel a?d xm$f mdem f n!i oT&e Wa fVa crude oil. ship, the pride of the Getty fleet, is 782 feet long and 53,000 deadweight tons. rreis daily, the plant processes a good part of werrys Family Weekly, November 2, 19SJ IS
