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Last spring, as happened with Texaco's first president Joseph Stephen Cullinan in 1913 and with Chairman Arnold Schlaet in 1920, the question of who was to run the biggest independent oil company in the U. S. again popped up. Ralph Clinton Holmes, by this time not only president but acting chairman of the executive committee and board of directors, again called for a showdown. This time he lost. Mr. Holmes was reluctant to move from his big paneled office in the Chrysler Building but when he did he took offices, like Mr. Beaty, a few floors above his old company. Last week in that office, unlike Mr. Beaty, he had a platoon of stenographers working busily on a campaign to justify his reign. Out to Texaco stockholders and the Press went a 43-page booklet containing Mr. Holmes's version of last spring's boardroom battle and a list of his good works. With it went a letter from a stockholders' committee, asking for proxies for a special stockholders' meeting in October. Mr. Holmes swore that he was not trying to regain the Texaco throne but only desired election of twelve additional directors. Mr. Holmes openly protested that Texaco had too long been dominated by the Lapham family who had three of the 13 seats — John H. ("Jack") Lapham and his cousin Henry G. Lapham and a Lapham nominee. Albert Rockwell. Seven directors are company executives. "No strong man, or any one above the average, has ever survived a Lapham board. . . . Every constructive or corrective effort, or activity, ever made has been carried out over the protest or objection of some, if not all, of the Lapham representatives," roared Mr. Holmes. To Mr. Holmes the most sinister in fluence in Texaco is Jack Lapham. A slim, blue-eyed, soft-spoken man of 51, whose father was one of Texaco's founders, Jack Lapham lives in Austin, plays polo, flies his own planes. Though no single one of Texaco's 90,000 stockholders owns more than a 2% interest, the Lapham family owns 250,000 shares of the 9.000,000 out standing. With nothing particular to do Jack Lapham has always liked to spend his time on Texaco affairs, in Texaco meetings, in Texaco fields and refineries. President Holmes, whose library on Napoleon is extensive, found this interest very annoying. Texaco has had a tradition of down right individualism ever since it was founded by John Warne ("Bet-a-Million") Gates & friends in 1902 — a longshot bet on a little $3,000,000 concern which had grown out of a wildcat gusher in the Spindletop pool. Ralph Holmes went to Texaco at its founding. Grandson of an oilman, he was raised in Olean, N. Y. near the Pennsylvania oil fields, quit school to go into refining. For Texaco he helped develop the famed Holmes-Manley gasoline cracking process, helped push its distribution into 51 foreign lands and into all 48 States (more than any U. S. oil company). Now 59, short, stocky, bulb-nosed Ralph Holmes is known chiefly as a refining man and a bear for work. After Mr. Holmes was boosted into the presidency (by the Laphams), he saw to it that his $500,000,000 company was run on Holmes ideas. Last spring he even edited an issue of the Texaco Star, monthly house organ. Editor Holmes blistered the oil industry, collectively and individually, for its colossal sins and the issue raised a storm in the oil world. Directors who had never seen Texaco in the spotlight were alarmed.