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Pickens insists that his objective is to raise the stock value for all shareholders, not just for himself, and that he is really serious about taking over a major oil firm. He not only would welcome the challenge, he says, but is confident that he could run one of the behemoths far better than the present managers: "I would show them how I could make their stock dance."
Like many independent oilmen, Pickens was born within sight of working wells. He grew up in Holdenville, Okla. (pop. 6,300), a cow town surrounded by pastures, where cattle graze alongside active oil pumps. An only child, Pickens was raised on a street of white clapboard houses and green lawns. The family is fond of tracing its ancestry back to the same part of England that produced a distant kinsman, Daniel Boone.
Pickens' father, Thomas Boone Pickens Sr., now 86 and living in Amarillo, was an inveterate gambler who made and lost a fortune buying and selling oil ^ leases. He also wagered frequently on college football games. During the depths of the Great Depression, he drove around Holdenville in a dazzling Pierce-Arrow. Recalls Tommy Treadwell, a retired local banker: "Little T- Bone, as his father called him, was so embarrassed about that car that he insisted on being dropped two blocks from school whenever his father drove him there." Pickens' mother, by contrast, was a practical woman who never made snap decisions. During World War II, she ran Holdenville's gas-rationing program. "I was very fortunate in my gene mix," says Pickens. "The gambling instincts I inherited from my father were matched by my mother's gift for analysis." While in high school, Pickens moved with his family to Amarillo (pop. 170,000), the unofficial capital of the Texas Panhandle, which has remained his home.
Despite his medium height (5 ft. 8 in.), Pickens was a star guard on the Amarillo High basketball team. During the semifinal round of a state tournament, his shooting helped keep his team in the game, even though he and his teammates were much shorter than the opposition. At the last time-out, Pickens bounded onto a bench and exhorted, "Guys, I think we've got 'em! Just keep playing the way you have been!" Unfortunately for biographers, the final result was a one-point loss.
Pickens arrived at Texas A&M in 1947 on a basketball scholarship but with no clear idea of what he wanted to do in life. Teammates remember him as a prankster who liked to throw bags of water from hotel rooms during road trips. When a broken elbow cost Pickens his athletic scholarship, he switched to Oklahoma State for his sophomore year. While there, he married Lynn O'Brien, his high school sweetheart. She was 17, he 20. "My mother says she never saw anyone grow up so fast," Pickens recalls. After two years on the dean's list, he graduated with a degree in geology and joined Phillips Petroleum, where his father then worked as a lease broker.