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He had been suckled with the sound of oil rigs in his ears; his father, an itinerant oilfield workman named William McCarthy, came to Spindletop as a driller, and Glenn was born there in 1907. One of his earliest memories concerns the great Gulf Coast hurricane of 1915. As the storm approached, the elder McCarthy galloped to the field in a two-wheeled gig; Glenn went with him and crouched in the roaring darkness as derrick after derrick crashed into wreckage.
William McCarthy got none of the wealth of Spindletop. His job petered out and the family moved on. Glenn grew up in Houston's "Bloody Fifth" ward, where as he says today, "the cops were afraid of the people, and there was almost always a dead man somewhere on the street in the morning."
It was a hard place to live; in the humid, tropical summers, men tucked newspapers under their shirtsleeves, made masks of them for their faces to keep off whining swarms of mosquitoes. For years, Glenn had racking seizures of malaria. The McCarthys had little money for cures —or anything else.
Roving Tackle. Despite illness and poverty, the boy developed into a big, cold-eyed, hard-fisted youngster who burned with a desire to make the world notice Glenn McCarthy. In Houston's San Jacinto High School he began to succeed—he often came to school with a patch on his pants but he was a football hero and a successful fighter at Saturday-night dances. Girls were enthralled by him.
When he was 17 he joined the Navy, served a six-month hitch in an unsuccessful attempt to get to Annapolis. After that, he made football his life. He went to New Orleans and played fullback one season for both the Tulane freshman and a local high-school team. He starred for each. Dana X. Bible persuaded him to go to Texas A. & M., but the coach soon suffered an untimely loss; McCarthy was fired for hazing before the fall season began, and played for Allen Academy at Bryan instead. The year after that he was on the freshman team at Rice Institute.
Then he got married—and made his first impact on Houston society. His bride, Faustine Lee, was the daughter of Millionaire Oilman W. E. Lee. Unabashed by her father's riches, the fact that she was only 16, or the knowledge that he had only a dollar and a half, McCarthy borrowed his mother's wedding ring, contrived to get a license and engineered an elopement. His father-in-law was not pleased. McCarthy moved his bride into a $15-a-month apartment, got a job painting tank bottoms and swore to get as rich as the Lees in a hurry.
He saved his money, in 1930 opened a dry-cleaning shop. He sold it, got an option on a downtown corner, talked the Sinclair Oil Corp. into putting up a gas station for him. He soon had a second. He made the two pay $1,000 a month. But he burned for great wealth; though the Depression was at its deepest and oil was down to 10¢ a barrel, he began gambling in wildcat drilling ventures. He sank a dry hole, sold one of his service stations, and sank another.