Pat Holloway was larger than life. He was a gambler, a risk taker, a wheeler-dealer, a giant standing tall in the great oil boom of Giddings, Texas, a lawyer who handled and repackaged truths as deftly as a sleight-of-hand magician. Now you see it. Now you don’t. He was not afraid to break old rules or invent new ones. Holloway was tall, slender, had blue eyes, strawberry blond hair, and was considered quite handsome within the inner circles of Dallas society. Well, if not handsome, he was at least debonair and supremely confident. He was sure of who he was and where he was going, although it was not unusual for him to keep changing directions at the oddest of times.
Pat Holloway
He could charm a man as easily as cut his heart out with some dusty law or precedent that the innocent had never heard about and the guilty didn’t know was on the books. Holloway was a schemer – both brash and brilliant. Some feared him. Others damned him. A few had threatened him. He worked hard and drank even harder, but said he never let an overabundance of alcohol cloud his good judgment. Holloway punctuated his sentences with intermittent explosions of profanity as though curse words, when cleverly pieced together, were the stuff of poetry.
He almost always looked as if he had just walked off the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly, and he was recognized as one of the more flamboyant figures – lawyer or otherwise – to swagger down the hallways of the Dallas Courthouse.
Pat Holloway loved the law. It was a chess game of the mind, a matching of wits, played out with briefs and pleadings, and it was his belief that whenever a legal matter was being discussed, debated, defended, disputed, denied, or negotiated, the best team always won. The facts be damned. He was slick. He was smooth. He was tenacious. He had a deep aversion to losing. Did not like it. Never accepted it. Did not believe it had any place in his life or his profession.
In time, he forsook the decorum of the Dallas Courthouse for the bleak, barren, and dusty peanut fields that guarded the dreaded Austin Chalk. He had operated private oil and gas drilling programs for about twenty investors, then gambled once more and plunged into the oilfield business, buying leases, hauling in equipment, and began drilling wherever geologist Ray Holifield told him to drill. By 1981, he had fifteen drilling rigs, ten completion rigs, and was producing 12,000 barrels of oil a day. During one year alone, he drilled a hundred wells, and only four of them came up dry.
The City Meat Market in Giddings where Pat Holloway worked so many of his oil deals.
Holloway’s Humble Exploration Company became the unquestioned leader in the Giddings oil game where the rules were always changing, sometimes bent, often broken, and sometimes buried in an unmarked grave. No one had thus far drilled more wells, pumped more oil, and trapped more natural gas than Pat Holloway.
A legal sniper took him down. Bill Browning – his business partner, his best friend, his running mate at Yale, a ten percent investor in Humble Exploration – had died of a heart attack. And a vindictive widow – who did not want to lose her pipeline to Giddings oil – sued.
Jane Browning wanted every dollar that Holloway’s Humble Exploration Company had squeezed from the defiant Austin Chalk, and, in a few short years, he had pumped out a sizable fortune. She did not want the millions for herself, Jane Browning said. It was for the children, she said. Please be fair to the children.
She had, in legal documents, accused Holloway of being a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a crook. She had charged him with everything except murder, and that might come later if her investigators uncovered any proof, and, Lord knows, they were trying.
Jane Browning did not have a solid legal case.
She knew it.
So did he.
“It doesn’t matter,” his lawyer told him. “She has the judge.”
The law remained outside the courtroom when Jane Browning walked inside.
Back in the oilfield, Holloway had been a free man. The courthouse was stifling. His nerves had left the sour taste of bile in his mouth. Pat Holloway shifted his eyes from the hard face of Jane Browning to the judge strutting in from his chambers like a little Druid dressed in the robe of justice.
The litigation, in Pat Holloway’s words, became a nightmare. He realized he was doomed from the time the first sound of a judge’s gavel echoed throughout the courtroom like a gunshot. The silence was broken. Pat Holloway certainly did not realize it, but he would soon be broken as well – financially and emotionally. His work, his life, his triumphs in the Giddings oilfield would all lie in shambles. He might as well have been a walking dead man. Pat Holloway would never lose his swagger. He lost everything else.
In Pat Holloway’s eyes, Jane Browning wanted to steal the oil empire he had built with his own hands. Humble Exploration belonged to him and him alone. It had been built with his guts, with his guile, with his vision, with his sweat. He took the risks. He was due the rewards.
After seven grueling weeks, the jury was ready to end it all. Harry Hurt III reported in Texas Monthly: The jury reported its verdict to a courtroom guarded by armed bailiffs, who frisked Holloway. The jury treated him even more roughly, awarding Browning and her children seventy million dollars in actual damages and two million dollars in exemplary damages. A week later, Judge Walker also awarded Browning a hundred percent of Humble Exploration’s stock, thereby hiking Holloway’s total loss to an estimated eighty-two million dollars.
Pat Holloway was devastated. His business and his life were in ruin. Said attorney Dale Ossip Johnson, “I’ve read this case from beginning to end, and this is the worst travesty of justice I’ve seen in twenty years of practice. As a former judge, I’m aghast at the conduct of that trial. It was a three-ring circus.”
Pat Holloway would not be allowed to go back to Giddings. He could no longer drill. The H. L. Hunt of the Giddings field was broke. He could not afford to buy a lease or rent a rig if he found one. The appeals would last for eight more years, and all the King’s men could not put the pieces back together again. The field changed. A boom. A bust. A boom again. Pat Holloway had lost his leases, his oil wells, and his relevance. He had helped pioneer the boom. It now belonged to somebody else. Pat Holloway threw his law books in a suitcase, walked for the last time across the gardens of chalk, and left the oilfields of never-never land.
He went back to a successful law practice, settling in Austin and using his legal mind to handle high-powered, high-dollar, often controversial oil and gas lawsuits across the country. Over the years, Holloway had known personally what it was like to be on both sides of a case and the wrong side of a judge. I had met with Pat while researching my book on the Giddings boom, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk. I’m sure he didn’t consider me a friend, but I lived with his legend for so long that Pat Holloway seemed like family.
In the early morning of a calm Austin morning, only a week ago, the demons finally left him for good. Pat Holloway died of a gunshot wound.
His finger was on the trigger.
I received a late-night email from his daughter, Marcy. She said: “I wanted you to know, if you didn’t already, that my father shot himself Friday morning. May he be treated better in death than he was in life.”
I was shocked, stunned.
Pat Holloway was larger than life.
Somewhere, back in the deep recesses of my mind, I expected him to live forever.
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Newbury