(See front cover)
Destiny is a strange thing. For some men it flows evenly, broadening like a river. For others it expands like a gas. If the expansion is hurried there may be an explosion and a man's career will settle to earth in floccules of soot.
Harry Ford Sinclair, oilman, who last week faced trial, a second time and less hopefully, for criminal conspiracy to defraud the U. S., has learned a lot about Destiny. Sinclair is not yet 52 years old. He was born in Wheeling, W. Va. It is less than 25 years since he was first heard of in Wall Street and on Long Island as a wealthy young parvenu from the midwestern oilfields. It is not 30 years since he was the son of a village druggist in Kansas, a son who, when his father died, lacked the patience to keep the little business going. One day he came in from rabbit-hunting with a wound in his foot. He had shot himself. An insurance company paid him $5,000 for the loss of a toe. Something told him where to put the money; not into the drug business, but into "mud sills," the big logs men were using then in Kansas to bolster their oil derricks.
Young Sinclair's logs brought a profit. He sank the money in an Oklahoma oil pool and came out with $100,000. Soon he was a millionaire producer with properties dotted all through the midwest, from southern Kansas to northern Texas. He would spot a place, buy or lease it, develop it, sell out and look for another place. He kept control of richest wells.
In those early years, Harry Sinclair helped fix the standard type of U. S. oil-boom promoters. His energy was tremendous. His big smile and loud, harshly good-natured laugh would persuade strong men to work and inspire other gamblers' confidence. But, if necessary, Harry Sinclair could drive strong men to work and outsmart the money fellows. He was, and still is, as shrewd as they come in the whole shrewd oil game. His big laugh and heavy hand are the foils of a cunning mind.
Not until 1916 did he start branching out from production into Oil's subtler phases—transportation, refining, marketing. He formed the Sinclair Oil & Refining Co. out of seven small enterprises and built his own pipe-line to the Great Lakes. In 1917 he formed the Sinclair Gulf Corp. with his own fleet of ships. While larger companies were getting War contracts, he, an alert independent, developed a Latin-American trade. In 1919 he let his friends in on various "ground floors" of the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corp., a towering organization of world-wide schemes.
In the U. S., outside of oil, he was making his dominance felt by bucking the baseball business with a league of his own. The National and American leagues were too much for him, however, and his costly Federal League died in its 2nd year (1915). With racehorses he did better. He bought the services of famed Trainer Sam Hildreth and out of his Rancocas Stables, in 1923, came Zev, world's champion. He bought a yacht, a private car, a Fifth Avenue mansion, an estate at Great Neck, L. I.