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Today many of the shacks are decrepit and abandoned.
Estes made other friends in Nashville, including the aged president of Nashville Christian Institute, a Negro school sponsored by the Church of Christ and endowed by a Nashville insurance magnate.
Estes persuaded the institute's trustees to turn $100,000 of the endowment funds over to him in exchange for mortgages on his converted-barracks homes.
Like the Murchisons. From cotton and cheap housing, Estes rapidly branched out into many other businesses—selling fertilizer and farm implements, digging wells, lining irrigation ditches, providing other agricultural services. He even founded a funeral parlor, thereby fulfilling a prophecy in the 1943 Clyde High School yearbook that he would become an undertaker. In the Estes manner, it was a grandiose establishment, far too fancy for Pecos, and it lost money.
Estes was frank about telling people what his ambition was: he wanted to get as rich as the Murchisons, the most famous of Texas' big-rich clans. He had some theories about how to get Murchison-rich. One of his basic concepts was that he could profit by handing out presents—a car, a suit of clothes, a thousand dollars in cash—since the recipient would be under an obligation to do him future favors. Another notion was that when a debt gets big enough, the creditor acquires an interest in the survival and prosperity of the debtor. "If you get into anybody far enough," he often said, "you've got yourself a partner."* Estes got far enough into Commercial Solvents, a New York chemical manufacturer, which did become a sort of partner. It was this partnership that enabled Estes to get into big-time wheeling and dealing.
In the mid-1950s, Estes had gone into business as a distributor of anhydrous ammonia, a cheap, efficient nitrogen fertilizer widely used in large-scale farming. Indeed, the stuff has become as necessary as water to the farm economy of West Texas. Estes got way behind in his anhydrous ammonia bills from Commercial Solvents, and by 1958 he owed the firm some $550,000. He went to New York and sold officers of the firm on a complex deal: under the agreement, Commercial
Solvents not only deferred payment of the $550,000 debt but agreed to lend Estes an additional $350,000—a credit of $125,000 for future purchases of anhydrous ammonia, plus $225,000 to enable Estes to get started in the grain-storage business. Estes, now into Commercial Solvents for $900,000, promised to pay off the debt in installments over a five-year span. As part of the overall deal, Estes agreed to assign to Commercial Solvents 100% of the fees he got for storing grain.
And Commercial Solvents in effect agreed to ship him all the anhydrous ammonia he wanted—as long as the grain-storage money kept rolling in.
Picking Up the Pieces. With his entry into grain storage, Estes acquired another partner—the U.S. Government. Grain storage is an appendage of federal price-support programs. A farmer who gets a Government price-support "loan" on a crop of grain deposits the grain