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When Pancho Villa's raiders crossed the border in 1916, the big house prepared for a siege. The Widow King called in all hands one anxious night, gave them guns and posted them at strategic spots. Then she calmly went to bed. The raiders did not come; instead, they besieged the Norias division ranch house to the south. There eight bandits and one King rancher were killed. When other bandits kidnaped a ranch resident the vaqueros nabbed them by following the shells which the peanut-loving bandits had dropped.
When the Widow King died in 1925, at 92, her complex will put the ranch in a trust for ten years. With Bob Kleberg the First ailing (he died seven years after the Widow King), the trustees chose his son and namesake to run the ranch.
Robert the Second. Bob the Second had been preparing for the job since the age of four, when he rode his first horse. He learned to rope, cut out cattle and shoot a pistol with either hand. As a boy, he used to rise before dawn, and with brother Dick and their three sisters ride 25 miles to a roundup. After dark they would ride back. Sometimes Sarah, the youngest girl, would go to sleep and fall off her horse. The others would put her back in the saddle, then wake her up to race the last mile home.
Bob hated to leave the ranch, even to go to high school, and then for two years to the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture. In 1916 he came home for good to help run the ranch. Ten years later, after a whirlwind 17-day courtship, he married pretty Washington-reared Helen Campbell, daughter of longtime Republican Congressman Philip Pitt Campbell of Kansas.
In 1935, when the ranch trusteeship expired, the property was divided among the heirs.* The Klebergs got 431,000 acres and formed the King Ranch Corp. with Bob as president and manager, and Dick, then a Congressman, as chairman. The stock is held in equal fifths by Bob, Dick, their sisters Henrietta (wife of Celanese Corp. Vice President John A. Larkin), Mrs. Alice East, and the two sons of Sarah (who was killed in an auto accident). By purchase, Bob Kleberg has built the ranch's holdings up to 750,000 acres, leased 140,000 more to the corporation from his own holdings as trustee of his mother's estate plus 20,000 from outside interests in Texas. The corporation has bought and leased 10,500 acres in Pennsylvania for grass fattening of King Ranch cattle.
Tight Lip. Bob keeps a tight lip about the ranch's profits. But they can be roughly estimated. The 20 million pounds of beef sold this year should gross between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000. (The ranch sells virtually all its cattle to Swift & Co. to keep from driving down prices by open sales.) Sales of breeding bulls bring in another $150,000 or so. But the expenses are huge, too. Real estate taxes run around $200,000, gasoline and oil take $48,000, land-clearing $120,000. The payroll for the 500 employees is over $400,000. At best guess, the ranch this year should net over $1,000,000 before income taxes.