Читать книгу Texas Got It Right! - Sam Wyly - Страница 16

It started happening to me in 1956, when I came

here for a summer job helping CPAs do audits in a

hot tin warehouse, where I spent the day counting

knives and forks before being “promoted” to an air-

conditioned warehouse to count ladies’ underwear.

That was the year the movie Giant came out, and the

images of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in the

West Texas high desert made a big impression on me.

So did the on-screen conflict between East Coast pre-

tentiousness and the Texas wildcatter spirit. I knew I

wanted to be a part of this place. So I finished my

MBA in Ann Arbor, Michigan; got toughened up at a

ninety-day boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in

San Antonio; and, while all my business-school bud-

dies were snagging their first jobs at GM (the

Facebook of the day), I got a job working for IBM in

Fort Worth (“where the West begins”).

When I finally broke out on my own in 1963,

selling Fortran software services to petroleum engi-

neers, my role models weren’t computer geniuses.

They were oil wildcatters, guys who were willing to

drill fifty dry holes in the West Texas desert before

they got a producing well. They never said die. And

Texas bankers had faith and loaned them the money

to do it! I knew that if I was going to hit it big—or

TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

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at least make enough for a mortgage, a car, and a

house to put my family in—I was going to do it right

here in Texas.

Hundreds of thousands of people from every race and

walk of life are fleeing states like California, Illinois,

and New York to start a new life in Texas. We’ve got

some of the fastest-growing, and fastest-diversifying,

metro areas in the country. That old abbreviation GTT,

“gone to Texas” (coined back in the 19th century when

hard-up farmers in Tennessee were heading to Texas in

droves), has new currency today.

And we are welcoming our new neighbors with

open arms. Because that’s how Texans were brought

up, sure, but also because we know that diversity and

population growth are good for our state. Today Fort

Worth, Dallas, Austin, and Houston are magnets for

the “reverse migration” of African-Americans who

are leaving behind the old urban enclaves of the Rust

Belt, the Northeast, and the Left Coast. And most

Texans know that the idea of a border fence along the

Two paintings by the artist David Wright, from left to right: Sam

Wyly’s great-great-great-granddad Hezekiah Balch; James

Wyly, who fought the French and the Indians on the 1760s fron-

tier and left land in North Carolina and Virgina to his children.