Some new names and links for researchers to have for their work
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-Caveat Lector-
I'm working on it. In my opinion, Houston, Texas became the headquarters for a very elitist group of families that were very closely connected to Standard Oil of New Jersey, while also being close to the Mellon family's Gulf Oil. The male members of this group met up in Beaumont at Spindletop in 1901 and later formed a corporation together, around 1916 when Spindletop had dried up and they moved their search to the north part of Harris County, to a town called Humble. The Standard Oil trust was broken up in 1911, so the Texans hid the Rockefeller interest in their Humble Oil Company by using nominees who held title to the stock through secret agreements. I suspect Gulf did the same thing with Jesse Jones, who obtained secret financial assistance from someone which enabled him to build most of the commercial buildings in downtown Houston during the same era.

Notable among these elite families were the Farish brothers--William S. and Stephen P. Farish. W.S. co-founded Humble Oil, and Stephen was involved in the Corsicana field and with obtaining patents to drilling equipment. They were close to the father of Howard Hughes, Jr., who is said to have committed suicide in his office in the Humble Oil Building in Houston when his son was only 17. Then Howard, Jr. married a niece of the brothers' wives--each of whom were members of the Rice family. That's Rice, as in Rice University. The Farish wives were nieces of its founder, who had been poisoned in 1900, and whose murderer had allegedly been caught by the grandfather of James A. Baker III. But that's another story.

The descendants of all these intermarried Farishes, Rices and Bakers (sounds like high-class hillbilly highjinks to me) have controlled the Rice endowment since its beginning, controlled George H.W. Bush's blind trust since he was elected to Congress, and shared a relationship with the Harriman family through W.S. Faris III's aunt, Martha Farish Gerry, a trustee of Mary Harriman's favorite eugenics charity, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Martha's middle name was Botts--as in Baker & Botts law firm--and her husband ,Edward Gerry, was Averell and Bunny Harriman's nephew.

If you read the society columns in Houston, as well as the donors of Rice University, you'll find all their names. These are the people who attended the chairity functions and balls thrown by former Rice University chairman Robert Herring's wife, JoAnne, who was Charlie Wilson's companion for several years.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/2002-09-01/feature3-2.php
Longtime residents still swap stories about Joanne King Herring, the former local television personality who looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor. In the sixties— during her first marriage, to Houston millionaire Bob King—she threw a Roman bacchanal party at her home and hired a black Boy Scout troop to dress like little Nubian slaves. During her second marriage, to Robert Herring, the chairman of the board of the Houston Natural Gas Company (which later evolved into Enron), Joanne became more refined, but she still knew how to entertain. For a party honoring a Middle Eastern potentate, she turned her mansion into a sultan's palace. The late seventies saw the rise of Sandy Hovas, a furniture salesman's daughter who was so busty she had been known at Lamar High School as Buckets. She married Baron Enrico di Portanova, a member of Houston's oil-rich Cullen family, transformed herself into the Baroness Alessandra di Portanova, and started throwing parties at their 32-room River Oaks mansion that lasted until sunup. Even the couture-clad Lynn Wyatt recognized the merits of putting on a good Texas show during her heyday. In the late seventies she served chili and fried chicken at a party she threw in Monaco for Princess Grace.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~instresr/ricefacts/history.html

http://www.washingtonlife.com/issues/2003-10/aroundtown/

NOTE:The information as posted by Kris Milligan and has no verify of validity at this time

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