Hassie Hunt

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr., called Hassie, was born at Lake Village, Arkansas, on November 23, 1917, the second child and first son of H.L. Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt. His father gave him his own name rather than styling him the third. He was sent to Culver Military Academy, did not marry, and drilled for oil as the Hassie Hunt Production Company from an office at Hunt Oil. "By the age of twenty-four, Hassie claimed ten thousand barrels a day in oil production," an income of about four million dollars a year. His father believed he found oil by mystical powers. Father and son competed for leases, and their arguments came to blows. On some days he came to the office barefoot with his shoes hung round his neck. Hunt assigned a man to look after him full time.¹

The Army

Hunt would not seek a medical deferment for him. He had two employees move Hassie from Dallas to Shreveport to Jackson, Mississippi, "changing draft boards with each move," and then obtained him a second lieutenant's commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. In Washington Hassie was to "advise" the Chinese Nationalist government on oil and gas, and lived at the Mayflower Hotel. In 1943 he was transferred to Camp Beauregard in Louisiana. "When he got down to Camp Beauregard, they put him out on the firing field," his caretaker Dick Kirkpatrick said. "He was so scared he just went beserk." He was put in the mental ward of an army hospital near Lake Pontchartrain and discharged.²

Treatment

Hunt sent him to a psychiatric institution near Andover, Massachusetts, where he was given electric shock. Back in Texas he did not know his relations. "You see that woman at the head of the table?" he said of his mother at dinner. "She's married to that fellow Hunt that you hear about." He threw a piece of fruit at her and broke her glasses, and challenged his father to fights. Hunt's aides hired women as companions for him and paid off those he injured. Hunt telephoned Clare Boothe Luce about new procedures, consulted Dr. Alton Ochsner of New Orleans, and contacted or sent his son to Duke University, the Menninger Clinic, and the Institute of Living in Hartford. One doctor offered an operation. "He said the operation would either be a success or Hassie would never be the same," Kirkpatrick recalled. The prefrontal lobotomy "was performed by a doctor up East" in the late 1940s. The surgeon is not named. The violence stopped. Hassie "did not 'get well,'" needed supervision at all hours, and was placed in an institution in New York State. Hunt kept an empty office for him next to his own.³

Return

In early 1965, at the suggestion of Hunt's second wife, Ruth Ray Hunt, Hassie was brought home to Mount Vernon, the family house on White Rock Lake, and lived with nurses in the pool house and later in a neighboring mansion bought by his trust. "The lobotomy had muted Hassie's violence, but it had also left him a middle-aged man with a childlike mentality." He and his father, who looked alike and dressed alike, walked together along the lake. He did not attend the 1978 trial of Frania Tye Lee's suit, "because of the mental illness that had prevented him from appearing in public for over thirty years."⁴

The Trusts

Two trusts and a production company went on drilling in his name throughout his illness, and by the time of his return had built up production worth more than 200 million dollars, more than any of his brothers had found apart from Nelson Bunker Hunt's Libyan field. By 1978 the Hassie entities were worth more than 500 million dollars, including 8 percent of Placid Oil Company and 12 percent of Hunt Petroleum. The trustees were Margaret Hunt Hill, Caroline Hunt Schoellkopf, Al Hill Sr., Herbert Hunt, Lamar Hunt, and the family's financial man John Goodson. "On occasion, such as in their takeover bid for Great Western United, the first family had provided itself with loans from Hassie's trusts." In settling the Lee case the first family obtained from Ruth Hunt's children and from the Lees an undertaking not to challenge Hassie's will.⁵