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His luck, perhaps, but not his views. H.L. ignored Dallas civic projects. Ray is investing $210 million in the Reunion redevelopment project, not far from the city's least loved landmark, the Texas School Book Depository. The project includes a 30-story Hyatt Regency Hotel to be opened next summer, a 50-story tower with revolving restaurant now half complete, and an office building to be started later. In 1973 Ray also put up $400,000 to launch a Dallas city magazine, D. Its first issue featured an article severely criticizing his father for doing nothing to boost Dallas.
Personally, Ray says he aims to keep his family life "average—despite the peculiar spelling of my last name." He lives in an unpretentious upper-middle-class house in North Dallas with his wife Nancy, who was a classmate at Southern Methodist University, and their four children, and drives a five-year-old Buick. Friends describe him as earnest and rather dull at parties. Politically, Hunt calls himself moderate, and by family standards he is. He has supported conservative candidates, but talks of the need for business and government to work together, a view that would have been anathema to his father.
At the office, Ray keeps his door open to almost any employee who wants to see him—though he always has a stack of phone messages on his desk to riffle through if the conversation drags. Some of his colleagues are concerned that he may even be a bit too polite and deferential. Says one Dallas businessman: "He's the last one out of the elevator and the last one walking down the hall. But I'm not sure he can twist arms or kick butts like he'll have to in order to run a good business." Be that as it may, it is surprising for a Hunt to be suspected of being too nice a guy.
Bunker and Herbert Hunt last week joined the pioneers of a new tactic in company takeovers. In March, Great Western United Corp., which the Hunts control, bid $15.75 a share for 35% of Sunshine Mining Co., a major silver producer, but Sunshine management never advised its stockholders whether to accept or reject the offer. So Great Western now has lowered its bid to $14.75.
Traditionally, of course, the maker of a tender offer raises the price if his first attempt is balked. But two weeks ago, Anderson, Clayton & Co., a big food processor, became the first to try the opposite tack: it lowered its offer for Gerber Products Co., the baby-food maker, to $37 a share from an initial $40. The aim apparently was to prompt shareholders of the target company to bring pressure on management to accept the original offer. Two lawsuits have already been filed on behalf of Gerber stockholders, seeking damages from Gerber management for resisting the $40 bid.
*A fourth son of H.L.'s first marriage has mental problems that keep him in seclusion.