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The younger Pickens was unhappy at Phillips from the start. He overflowed with ideas that his bosses refused to heed. After four years of watching his frustration, his wife half-jokingly asked one day, "If you hate it so much, why don't you just quit?" Returning to his office, Pickens gave notice, packed up and drove away. "It was the best advice Lynn ever gave me," he says of the episode, "though she was shocked when I told her I had taken it." Using the $1,300 he received in severance pay from Phillips' profit- $ sharing plan, Pickens bought a 1955 Ford station wagon large enough to hold his exploration gear and set out on his own.
It was not easy work. The search for oil meant days of chasing rumors over dusty back roads in Texas and Oklahoma, and nights bent over maps studying geological strata. In his spare time, Pickens indulged his passion for Gusher, a board game in which players roll dice to look for oil. Says Amarillo Lawyer Wales Madden Jr., an old friend: "It was uncanny. He always won at that darn game."
After a year of knocking about without financial backing, Pickens secured a $100,000 line of credit, half of which came from his wife's uncle. With it, he formed Petroleum Exploration, his first company. "I've worked with a lot of geologists," remembers Lawton Clark, an independent Denver oilman who joined Pickens in that venture, "but I've never seen anyone as well prepared. He just knew what there was to be known." Pickens describes those hardscrabble early days as a period of "pickin' with the chicken."
Within a few years Pickens had found enough oil and gas to attract investors from throughout the Panhandle. He had also become a workaholic, and that cost Pickens his marriage. His wife took little interest in his work, and he paid scant attention to anything else. They were divorced in 1971. "It was almost jealousy," says their son Michael, 30, a Dallas stockbroker and the third of the couple's four children. "Everyone admired his success, and she did not even know what was going on." Debra, 35, the oldest child, remembers Pickens as an absentee father: "He worked six, sometimes seven days a week, and I'm sure that when he came home in the evenings, it was difficult for him to say, 'O.K., this is my family, they're not my employees.' " By the time of his divorce, a combination of business sense, luck and geological knowledge had made Pickens a millionaire. At the heart of his fortune were the energy finds and lucrative investments that had been made by Mesa, which Pickens formed in 1964. Some properties acquired by Mesa rose staggeringly in value. In 1959, for example, Pickens scraped together $35,000 to invest in drilling sites in Canada. Mesa sank the income from those sites into new wells and in 1979 sold its Canadian operations to Dome Petroleum for $600 million.