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By the middle of Depression Mr. Rieber was ready to use his strong hands in another management eruption caused by Ralph Clinton Holmes, who called for his showdown in 1933. Only a few years before, Oilman Holmes had been backed by his directors in a sudden showdown with Judge Amos Beaty, then a Texaco power. Judge Beaty lost, picked up his hat, walked out to take a friendly office directly above Texaco's Manhattan headquarters. In 1933 Mr. Holmes picked up his hat, but he walked only as far as another Texaco office, there to organize a proxy battle to regain his dictatorial control. Upshot was Texaco got a new president, William Starling Sullivant Rodgers, a Yale graduate who represented a new type of oil executive. A trained engineer who went into oil after a turn at mining, he entered Texaco in 1915, was sales vice president when his directors called. Now 50, tall, athletic, he avoids the trappings of wealth in good Texaco tradition.
After the brief interregnum of the late Charles Bismark Ames, the chairmanship went logically to Torkild Rieber. To Texaco Mr. Rieber is still "The Captain." To the oil industry he is already a legendary figure. To a person who has drawn a Rieber reprimand he is about as forgettable as a typhoon. In his soft Norwegian accent he speaks of a "god dam" this or a "helluva" that with considerable frequency but no particular feeling. In his paneled office in Texaco headquarters in Manhattan's Chrysler Building, he seems to have the same intense detachment that always characterizes a good shipmaster.
For being literally "The Captain" to what he and all other Texaco men insist is The Texas Corp., Mr. Rieber draws something less than the $75,000 per year paid to the preceding chairman. Texaco salaries have not been filed since Mr. Rieber took office. He lives in an apartment hotel, has no country estate, no seagoing yachts. His son is at Yale and a daughter lives at home with his wife. Greying, powerfully-built, he has a trace of a mustache, clean, rugged features and a maze of wrinkles around his grey eyes earned by years of gazing at ten times ten thousand miles of changing sea. Forthright, generous, usually genial, sometimes convivial, he sits at a clear desk with a globe at his right, a telephone at his left, rolls of maps upon the wall and runs the biggest independent oil company in the U. S.