Hughroy Cullen was born on July 3, 1881 in Denton County, Texas, United States. He was the son of Cicero Cullen, a cattle buyer, real estate broker, and insurance salesman, and Louise Beck. Cullen's parents separated when he was quite young, and he was raised by his mother in San Antonio.
His education was limited to elementary school, which he left at the age of twelve.
He worked as a packer in a candy factory. Five years later he secured employment with a cotton-buying firm and in 1904 opened his own cotton-buying agency, which operated throughout Oklahoma and Texas.
Since cotton trading remained depressed after the Panic of 1907, Cullen moved his family to Houston in 1911. With substantial federal assistance, Houston had been dredging a ship channel that would convert the city to a major port.
Cullen's father-in-law owned an attractive parcel of land that fronted on the new channel, and shortly after arriving in Houston, Cullen bought the land. When he later sold this property, Cullen became involved with other real estate transactions and city politics.
He played a major role in raising Houston's share of the funds for the channel. He also fought vigorously to prevent another better-established real estate operator, Jesse H. Jones, from diverting the project nearer to sites in which Jones was interested. Cullen won this battle and saw much of his career as being a rivalry with Jones.
Cullen had a talent for enlisting the support of older men with capital to invest; he could also spot the most influential man in a group and negotiate successfully with him. In 1917 Jim Cheek, a Houston realtor who had benefited from Cullen's work for the channel, asked Cullen to become his agent for acquiring oil leases in western Texas. Cullen accepted on condition that he be taken in as a partner, and he quickly learned how to lease land and to drill for oil. Cullen had an uncanny knack for finding oil. He claimed to have mastered "creekology, " the "wildcatter's natural sense of surface geology. " From the pattern of surface contours and the location and shape of the streams, he said he divined where the underground pools of oil were to be found. Cullen drilled deep, substituted water for mud in certain critical stages of the drilling, and employed a new but simple technique for getting through "heaving" or "Jackson shale, " a brittle rock formation that had been clogging the drilling taps for over a quarter of a century. His last technique was discovered under the aegis of Quintana Petroleum Company, which he had formed in 1932.
Shortly after a tragic accident that killed his only son in 1936, Cullen became interested in philanthropy and contributed a building in his son's memory to the small and struggling University of Houston. The school's concern with educating children of "working people" and providing practical evening courses for adults had attracted Cullen's attention. His donations (eventually totaling over $30 million) and leadership converted the university into a major institution. Texas hospitals also benefited from his generosity. During one week in 1945, he gave over a million dollars to each of four hospitals.
In 1955 Cullen estimated that he had given away 93 percent of his wealth.
During the 1930's and 1940's, he tried to promote the Scandinavian program of bringing industrial workers into the ranks of stockholders so that labor would "sit on the same side of the table with capital. "
Cullen died in Houston, Texas.
He is considered one of the most important figures in Texas during the Oil Boom era. During fourteen years, he discovered oil fields in Texas worth billions of dollars. These included the fields at Pierce Junction, Blue Ridge, Rabb's Ridge, and, in 1934, the biggest one of all-Tom O'Connor's. He contributed a greater sum to the Texas Medical Center. In 1947 he organized his major philanthropies under the Cullen Foundation, to which he transferred title for oil-producing fields valued at over $160 million. It became the third largest foundation in the United States.
When Jones brought the Democratic national convention to Houston in 1928 and ardently supported its nominee, Al Smith, Cullen naturally switched to the Republicans and Herbert Hoover. Four years later, when Jones joined Franklin D. Roosevelt's entourage, Cullen continued to back Hoover. Thereafter, he supported Republican and conservative causes. In 1947 Cullen again opposed Jones over the latter's proposed zoning program for Houston. Cullen denounced his opponent as the agent of those who, on second thought, he described as "New York merchants. " Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the Houston voters agreed with Jones and with apparently no major ill effect on the later orderly development of the city. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Cullen helped stall the candidacy of Senator Robert A. Taft and actively promoted the nomination of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He helped organize conservative Democratic support throughout the South for the Republican ticket, and he provided funds for Republican senatorial and congressional candidates in several states.
Cullen remained politically conservative, and during his last years he was determined to protect America and its economic system against European and Asian Communism and "internal subversion. "
He was equally proud of his membership in the Musicians' Protective Association of the American Federation of Labor.
Cullen was the archetypal Texas oil millionaire. He loved fancy clothes, good cigars, and liquor, and was also a rough-mannered man ready to bet $50, 000 that he would strike oil on his next try. He never forgot the uncertain means by which he had acquired his fortune, consequently he was anxious that no one, especially "outsiders" (including the federal government), would despoil him or his descendants of it.
One observer noted that he was "by turns impulsive, sentimental, opinionated, gentle, sharptongued and folksy, and as tactful as a Texas steer stampeding through a glass works. " But all of these adjectives pale, the observer added, "in favor of one word: generous. "
On December 29, 1903, he married Lillie Cranz, the daughter of a prominent Schulenburg, Texas, merchant. They had five children.
