Word: sol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sheer gaudiness, the Estes mess dramatizes the farm scandal more vividly than ever before. If that dramatization were to result in something really being done about the farm fiasco, who knows but that the U.S. might even owe a vote of thanks to none other than Billie Sol Estes...
...broke but hopelessly in the red-by $12 million according to his own figures, by $20 million according to Texas' Attorney General Wilson. "The sad part of it," says a Pecos bank president, "is that he could have been an honest millionaire instead of a broke crook." Billie Sol grew up in an environment of a sort that is supposed to produce not crooks but plain, solid, honest people-the kind often referred to as the salt of the earth. One of six children, he was raised on a prairie farm near Clyde, Texas...
...never even gotten a parking ticket in my whole life." The father still refuses to believe that Billie Sol really did anything wrong: "The Constitution says a man ain't guilty until they prove it, and they ain't proved anything on Billie yet." The family was so poor that Billie Sol's mother sold home-churned butter from door to door to help meet the mortgage and insurance payments. Billie Sol made up his mind early in life that he was going to be rich. While other West Texas farm boys were thinking about shooting crows...
...said he'd been thinking about a tractor and said he thought he could get one in a trade for a barn of oats we had. I told him to go ahead and try. He went off and came back with a tractor." How to Succeed. Billie Sol started out in farming, and he prospered at it. By the time he was 28 he was doing so well as a cotton farmer that the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the U.S.'s ten outstanding young men of 1953. Billie Sol traveled to Seattle...
...school board post. To get revenge, Estes set up a rival paper. Upshot: the Independent investigated and printed the first exposure of Billie Sol's tank-mortgage fraud. The alarmed finance companies sent in swarms of investigators, and Billie Sol's empire came crashing down with a thud that reverberated all the way to Washington. On March 29, the FBI arrested Estes on charges of transporting the bogus mortgages across state lines. Estes is now out on bail, but is under both a federal indictment for fraud and a state indictment for theft...