Margaret Hunt Hill

Margaret Hunt was born at Lake Village, Arkansas, on October 19, 1915, the first child of H.L. Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt. On October 15, 1938, she married Albert Galatyn Hill, an accountant at Hunt Oil, who stayed with the company. She "worked for her father as a business aide and confidante, acquiring training available to few other men or women." When Hunt's bigamous wife Frania Tye came to a Dallas hotel room to settle with him she found the twenty-five-year-old Margaret there with her father. Her daughter, Lyda Hunt Hill, born in the fall of 1942, was Hunt's first grandchild.¹

The Hills owned the Garden of the Gods Club. Margaret took no part in the daily running of the family companies, "but she was always on hand when something big was in the works." Employees at Hunt Oil called her "the big boss." She sat on the board of Hunt Energy with her brothers and on the boards of the two trusts of her brother Hassie, from which the first family on occasion lent itself money. At family meetings on Placid Oil Company, an insider said, "even Bunker and Herbert were quiet." The ordinary course was described by another: "Bunker says, 'I know how it is; it's like this.' Margaret says, 'No, it's like this.' Herbert says, 'No, it's like Bunker says; I took notes.'" She waited in a motel rather than outside the courtroom during the Lee trial in Shreveport in 1978. On the copy of the family genealogy that she gave to the New York Public Library she struck out "Prepared for Mrs. H. L. Hunt" and wrote in her mother's name.²

After the silver market broke in March 1980 she insisted that Bunker and Herbert put up more of their own property to secure Placid's interest in the silver partnership. "Margaret never liked the way Bunker and Herbert were wheeling and dealing," a source said. "After the silver collapse, she put her foot down." She asked Bunker in the family's discussions what he had been trying to do.³

Her trust and Hassie's owned Hunt Petroleum. In November 2007 her grandson Al Hill III sued his father, his sisters, his aunts, and the trustee Tom Hunt over the management of the two trusts.⁴