T. Boone died
- Thread starter Henry Kendall
- Start date
Thanks....obviously he'll be missed. Gave roughly $650 Million to OSU about half to academics and half to athletics....certainly transformative for our university.
Wow. Classless comment. SMH.
Glad to know that classless Oklahomans are in the very small minority.
You’re an idiot. GTFO and never post again you assclown. Definition of classless.
I remember when OU fans were making fun of the OSU parade by saying " even OSU fans don't like OSU fans." There are some sick individuals out there.
I hate OSU almost as much as I hate the pigs, but that's definitely over the line. My moneys on the idea that sometimes we think something, and then unfortunately post it, then give it some thought and follow with the realization that we shouldn't have put it out there. Certainly hope that's the case her.
Here’s a thought: his predatory business practices caused several men to kill themselves when they lost their meager life savings. A good portion of what OSU spends was taken from widows and single mothers retirements. For years I’ve thought it shameful that OSU took his money in a desperate attempt to over come their feelings of inadequacy.
The last time an opponent had a high profile death before one of our games, we won in an upset at South Bend. I hope the same happens again, but it probably won’t.
I regret the pain his family feels tonight from the loss of a loved one. I wish them comfort. But you die alone and he will stand alone in judgment here and in the hereafter. The verdict is far from the benevolent philanthropist his millions spent on marketing would like you to remember.
The last time an opponent had a high profile death before one of our games, we won in an upset at South Bend. I hope the same happens again, but it probably won’t.
I regret the pain his family feels tonight from the loss of a loved one. I wish them comfort. But you die alone and he will stand alone in judgment here and in the hereafter. The verdict is far from the benevolent philanthropist his millions spent on marketing would like you to remember.
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When all is said and done he will have given over a billion dollars to education, research, health services and other philanthropy. Some of his methods can surely be criticized. However, his giving to many worthwhile causes cannot. Criticism is warranted. However, so is recognition. As the distribution of his estate pursuant to his directions will dictate.
He did bad things, he did good things. That's how everybody's resume looks in the end. May God weigh his good deeds more heavily than the bad. There's only one man's death I'm a fan of celebrating on this date and it ain't T. Boone.
My Grandfather was a Geologist for Cities for his entire life. T. Boone was a piece of shite. Donating some of the money that he essentially stole doesn’t make him a good person.
In fact, I would argue that T. Boone was one of the primary reasons that Tulsa (the city) lost most of its oil cache. TU might have been in a much better place right now if it wasn’t for him.
In fact, I would argue that T. Boone was one of the primary reasons that Tulsa (the city) lost most of its oil cache. TU might have been in a much better place right now if it wasn’t for him.
I think he's talking about Boone's attempted takeover of Cities in 1982. It basically forced Cities to find a merger partner. They tried to merge with Gulf and that fell apart (Gulf was later taken over by Pickens) and then they merged with Oxy and Oxy sold most of their assets of in pieces or moved their employees away from Tulsa. Only the "Citgo" corporation (which was sold to Vuenezuela) which was a refining company remained in Tulsa until 2004. That company was about 1/4 the size of the upstream exploration company Cities Service.
No one will ever accuse Boone Pickens of being an ethical businessman. He destroyed many businesses and ruined many careers. He gave his blood money to OSU.
Read up on his unethical treatment of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
And those are the kindest facts I can say about him.
Read up on his unethical treatment of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
And those are the kindest facts I can say about him.
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Listen...he literally died yesterday. Let his family and friends mourn. Have some empathy for them. Let OSU do whatever it is they will do to at least acknowledge the part of his legacy of giving them (and leaving them) a healthy amount of $ to improve their ability to serve the students of OK.
Give all of those constituencies at least a few days to do that. Then you can debate what his legacy should be.
Give all of those constituencies at least a few days to do that. Then you can debate what his legacy should be.
Gotcha. Cities end game was always going to be and acquisition by a third party and to be pieced out and sold imo. Mesa (Pickens) likely accelerated the end game. However, lets not absolve Cities of it's role here. Cities was a poorly run company in the late 70s and early 80s. It's books were as mess as were many of it's accounting and business decisions. All of which made it's pieces more valuable than it's whole.
Cities only had to find a buyer because they were going to be taken over. Had Pickens not come in, they might have had accounting issues, but they would have still remained a company, at least for quite some time. Don't forget, a LOT of oil companies were having issues around that time. It just so happened that Pickens targeted Cities. Oxy did very well with the Cities exploration assets. I know. I have an uncle who followed my Grandfather and has been an Engineer with Oxy for 30+ years. The fact that Cities had to find a White Knight to fend off Pickens had a lot to do with Tulsa's biggest operator leaving the city. Good Riddance to him.
I have a wife, an uncle, and a mother who all went to OSU... none of my family has an affinity for Pickens.
My father and brother-in-law worked for Cities Service. Their moving of the corporate office from Bartlesville to Tulsa is why he and my sister ended up in Bixby.
Same. My mom graduated HS in Bartlesville right before Cities moved. The rest of my family moved to Tulsa with the company. Apparently there was a sign at the edge of Bartlesville that said, "Last one out turn of the lights". She went to OSU and her brother followed her and played football there in the early 70's.
Honestly, Cities coming to Tulsa 50+ years ago is probably a main factor in my having been around in Tulsa to go to TU at all.
TBoone and OSU can suck it. Beat the Cowboys! Then beat the OTHER Cowboys!
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It went well beyond basic accounting issues. Their tax treatment of certain assets were baffling and subjected them to future issues. Their employee pensions were vastly underfunded and an absolute mess. They were mismanaged if we're being honest. I can't predict what would have occurred without Mesa's takeover attempt but with their issues and stock price I find it hard to believe that another company wouldn't have been next in line. Gulf backing out of their deal with Cities had everything to do about what they found in their audit. I found it odd that even Oxy wasn't aware of the extent of the issues until after their acquisition.
Again...not absolving Pickens. He was at that time a corporate raider. However, the management of Cities shares much of the blame as well.
You certainly have a point regarding their audit. But they were still valued extremely highly post the Gulf fiasco. Their company went from a 5 billion valuation merger to a 3.5 billion. Not great, but let's not act like they were going to have to liquidate prior to having to spend so much to cover their stock position after the Gulf issues went public. At least if they sold off their Citgo brand the exploration company might have stuck in Tulsa. It was worth more.
Yup. I spent a good year auditing Cities books for Oxy after the acquisition. Pensions were a thing among other undisclosed items. Do you know what happened to those Cities' employees pensions? Just curious.
From a NY Times article in 1985:
"Indeed, the mergers-and-acquisitions craze of the last two years owes much of its vitality to pension fund redemptions. The Occidental Petroleum Corporation financed part of its Cities Service purchase with $400 million from Cities' pension plans, the most significant of the early redemptions."
From the LA Times in the same year:
Occidental Petroleum terminated three of its own pension plans along with its Cities Service subsidiary’s retirement program in 1983, capturing $368 million. Occidental replaced the old, clearly defined benefits with new ones that can go up or down depending on the market value of investments. The new plan is no longer insured by the government.
Each pension case seems to have its peculiarities. After Occidental Petroleum took over Cities Service in December, 1982, for example, it took $237 million out of the Cities Service pension fund, as well as surpluses from other pension funds, and allowed workers to choose between getting an annuity equivalent to their earned benefits or to participate in a new, defined contribution plan in which a 12% return on the investment was guaranteed for 10 years.
“Now, if that’s a risk it’s a nice risk to be in,” said an Occidental spokesman who requested anonymity, contending that the risk of defined contribution plans is often exaggerated.
I'm guessing you're saying that Oxy made those moves due to the underfunding?
My argument would be... there is no way that Pickens knew about those items prior to his raid. Hell, Oxy and Gulf didn't even fully know about them until after their mergers were announced and they got to look at Cities' books.
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That I don't know. I was a very very young accountant who had no access to the decision makers. I simply pushed a pencil. Probably why I got out of accounting. Remember that $368M number doesn't address the associated liability. My hope was that the Cities employees were taken care off.
I never heard any complaints from my Grandfather, although I know he worked for Oxy for a couple of years before retirement and consulted with them for some time after that. That's what got my Uncle his foot in the door as an engineer.
Most weren’t. Many had to continue working until their deaths. A few killed themselves and got it out of the way. In one case, discussed widely in Bartlesville, the suicide note was addressed to him.
This. 10,000 times. Every brick he set down in Stillwater came at the price of 100 in downtown Tulsa.
That's what I was afraid of. That letter should have at least been co-addressed to the management of Cities. They were the ones who failed to properly fund those plans at best. Stole from them at worst. The only way those employees were going to get the numbers they saw on paper was a white knight was going to dig in it's pocket book and make up the deficiencies. Even as a 23 year old, I knew that was very unlikely. It was a surreal time there. Some of the employees had heard the rumors. They knew what my team was doing there. They would occasionally come in our "hole" and ask us questions about the pension plans. We were of course under strict orders to discuss nothing.
It was before my time, but I live in Bartlesville now and at the Phillips 66 museum there is a section about the attempted T Boone takeover of P66 in the mid-'80s. There's video of people protesting in the streets with Ghostbuster style "Boone Busters" shirts on. I guess if he would have succeeded, Bartlesville really would have turned the lights out.
I suppose my family was just too high up for that.... That's really sad. When Cities was in Bartlesville it was very much a community that revolved around two companies. I mean, they would close the schools for Phillip's birthday.
The demise of those companies was really the demise of entire communities. People who were brought all the way in from NY and Philly.
I was in Bartlesville during both takeovers. My father lost a bundle on the Cities Service raid, but intuitively cashed in on the P66 attempted raid and quietly retired from Phillips on those earnings at age 54. Pretty good for the son of an uneducated coal miner.
In contrast, his secretary lost her retirement and eventually her home when her health did not allow her to continue to work.
That was a very familiar story in Bartlesville at the time.
But the city learned a lot from the Cities raid. There was a mass parade/demonstration the size of a Christmas parade. International news coverage. They closed the schools on the day of the stockholders vote to take action to fight the takeover. There were full page ads in the paper regarding what the community needed to do together to survive.
Phillips had to lay off several thousand people on Christmas Eve to get the cash and tax breaks to fight the takeover. One guy took a revolver out of his glove compartment and killed himself rather than drive home and tell his wife he was fired, broke and Christmas was ruined. He worked on my Dad’s team for a couple of years before being promoted over him. I played soccer with his son until he killed himself in a single vehicle alcohol related crash near Barnsdall a few years later.
You can say that it would have been another raider or that management was truly to blame. But a lot of those poor management decisions and expensive inefficiencies kept the company working and the town together. But nobody was killing themselves until he came along and they stopped doing that when he moved on to the next venture. Leaving two generations of aging and retiring women to wonder if they would outlive what they managed to save.
If I was there, I’d go to funeral just to make sure he’s dead.
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I understand that those decisions may have kept the company running. However, they were stealing from their own employees to keep their high salary jobs and benefits. I get wanting to blame a third party and to some extent it is warranted. However, I don't buy for a second that management did what they did with the benefit of the town as their primary concern. Cities' management did what they did in order to keep their $$$ rolling in at the expense of their employees not for their benefit imo. In the end it is the employees who I truly felt sorry for. I saw them everyday during my brief stint there. Probably why I feel the way I do towards the management.