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But he is no round-the-clock worker.
Usually he arrives at his office on the 29th floor of Rockefeller Center's RCA Building at 9 a.m. He dislikes paper shuffling so much that his broad, flat-topped desk is almost always clean of everything except a big blotter. At 5 p.m. he usually leaves for home—and he tries not to take any work with him. On the way, he drops in at the University Club for a swim. He feels that a little exercise every day is the reason why he has not missed a day's work in 30 years.
His 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment has an international look about it, with paintings from Hungary, France and Germany, chairs and sofa from Lima, rugs from Egypt, ornate gold-leaf mirrors from Mexico. On weekends, he and his wife, Edith, whom he married while she was a physical-education teacher in Shreveport, La., and their two children, Catherine, 17, and Eugene Jr., 14, go to their 18-acre farm near Greenwich, Conn. There Gene Holman putters around in his garden, trapshoots from his terrace, or has whiskey &water in his trophy house under the stuffed heads of the game that he has shot. He cares so little for night life that he hasn't been in a Manhattan nightclub for two years, says: "I'm the kind of fellow who needs eight hours sleep a night."
"Shot" & "Ma." Gene Holman was pretty well bound to be an oilman. He was born in Texas, raised in the first excitement of its oil boom. His father, James R.
("Dad") Holman, was a Texas ranch hand who had a local reputation as a "hoss traduh." He settled down with his family in Monahans, whose 35 weather-beaten houses marked only a wider place in the road. While Dad Holman kept a livery stable and feed store, his wife ran a boardinghouse grandiloquently called the "Holman Hotel." Young Gene helped around the hotel and attended the one-room country school.
His playmates called him "Shot," in honor of the time he had once misspelled the word in school. Later, he worked as a call-boy on the nearby Texas & Pacific Railway, and punched cows in the summer to earn his way through Simmons College (now Hardin-Simmons University). He played basketball, and ran so many campus organizations that he picked up another nickname, "Ma." Prankish, he liked to set all the alarm clocks in the student dormitory in which he lived for 4 a.m., roll 16-lb. shots down the halls and stairs in the dead of night. The college yearbook, which Gene edited, said of him: "Quiet and un assuming but a living example of influence."
A good student, he showed particular talent for geology, the "new science" which the oil business was just getting interested in. Gene also got interested. He spent a year after graduation studying geology at the University of Texas and then a hitch as a corporal in the U.S. Signal Corps in World War I. He caught the eye of Wallace Pratt, then Standard's top geologist, who hired Gene to work fin its subsidiary, Humble Oil Co. There Holman again impressed the right person—William Stamps Parish, Humble's president. In a short time he was made boss of Humble's Shreveport office. When Holman asked for "instructions," Parish waved a hand and said: "Just run things."