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While John flew P-39s in the Mediterranean and P-40s in South China, the Marines sent Clint Jr. through Duke University, where he graduated top man in his engineering class. The war over, John went back to Yale for some serious studying, then headed out to Santa Fe where Clint Sr. had lined him up a $175-3-month job in a bank. Meanwhile Clint Jr. was getting a master's in math at M.I.T. In 1950 they joined forces in Dallas.
Calvinistic Compulsion. The Texas to which the Murchison boys returned was changing fast, was no longer just a cornucopia shaped like an oil well. Among the Dallas millionaires, Trammell Crow made his fortune by building and operating warehouses in a dozen states, and Carr P. Collins and his sons got their multimillion-dollar stake in the insurance business. Texas Instruments Chairman Erik Jonsson was busy piling up what eventually became $100 million in electronics, and Leo Corrigan was rapidly multiplying his wealth by building a hotel combine that now stretches from the Bahamas to Hong Kong.
Many of the adventurers belonged to a new generation, were just back from a war that had taken them to the ends of the earth and filled them with determination to "make a mark on the wall" that would be visible outside Texas. They had new and ambitious ideas, and their fathers had the money and confidence to act on them. Things began to move fast. Dallas' Republic National Bank took to financing Texans who were building in San Diego, and wound up so savvy about the market that even San Diego builders began to come to it for financing. Dallas builders, claim the wide-ranging Texans, did more to develop Atlanta than did Georgians. In Texas itself, the deals flew hard and fast under the hands of second or third-generation millionaires such as Angus Wynne Jr., who sparked the Great Southwest Corp., a development company now constructing a huge industrial park between Dallas and Forth Worth.
But if their horizons were broader, the new Texans had some of their fathers' narrow wisdom about them. They knew how to make credit work and work again. For them, the real joy of business was the excitement of the risk and the satisfaction of pulling off a deal. And with an almost Calvinistic compulsion, they all drove themselves to work, work, work—even after they had made more money than they could ever personally use. "We are obligated to do something useful," says Clint Murchison Jr., "and the most useful thing I can do is be in business. The most important thing about money is as a measure of your value in the economy."
Once, That's All. John and Clint Murchison had some early trouble establishing their value. John got stuck in an unprofitable timber investment in the Northwest, lost millions in mining uranium. Clint Jr. plunged into a residential deal in Dallas on which old Clint figured a smart operator could have made a million. Clint Jr. lost half a million. Said old Clint: "You can afford to go broke once, but that's all."