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He bought a derrick, got an ancient, 3,000-ft. East Texas drilling rig and a leaking secondhand boiler and boldly set out to sink a 6,000-ft. hole in Hardin County. He drafted his father as a tool pusher, his younger brother William as a laborer. It was agonizing toil. Sand ruined the rubber rings in his pumps every half hour; each time, he dismantled the mechanism and installed new ones. The "coffee pot" rig broke down endlessly. He says: "We might as well have been drilling with a high-heeled boot." It took six months to sink a hole which modern equipment would drill in a week. The well was dry.
McCarthy refused to quit. He rented another rig, drilled again in the Conroe field. A platform collapsed and he burned the skin off his hands sliding to safety; he stood off a sheriff bent on reclaiming his equipment. He finally "made a well." He got a little oil with another hole in the same field. Then he hit it big in Chambers County and one day the Humble Oil Co. sent him a check for $700,000. He was 26. McCarthy ordered his Houston mansion built, bought his big diamond and went on plunging.
Disaster. For a while his luck held. He bought up a lease with only eleven days to run, gambled on drilling before its expiration date. It rained night & day for the whole eleven days. McCarthy toiled in knee-deep, liquid mud for days at a stretch, drove his men to exhaustion. But his derrick was up and rigged and his rotary turning in 10½ days. He brought in a big gas producer.
Then one disaster after another hit him: a derrick collapsed, a well blew out and started a quarter-million-dollar fire. McCarthy invaded the Palacios district, sank $700,000 in leases, a million dollars in equipment, drilled five disappointing wells at once and went broke. By the time his mansion was built he was $1,500,000 in debt.
It might have been the finish of a softer man. McCarthy was worried because the grounds around the mansion were still bare —he bought a nursery firm, used its stock to landscape his vast lawns, and sold the company at a $1,500 profit. Then he argued his creditors into letting him go on drilling. After that he really got rich with a string of successful explorations at Chocolate Bayou, Anchor, Bailey's Prairie, Coleto Creek, Angleton, Winnie-Stowell and Blue Lake.
Danger. He never quit plunging, and the Shamrock, his big chemical company (which is reported losing money) and his endless drilling ventures have been great financial drains. Last week Houston was alive with a titillating rumor: that its most flamboyant citizen was strapped for cash. In the last few years, McCarthy has borrowed $50 million from big insurance companies, using as security his vast oil reserves (calculated at from 100 to 200 million barrels). The trouble with reserves is that they are still underground. With oil prices falling and recent sharp cuts in oil production quotas ordered by the state, his weekly take from his own fields has been curtailed.
Last December he asked the RFC (which does not lend money when private capital is available) for a loan of $70 million. If he gets it, he can pay off the insurance companies, and use $20 million to tide himself over while he does his utmost to develop new fields at New Ulm and Collins Lake. If the RFC refuses him? Glenn McCarthy might have to surrender some of his empire.