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Chapter 1
The Fish House
American Dream stories aren’t supposed to end this way. An old man lies in bed surrounded by the proof of a lifetime of hard work and ingenuity: a beautiful house in a lovely subdivision, birds chirping in the garden, two gleaming white luxury cars in the garage. Yet he cannot rest. Death approaches, but he cannot die in peace. Day after day, he fretfully asks his firstborn and favorite grandson, “Did you get a judgment yet?” There are lawsuits pending; his life’s work hangs in the balance. His devoted grandson, Wright III, has no choice but to answer, “Not yet, Pappy, not yet, but we will.” The old man tells him, “Don’t let them take it from me.” It wasn’t the way Pappy Gore’s life was supposed to end. Not given how far he had come.
Wright Winston (Pappy) Gore was born in 1919 in Trinity, Texas. He was about as poor as a little boy can be. His daddy worked a number of jobs: in the oilfields, as an engineer on the railroad, in the cotton fields. Pappy spent most of his youth in the spare, unforgiving part of Texas known as the Highlands. He had two pairs of overalls when he was very young, one that he wore during the week and one that he kept for church on Sundays. He seldom wore shoes. It was a childhood filled with hard labor and the knowledge that you worked for the necessities of life. “He tells stories of the great American Depression,” said Beth Gore, Pappy’s daughter-in-law, the wife of his eldest son, Wright Jr. “He would have to go shoot a squirrel if he wanted some dinner.”
Pappy Gore worked with his family in the cotton fields, where his parents would find him out of breath in the blazing Texas sun. They thought they had a very lazy boy because he kept “pretending” to faint or going off to lie down. “Don’t be lazy,” they admonished him, fearing he would amount to nothing. Their child actually had a hole in his heart, a condition that was not corrected until he had open-heart surgery when he was forty years old.
“They didn’t know,” Pappy said, waving his arm, forgiving his parents as he listened to relatives recount this story. He was eighty-six, and speaking was difficult after a series of strokes. “They didn’t know,” he insisted.
Pappy loved to learn, but hated the schoolmarm, a strict disciplinarian who had no patience for a cut-up like him, disrupting her classroom with his antics. Fortunately, at this point in his childhood he had lucked upon a pair of wide-wale corduroy pants, thick enough to soften the blows of the fierce whippings administered by the schoolmarm, after which he was banished to the schoolroom closet. But fear not; this turned out to be a great boon to his education. For there the schoolmarm, great enemy of fun and learning, had stored the treasure of all treasures: the World Book Encyclopedia. Pappy would keep the closet door open just a crack to allow in enough light so he could read the encyclopedia all day long, drinking in A to Z of famous men and women, exotic places, foreign wars and civilizations and all manner of diseases and animals. It was glorious and well worth the whipping.
A poor boy became a man quickly in the Highlands in those days. A visitor asked Pappy, “How old were you when you were responsible for taking care of yourself?”
“Fourteen,” Pappy answered, forcing the words out through his dysphasia.
“What kind of work did you do?”
“Anything. I would do any work.”
The year was 1933. Tall for his age but still a child, Pappy had to earn his keep. “He started working in service stations when he was just a kid,” said Isabel Gore, his wife of sixty years. He pumped gas and later drove a laundry truck. Graduating from high school with dreams of a better life, he enrolled at Lee College in Baytown, Texas, and began studying chemistry. He was going to put himself through school. But his education was cut short when Tillman Falgout asked Pappy to go to Galveston Island and run a Gulf Oil service station for him and deliver fish to the Falgout and Godfrey fish markets. Falgout was a partner of Walter Godfrey. The Falgouts and the Godfreys were among the most powerful Texas business families of their era. So Pappy went where Tillman Falgout sent him. He started working on Galveston Island in the early 1940s. At that time, Galveston Island was considered a high point of civilization along the Gulf Coast of East Texas. There were grand hotels, bathing beauties, casinos and dance halls and even some legendary racketeers. There was money to be made in a place like Galveston Island. There was the pulse of life.
But Pappy never stopped longing for an education. Later on, when he was working from dawn to the wee hours of the night as his own boss at Western Seafood, in rare moments of leisure he loved to sit at the kitchen table and read the dictionary. He would search out the perfect word for every nuance of human emotion or thought; Merriam-Webster never had a bigger fan. “My grandfather had a vocabulary like William F. Buckley,” said Wright III.
In the mid-1940s, the Falgouts had the idea of setting up their own “fish house.” A fish house is a place where shrimp boats offload their catch and sell it to a processor, who prepares the shrimp for sale to a wholesaler, who in turn supplies it to retailers all over the country. In this way, the Falgouts could sell the shrimp to retail outlets of their own on Galveston and along the Gulf Coast. Around 1945 they bought a small tract of land about 200 feet wide in a little town in East Texas called Freeport, right on the banks of the Old Brazos River, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. They decided that Pappy should go down there and establish the shrimp business for them. Once again, Pappy pulled up stakes. Leaving Galveston Island for Freeport was not a step up in terms of locale, but Pappy had little choice in the matter. He set out for Freeport to run a little company called Western Shellfish.
One day a young woman named Isabel Maier came to Freeport to visit her sister, whose husband worked with Pappy at Western Shellfish. Her sister introduced her to Wright (Pappy) Gore.
“Six weeks later we were married,” said Isabel Gore. Pappy was twenty-six; Isabel, still a teenager, had just graduated from high school. “Wright had a friend who was the judge up in Alvin, so we got married up there.”
Isabel and Pappy Gore worked side by side at Western Shellfish. It was hard work. Some would say it was a man’s work, but Isabel didn’t mind. She was no stranger to hard work or to shrimp. Isabel Maier Gore was one of eight children—“the fourth in line”—from Ocean Springs, a small town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Biloxi. Her father was an itinerant canning plant supervisor. “We went where the work was.” When she was a young child, her father supervised a shrimp canning plant. She and her brothers and sisters started helping their daddy at the plant at the age of five or six. “There weren’t any laws back then at the time. We worked when we had to.” Isabel’s family moved around the Gulf Coast, going next to Franklinton, Louisiana. “My daddy ran a vegetable canning plant there,” said Isabel. Later they settled in Bayou La Batre, a tiny Gulf outpost that would become famous in the movie Forrest Gump as the setting of the Bubba-Gump Shrimp Company.
When Isabel and Pappy settled into Freeport in 1946, there was little in the town that a Hollywood director would have found picturesque. Freeport was just beginning to shake off its reputation as little more than a Gulf Coast pesthole. But Isabel and Pappy didn’t intend to work for Tillman Falgout forever. They had dreams and ambitions for the future.
Not all young married couples in the eastern part of Texas were living such hard lives in those years. Houston and its environs had a high society, and for its stars the world was a glistening oyster. The unquestioned queen of that society was a woman named Sarah Campbell Blaffer. “According to many of Houston’s old guard, Sarah Campbell Blaffer was the nearest equivalent of Texas royalty,” says Debrett’s Texas Peerage. “Her husband was Robert E. Lee Blaffer, a founder of Humble Oil [later Exxon]. Her father, William Thomas Campbell, signed the original charter of the Texas Company, which became Texaco. The Blaffer-Campbell marriage combined two of the world’s great oil fortunes. Governor James Hogg, a partner of Campbell’s, later called it, ‘the conglomerate of the century.’” Sarah Campbell Blaffer’s great-grandson H. Walker Royall was slated to be the developer of the Freeport marina project, for which the City of Freeport wanted to take Pappy Gore’s property.
Around the same time that the newlywed Gores were pulling themselves up by sheer force of will from the grimy oilfields of the Highlands and the sticky poverty of Mississippi bayous, Sarah Campbell Blaffer’s children were coming up in Houston society. John, Jane, Cecil Amelia (Titi) and Joyce had been raised by “a French governess and spent every summer on her farm in the wine district of Charente in order for them to perfect their French, and their mother to visit the studios and galleries of Paris.” Mrs. Blaffer’s children and grandchildren received their secondary education in the Northeast, an uncommon thing in many Texan circles, and her home became a literary salon. She developed a keen eye for paintings and became an enthusiastic art collector until her death in 1973; she shared her paintings with all of Texas by making donations to public collections, a fact that endeared the Blaffer name for generations. To honor her husband, who died in 1942, she founded the Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1947, through which a large and generous collection was given to the museum. She insisted on having traveling art exhibits of valuable masterpieces she donated, at a time when such a notion was unheard of. “Mother wanted a museum without walls,” said Titi Blaffer von Furstenberg, “because she herself lived in a small town once and never forgot the hunger of intelligent people in such places for excellent things.” (Titi was married to Tassilo von Furstenberg, whose son Egon, a fashion designer, was married to Diane von Furstenberg.) Town & Country magazine, known for chronicling the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful families, did a profile on “Blaffer Women” in December 1981.
Sarah’s son John Hepburn married a young woman named Camilla Davis, whom he met at her debut party, which was covered by Life magazine. Camilla was no slouch in the lineage department; she was the daughter of the Texas real estate tycoon and banker Wirt Davis. The couple followed in the tradition of John’s mother. If there was a fundraising ball for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston that needed organizing, Camilla pitched in along with her sister-in-law Jane Blaffer Owen. Through Houston’s new Allied Arts Association they were involved in creating the first museum ball, called the Beaux Arts Ball of 1952. The ball was given intermittently until 1960, and then it became a yearly event under the steady hand of the Blaffer sisters. Camilla and John donated a wing to the Kincaid School, a prestigious private school in Houston founded by Robert Lee Blaffer. The couple also funded the construction of a wing at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, dedicated to the memory of Robert Lee Blaffer.
Jane Blaffer had made an interesting match too. She was married to Kenneth Dale Owen, a descendant of the British industrialist and philosopher Robert Owen, who helped found New Harmony, a utopian society in Indiana established in the first half of the nineteenth century. Jane later undertook the enormous project of restoring the town of New Harmony, which had gone to ruin over the past century. She also donated many new structures, including the “Roofless Church” designed by Philip Johnson, “a dazzling-white library” designed by Richard Meier, an inn built by an Indianapolis architect named Evans Woolen, and ceremonial gates for the town sculpted by Jacques Lipchitz. Clearly, this was a family that had an eye for beauty and wasn’t shy about combining its love of art with civic causes.
Sarah Blaffer’s four children gave her numerous grandchildren. John and Camilla had five children. Their oldest child, Camilla (Coco), married a man named John Royall. Coco has enjoyed society life, although her last name caused a bit of confusion in England, where the word “royal” has a literal meaning. According to Richard Kay, observer of British blue bloods for the Daily Mail, Multi-Millionaire oil heiress Coco Blaffer (her grandfather founded what became Exxon Oil) can dine out for years on what happened to her when she attended the glittering 50th anniversary ball for the Guards Polo Club. Coco—who has homes in London, New York, Monaco, Rhode Island and Houston—thought the £1,175-a-ticket for the Windsor Castle event was worth it, not least because it was hosted by the Queen. She tells me: “Mostly I am ‘Coco Blaffer.’ Coco is short for Camilla and Blaffer is my maiden name. But I went to the ball under my married name of ‘Camilla Royall.’ When I told the equerry who I was, he just stared at me and asked: ‘are you an imposter?’ Then, when I met the Queen, she exclaimed, ‘We have had trouble with that name before.’”
Hiram Walker Royall, who goes by “Walker,” is Coco and John Royall’s son. His name alludes to a family connection to the famous Scottish liquor business. Walker tends to stay out of the limelight. He runs an investment company in Dallas and serves on the advisory board of a company called Sun Resorts, which operates commercial marinas in the Texas Gulf region and in the Caribbean. His Sun Resorts bio describes his company, Briarwood Capital Corporation, as a “real estate investment vehicle with an emphasis on Texas retail properties.” The company “currently oversees a portfolio valued at more than $100 million,” the website says.
Though some Blaffer women have attended school in rather brainy quarters in the Northeast (Coco went to Bryn Mawr; a first cousin, the noted anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, attended Radcliffe and Harvard), Walker stayed closer to home and attended Southern Methodist University, where he got a BBA in finance and real estate. At thirty-four, Walker is a nice-looking young man, tall and fair with broad shoulders, and a rather patrician appearance. On a website for Maverick Pac, a loosely organized fundraising group of young Texas Republicans, there is a picture of Walker at an event. He is wearing a pinstriped suit with an understated tie, the very picture of upper-class elegance. He looks perfectly at home in the mahogany-paneled room lined with bookcases as he chats casually with George P. Bush, the nephew of the president. George P., being much shorter than Walker, looks up at him with an inscrutable expression, a mixture of seriousness and what can best be described as puzzlement. To the left stands Bryan Pickens, heir to the Dallas Wildcatters. We will never know what Walker, George P. and Bryan Pickens were talking about that night, but whatever it was, that mahogany room was a world away from the troubles of a small industrial town like Freeport.
