A Good Salesman and a Good Promoter

The verdict in the title is not this expert’s. It was written on 11 November 1929 by H. C. Mandeville, general counsel and chairman of the board of the Thatcher Manufacturing Company, in a confidential letter to the president of a rival glass firm, about a Texas competitor he was at that moment planning to absorb: “He is a good salesman and a good promoter and probably will get capital somehow, but I do not know just how or where he can do it. He has no plants that entitle him to make any low prices” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. It is the fullest assessment of Charles R. Tips by anyone outside his own circle that this expert holds, and it was not meant for him to read.

The account this article replaces had Tips as a builder who was destroyed in 1936 by one treacherous attorney. That is the story Tips told, and the attorney is real. What the trial record adds is that the squeeze on Three Rivers Glass began in 1928, at the top of the company’s fortunes and eight years before the foreclosure; that it was administered not by Ball Brothers but by Hartford-Empire and Thatcher; that Tips knew it, fought it, and sometimes won; and that in the autumn of 1934 it was Tips himself who broke up the first attempt to sell the plant to Ball Brothers [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10198].

The man, so far as the record establishes him

Charles Rudolph Tips was born at Seguin, Texas, on 5 June 1892 [ev-0037]. He finished college at nineteen, in 1912, and went to work with his father in banking, selling real estate and fire insurance on the side [ev-0037]; a 1931 newspaper profile has him a University of Texas graduate and a student assistant in government there [ev-0030]. He married Hazel Woodward of San Antonio in December 1915; they had four children — Mary Louise, Hazel, Eugenia, and Charles David — and divided their time between Three Rivers and San Antonio [ev-0037]. He died in 1976; Hazel died in 1977 [ev-0037].

He founded the town. The 1931 profile says so flatly — he “founded and first settled the town of Three Rivers” — and sets it beside a second career in agricultural finance: he helped establish the Federal Farm Loan System in Texas, was secretary and treasurer of one of the first national farm loan associations, was vice president of the Dallas Joint Stock Land Bank and president of the Texas-Oklahoma Joint Land Bank, and had developed several thousand acres of South Texas land [ev-0030]. The glass company is the last item on that list, not the first.

The title he is remembered by has a family explanation, a first-person account, and a datable first appearance in print. The family account, given by his granddaughter in 2013, is that he entered the Army as a private and came out in 1919 a lieutenant colonel, “thus earning him the nickname ‘Colonel Tips’” [ev-0037]. Tips’ own memoir, written around 1962–1963, gives the sequence in detail: he had graduated from West Texas Military Academy before the University of Texas; when the United States entered the war in April 1917, “I had a wife, a child and a business that was important enough to enable me to be exempted from military service. However, in spite of strenuous objections, I decided to volunteer” [ev-0075]. He “went in as a private, attended Officers’ Training School and was commissioned as a Lieutenant,” served throughout the war, “was promoted to Captain and then to Major in 1918 and to Lieutenant Colonel in 1919” [ev-0075]. Before entering the service he sold his stock in the bank of Three Rivers and resigned as president; he “was not to return to Three Rivers to live until 1928” [ev-0075]. The detailed profile of March 1931 calls him “Mr. Tips” throughout and never uses the rank [ev-0030]. Sixteen months later a South Texas weekly introduces him without explanation as “Colonel Chas. R. Tips, president of Three Rivers Glass Co. and founder of the town of Three Rivers” [ev-0033]. That is the earliest use of the title in anything held here. The Live Oak County Historical Commission independently lists Tips among WWI participants in a supplementary section separate from the main discharge roster, and the claim is plausible under WWI’s temporary-promotion system — Leon Springs, near San Antonio, is the most probable training site [ev-0060]. No independent military record — service record, discharge, unit roster or decoration — is held; the account above is Tips’ own, corroborated by the family on the endpoints and by neither on the intermediate ranks.

The town, and how he came by it

An earlier version of this article withdrew the whole town-founding narrative as resting on unadmitted research notes. That was a search failure. Three admitted sources carry it in detail — Smith’s 1989 history [ev-0039], the family account [ev-0037], and Tips’ own memoir written around 1962–1963 [ev-0075] — and their disagreements are worth more than the withdrawal was.

Michael David Smith’s 1989 history dates the founding of the township, then Hamiltonburg, to March 1913, and gives Tips a stated motive: he was “an entrepreneur driven by a self-professed dream to emulate the empresarios of Texas’ pioneer period,” inspired by George West, who was building a pair of towns on a fifteen-mile-wide ranch in the same county [@ev-0039, p. 13]. On Smith’s account Tips graduated from the University of Texas in 1912, learned that a rail line had been surveyed from San Antonio south, and rode the route with a small group until he reached the valley near the confluence of the Frio, Nueces and Atascosa [@ev-0039, p. 13]. The land was Annie Hamilton‘s, of Cuero. She and her son Thornton had already agreed to pay the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad five thousand dollars to bring the line through their property, in exchange for a depot and the town’s name; Tips learned of the bargain, brought in investors, bought a two-hundred-acre tract including the depot site and Frio River frontage, and paid the railroad’s five-thousand-dollar bonus himself [@ev-0039, p. 14]. A land company was organized with seven directors, and Tips was not one of them — he had not yet turned twenty-one [@ev-0039, p. 6]. The first train reached Hamiltonburg on 5 June 1913, his twenty-first birthday [@ev-0039, p. 14].

The family account, given by his granddaughter in 2013, has the same shape and different particulars. Tips “fancied himself an ‘empresario,’ a colonizer who settled at least 100 families,” went to Cuero, and “was able to purchase the Hamilton ranch” himself; he camped on the site and hired crews at $6.30 an acre to clear streets in the spring of 1913, aged twenty [ev-0037]. Where Smith has an investment group buying two hundred acres, the family has Tips buying the ranch.

Tips’ memoir resolves the disagreement in Smith’s favour. He took German farmer customers from his father’s bank on an exploration trip down the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad line; they reached the Hamilton land and their spokesman Friedrich Harborth said “Mr. Tips, if you can get this land for sale, we would like to buy some of it” [ev-0075]. Tips went to Cuero, negotiated with Thornton Hamilton, and contracted the ranch land at a net price of $25.00 per acre. A 200-acre townsite was carved out; Thornton proposed a company with $30,000 capital stock, the Hamilton family taking $8,000 in stock against the $20,000 purchase price, and the company paying the railroad’s $5,000 bonus. Tips sold the remaining $22,000 to family, friends and bank customers, which gave him control. Seven directors were named — four from Guadalupe County (Tips’ father Charles E. Tips, Judge J. B. Dibrell, Friedrich Harborth, George Hagn), and three from Live Oak and DeWitt counties (Thornton Hamilton, D. T. Blair, W. W. Caves). Tips “could not be a director of the company initially because I had not reached my 21st birthday,” but he “had the naming of four of the directors” and was made secretary and general manager [ev-0075]. The memoir account is consistent with Smith’s investment group and seven directors, and inconsistent with the family account of Tips buying the ranch himself.

All three agree on 4 July 1913. Smith has the grand opening celebration on that day [@ev-0039, p. 14]; the family has salesmen bringing prospects in from around the country for a barbecue, lots sold, “and the town of Hamiltonburg was established” [ev-0037]. Note that this is Smith’s opening and the family’s establishment, four months after Smith’s March founding date; the two sources are dating different events with the same word.

Both carry the renaming. Smith: the Post Office complained in early 1914 that Hamiltonburg was confused with Hamilton, Texas; a petition circulated to rename the town Tips, “but the founder modestly declined the honor,” proposing Three Rivers for the water it implied; and on 1 May 1914 the change took effect [@ev-0039, p. 14]. The family gives the same cause and the same month without the petition [ev-0037]. Smith adds that by January 1914 the land company had drawn over five hundred people, with sidewalks poured around the town square [@ev-0039, p. 14].

What Tips built there before the glass company is held in the family account and in the memoir, and the two agree. The family has a public water works, a school, and the Live Oak County State Bank, established 12 August 1914 with Tips as its first president [ev-0037]. The memoir confirms the bank, naming the charter date as August 12, 1914 and Tips as “its first president” [ev-0075]. When he went into the Army in 1917 he sold his controlling interest in that bank — renamed the First State Bank of Three Rivers — to Charles Gaddis and Buck West, who later sold control to Mack Buckaloo Sr. [@ev-0037; @ev-0075 gives the same sale]. After the war he developed and subdivided land west of Three Rivers, at Oakville, and the Ray Ranch at Ray Point [@ev-0037; @ev-0075 has “the 10,000 acre Ray Ranch northeast of Three Rivers”].

This matters for reading the rest of him. The 1931 profile’s “founded and first settled the town of Three Rivers” [ev-0030] is not a courtesy: on both held accounts he was twenty years old, unable to sit on his own land company’s board, and paying a railroad’s bonus out of an investors’ pool to secure a depot. The man who later told Hartford-Empire he would keep an unlicensed feeder running had been assembling ventures out of other people’s money since before he could legally direct one.

What he built

Tips’ memoir gives his own account of the founding: “In 1922, while I was actively engaged in the mortgage loan business in San Antonio, I ran an advertisement in a Trade Journal trying to attract industry to the town of Three Rivers. I advertised that natural gas had been discovered near the town and was available for manufacturing purposes and that sand was being shipped from north of the town to the glass factory of Monterrey, Mexico. As a result of this advertisement, a man named H. S. Warrick came down from Ohio where he had had an interest in a glass factory which had burned down. I helped him to organize the Three Rivers Glass Company, with $50,000.00 capital stock” [ev-0075]. He names three investors he recruited: “James Kapp, who owned the Household Furniture Company, in San Antonio, Mr. Harry H. Rogers, with whom I was associated in the Joint Stock Land Bank business, and W. L. Moody III, of Galveston” [ev-0075]. More capital was needed; “We kept putting more money into the Three Rivers operation to keep it in business. Finally, we had enough invested that in 1928 it was decided that it was important enough for me to move down and take charge personally of the operation. I spent eight years of my life actively operating the Three Rivers Glass Company” [ev-0075].

The growth figures come from a single column of Texas business news in October 1929, and they are the best measure held of what Tips did in the 1920s: company sales of $16,000 in 1922, the founding year, and half a million dollars in 1928 [ev-0028]. By that October the firm had opened a general sales office at Dallas and district offices at Oklahoma City, Little Rock, New Orleans and Houston [ev-0028]. By mid-1930 it was making fifty million bottles a year [ev-0029]. In May 1925 Tips addressed the Texas State Manufacturers’ Association annual meeting at Dallas on “Glass Bottle Manufacturing in Texas” [ev-0023]. By 1931 he was general chairman of the campaign committee of Progressive Texans, Inc., working with the University of Texas Bureau of Business Research, and was chosen for it “because of his interest in the general welfare of the State and also because of the remarkable success that he has attained in his own business” [ev-0030]. In July 1932, with the company already in trouble, he was still organising a regional barbecue for the paving of Highway 66 and inviting sixteen counties and the Mexican government [ev-0033].

He also bought a second plant. The Bottle Research Group dates the Three Rivers occupation of the former Bastrop Glass Co. factory in Louisiana to June 1929 [ev-0042]. Mandeville, writing privately five months later, independently confirms both the purchase and Tips’ stated intention for it: “Mr. Tipps of the Three Rivers Glass Company is trying to expand his business and has bought an old plant at Bastrop, La. There is nothing much there, but he claims he is going to improve the plant and also that he is trying to get together a combination of glass manufacturers in the South” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716].

Who was backing him is less clear than the compiled account had it. Mandeville heard only that “he has some man who has made a lot of money in oil from Dallas, Tex. who will back him” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. Smith has Tips approaching the Houston millionaire W. L. Moody III [@ev-0039, p. 23], and a Texas business column of July 1930 reports Moody, of Galveston, as “recently elected to the board,” bringing the company into close contact with the Moody-Seagraves gas interests [ev-0029]. Galveston is not Dallas and July 1930 is not 1929; whether the Dallas oil man, the stock purchase, and the board election are one transaction or three is not established here.

The one feeder he was never licensed for

The compiled account had a clean ending to the machinery story: Tips recruited an engineer from Monterrey who built a working feeder, and once Hartford-Empire saw that it worked, they relented and sold him the rest of the equipment. The first half survives. The second is wrong in a way that matters, and the correction is in Tips’ own hand.

Writing to Thatcher on 27 May 1929, over his own signature as general manager, Tips set out his position with no varnish at all: “As I explained to you, the Hartford Empire [Company has] notified us that the feeders we are now using infringe their patent rights. We have not contested this claim, but have agreed with them on a payment of release of damages” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60713]. He was not a manufacturer who had beaten the patent pool. He was a manufacturer who had conceded infringement and bought his way out of the damages.

Hartford then granted him a licence, and the terms of it were a trap with a timer. The company’s own letter to Tips of 1 June 1931 recites the bargain as Hartford understood it:

“As you will remember, we hesitated for a considerable period of time before offering you a Hartford License, in view of the fact that you definitely stated you felt you must continue to operate one of your ‘Three Rivers Feeders’, in view of the fact that Hartford was unable to grant you Milk Bottle rights. However, we did offer you a license for certain types of ware other than Milk Bottles, with the knowledge that you would continue to operate one feeder on milk bottles, which feeder would not be under license from Hartford.” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60862]

And then, in the next breath:

“This license you accepted with the understanding that Hartford would, at some time dictated by its own judgment, bring suit against the Three Rivers Glass Company on this one unlicensed feeder, which we considered to be an infringement of Hartford patent rights. This situation, of course, remains unchanged at the present time.” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60863]

Tips signed a licence one of whose stated conditions was that his licensor retained the right to sue him, at a moment of its own choosing, over the single machine his milk-bottle business ran on. Hartford’s president described the same arrangement to a third party in December 1929 in language written for no one’s eyes but a peer’s: “we, of course, have refused to license them on this feeder, or to grant them a license for any Hartford equipment on milks. They are building up infringement damages, and if we win the decision in the Court of Appeals in St. Louis, we will be in a position to get an injunction” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60719]. He added that on the next call at the plant his men would make a special point of checking the feeder, “as we would feel very much concerned and disturbed if Tips had taken any steps contrary to his distinct understanding with us” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60719]. Under examination sixteen years later, Hartford’s Arthur T. Safford Jr. agreed the plain description: Three Rivers operated one feeder on milks “free” — the examiner’s word — and Safford supplied the gloss, “By ‘free’ you mean in defiance of our patent” [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10273-10274].

Hartford’s own register says the same thing in a column. The company kept a tabulated schedule of its licences, printed in the record as a defendant’s exhibit, listing each licensee’s permitted ware field. The Three Rivers entry reads, with its left margin shaved by the scan: “[Three R]ivers Glass Co. - Three Rivers, Tex. / [bever]ages, [pa]ckers, proprietary and [m]iscellaneous ([she]llacs, shoe polishes and bluing), pressure, beers, still waters, liquors, fruit juices” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 67552]. There are no milk bottles in it — and the schedule does grant them elsewhere, since the entry immediately below, for Illinois Pacific Coast, carries “milk bottles (territorially restricted to west of Rockies).” The correspondence above says the licence withheld milks; this is the licence itself, in the licensor’s own tabulation, withholding them. They are documents of different kinds out of different files, and they agree.

And the field could move; for this plant it never did. The same exhibit keeps a dated ledger of changes to licensees’ ware fields, and in 1936 alone it records seven of them across six companies: Thatcher’s broadened on 1 January to a long list beginning with milk and cream bottles, Knox given pressure ware the same day, Maywood’s jam-jar limits raised in March, Maryland’s limits on pressed jars removed in June, Pierce given food containers in June and bluing and cleaning fluids in July, Latchford given rubbing alcohol in July [@ev-0059, part 18, line 68242]. A ware field was not a fixed term of an old contract. It was something Hartford revised on request, several times a year, in a book kept for the purpose. Three Rivers’ field is revised nowhere in the ledger this expert can see; the company’s one line in it is the record of its sale, “11/27/36 - Three Rivers - acquired by Ball.” So the refusal of milks was not an oversight in an agreement nobody reopened — this licensor reopened agreements constantly. That is as far as the holdings carry it: they are two windows onto a long table, and most of what the ledger says between 1929 and 1936 is not in them.

Why milk bottles were the thing he could not have

The reason had nothing to do with Three Rivers. Milk bottles were an allotted field. In 1920 Thatcher acquired the licences of four glass companies including J. T. & A. Hamilton, and thereafter Hamilton operated one milk unit under arrangement with Thatcher; the right to milk machines had been assigned to Thatcher [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10273-10274]. Hartford’s president and Thatcher’s chairman corresponded about the Buck Glass Company’s annual “allotment of 42,000 gross” of milk bottles and what to do about an overrun [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60719]. Into that arrangement Tips wanted a licence, and the answer he got from Thatcher on 30 October 1928 named the reason exactly: “The Hartford-Empire Company say that if they grant a license to you, or consent to our sub-letting, they will get into trouble with other licensees. They think that Berney-Bond should be consulted, and that if they extend the licenses any, they must also explain to the Buck Glass Company and perhaps to others” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60711].

When the Government came to charge the participants, it put the same fact in one sentence: “Thatcher has induced Hartford to refuse to license existing manufacturers of glass containers, and other companies seeking to enter the industry, to make milk bottles, or to limit the production of milk bottles” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375].

The merger that was stopped, and who stopped it

Tips’ answer to being locked out of milk bottles was to stop being an outsider. In October 1928 he was in correspondence with Thatcher — the milk-bottle interest that had held the assigned rights since 1920 [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10273-10274] — about combining Three Rivers with it, in a grouping that would also have taken in the Liberty Glass Company. That the approach was Tips’ own initiative is not established; that it was under active negotiation is. Hartford’s president F. Goodwin Smith wrote to Mandeville on 24 October 1928 to discourage it:

“Personally, I do not think Thatcher could safely join Tips, and I do not think you would better the situation. I think you would upset the other manufacturers, and that eventually there will be other chances for Thatcher to expand in a bigger way. The original suggestion of Three Rivers purchasing Liberty seemed to me justified, but for you to go ahead and buy into Tips’ concern just on the basis of an additional 30,000 gross of milks a year doesn’t look good to me… At this time I do not want to commit myself to any definite answer about giving Three Rivers a license.” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60710]

Six days later Mandeville put the refusal to Tips himself, and the wording of it is the clearest statement held of what the industry was actually protecting: “we are advised if we go into Three Rivers alone it will upset other manufacturers and give manufacturers of other lines an excuse to make milk bottles. The industry is in such a critical condition just now that we cannot see at the present time how we can safely take an interest in Three Rivers alone” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60711]. He closed courteously — “We are glad indeed to become acquainted with you and wish you every success” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60711]. On 26 November Thatcher’s chairman wrote again after seeing Goodwin Smith in New York: Smith “agrees that it would be wise to combine your company with ours if it could be accomplished, but is not disposed to favor the putting in of a milk bottle unit by us at your plant until some general combination is accomplished” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60712].

The negotiation ran on into 1929 — Tips still writing in May to ask whether Thatcher would tell Hartford it was satisfactory for Three Rivers to be licensed on milk bottles [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60713], Mandeville still answering in July that the accountants were reducing the several companies’ figures to a common denominator and that he expected to be back in New York about the first of the month, when “we ought to make some progress” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60715]. Then, in November 1929, writing to a third party, Mandeville disclosed what he had actually done:

“It is quite true that Goodwin Smith gave them a Hartford feeder franchise for everything, and he wanted to give them a franchise on milk bottles. I heard about it in time to talk with him and it was not done, although he said it puts them in an awkward position to have Three Rivers a licensee on most of their wares and not on milk.” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]

Hartford’s president wanted to license Three Rivers for milk bottles. A competitor found out in time and talked him out of it. That is the single sentence in this extract that most directly answers the mission’s question about anticompetitive destruction, and it is dated seven years before the foreclosure.

The same letter shows the practice was not confined to Three Rivers. “I also heard that the activity of Three Rivers was driving the Liberty Glass Company at Sapulpa to putting in a plant at St. Louis. I telephoned Goodwin Smith that he should not permit this to be done” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. And it shows what the merger talks had been for, on Thatcher’s side: “Had our merger gone through my idea was to take over Liberty and Three Rivers somehow and then build up a southern plant of our own” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. The combination Tips spent a year negotiating into was a plan to buy him out and replace him.

Cutting prices, and the cost of it

Mandeville’s complaint about Tips was commercial before it was legal: “He sends out letters all over with low quotations, and claiming that as a southern plant, he is entitled to southern business… He has no plants that entitle him to make any low prices” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. Hartford’s own file holds the measure of how far that went. Reporting on a full day spent with Henderson Coquat in April 1933, after the receivership, a Hartford officer wrote that the receiver “had not Tips’ ambitions but was attempting, so far as possible, to restrict his sales to Texas and to part of Louisiana. He also, for one reason or the other, seemed to be making an attempt to get a good price for his product and in at least one instance had turned down a contract at Tips’ old figure” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59558]. “Tips’ old figure” is Hartford-Empire’s shorthand, in its own internal memorandum, for a price the industry regarded as too low.

Tips also pushed at the boundary of what he was permitted to make, and he was watched doing it. On 1 June 1931 Hartford wrote to him about pressed packers tumblers appearing in the trade from a licensee new to the pressed business: the rights were limited, existing licensees were “naturally quite jealous of them,” and Hartford was “immediately questioned—and properly so,” which “causes us considerable embarrassment” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60862]. Three years later, with the plant in receivership, an internal Hartford memorandum recorded that Three Rivers had made brilliantines on Single Feeder No. 295 and checked them as toilet ware — the correct classification, “but they have not the right in their Field of Permitted Ware to make ‘Toilets’.” The memorandum’s conclusion is the plainest sentence Hartford wrote about the plant’s future: “We are going to overlook this production for the time being inasmuch as this plant may be sold very shortly to another licensee. If it is not sold we expect to terminate their licenses completely” [@ev-0059, part 16, fols. 60789-60791]. The date is 16 August 1934.

Arrears, receivership, and the deal Tips broke

The royalty arrears are documented from Hartford’s side across 1931 and 1932 as a running monthly business: a letter from Tips of 9 September 1931 [@ev-0059, part 09, before fol. 10172]; Safford’s testimony that “we were having a great deal of trouble collecting our royalties” and that demands and excuses were “more or less a monthly occurrence” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10172]; a Main & Company audit of 15 September 1931 addressed to Tips, and telegrams to him from Hartford’s president in September 1931, February 1932 and May 1932 [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10175]. On 1 November 1932 Tips signed a notice to the creditors of Three Rivers Glass Company, which Hartford put in evidence [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10177]. The receiver appointed in the state court at Corpus Christi was Henderson Coquat, mayor of Three Rivers and manager of the local gas company [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10177].

Tips did not leave. Asked who had been operating the company, Safford answered: “Mr. Coquat was the receiver but Mr. Tips was in and out. I think he did some selling for Mr. Coquat” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10184].

Through 1934 Coquat was negotiating to sell the plant to Ball Brothers, and Hartford knew it — indeed Safford allowed that Hartford “may have suggested Ball Brothers as a possible purchaser for that particular plant” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10184]. In October 1934 Tips wrote directly to Hartford’s president [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10195] and put forward a plan of reorganization; the company was placed in bankruptcy court under section 77-B. Safford’s account of what became of it: “it was adopted to the extent that the petition under 77B was filed with the Court, but subsequently, as I recollect, the petition was dismissed” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10196]. Asked what had stopped the Ball negotiations, he gave two causes: “I think it was a combination of the inability of Ball Brothers and Coquat to get together on the price, and also, as stated, Mr. Tips blocking the deal by taking the matter” into the federal court [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10198]. The deal was “definitely stopped in the Fall of 1934” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10198].

This is the correction that most changes the shape of the story. Ball Brothers tried to buy Three Rivers Glass in 1934, and did not get it, and one of the two reasons Hartford gave under oath was Charles R. Tips. The 1936 purchase was the second attempt, and it was conducted through the noteholders rather than the receiver.

Hartford, April 1936

By the spring of 1936 Tips no longer controlled the company and went to Hartford in person. What he said there is not held; that he said something is. Safford wrote to Hartford’s Texas attorney on 22 April 1936 recounting “Tips’ statement to you in the conference at Hartford,” and confirmed under oath that he had recounted it correctly [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10208]. The letter also contains a sentence Hartford’s counsel took care to have affirmed on the record: “Referring to the bonds, we haven’t the faintest idea who bought the bonds, so you can rest assured nothing is being done without your knowledge so far as we are concerned” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10208]. Asked whether that statement was true, Safford answered, “That is correct” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10208]. It was April; the bonds had been canvassed among the glass makers the previous November.

On the Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan — the centre of Tips’ own account of the loss — the trial record holds one exchange, and it is a denial. Asked whether Hartford “have anything to do or take any action which resulted in the refusal of the loan by the R. F. C.,” Safford answered “No” [@ev-0059, part 09, at fol. 10207].

What is held from the borrower’s side is Tips’ account of the meeting, on the same page of the marker material this article already quotes for the errand to Tulsa. Roosevelt “appointed Jessie Jones of Houston to head the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which made loans guaranteed by the government” — the spelling is Tips’, the man is Jesse H. Jones — and Tips “went to Washington and got an appointment to see Mr. Jones to try to get a loan to save the Three Rivers Glass Company.” Jones called his staff in: “You know I would not do anything for a friend of mine from Texas that I would not do for anyone in the United States. All I will say is that if you make the loan to Mr. Tips, we would not have a better moral loan.” Then, to Tips: “If you can convince these men that you can repay the money we will make the loan” [@ev-0041, p. 19].

The staff set two conditions, and Tips states both. An engineering firm the agency approved had to inspect the plant and report on it; and the Tulsa mortgage holder had to let the RFC take a first lien. The second is the errand Church was paid five hundred dollars to run. The first has an outcome: “The engineers from Pennsylvania went to Three Rivers with me, surveyed the factory, and made a completely favorable report” [@ev-0041, p. 19]. Michael David Smith gives the same sequence, the same two conditions and the same acquaintance with Jones [@ev-0039, pp. 25-26], but Smith’s account of these years is Tips-derived throughout, so that is one lineage told twice and not two.

That is a claim worth marking. On Tips’ telling, in the year the plant was foreclosed, an inspection the federal agency itself approved found it capable of producing enough glass to repay the debt — which is the opposite of a plant failing on its merits, and it stands against the closure accounts that treat 1936 as the end of a decline. It rests on the recollection of the man it exonerates, thirty-seven years after the fact, and nothing else held touches it.

What is not held is the agency’s own file: the application, the conditions as the RFC wrote them rather than as Tips remembered them, the engineers’ report, and the refusal.

Caney, Kansas

In September 1936, in the weeks when the plant was being sold out from under him, Tips was operating — or appearing to operate — a glass plant at Caney, Kansas. Hartford’s Texas attorney reported it, and Hartford’s counsel put the letter in evidence and asked about it: “Exhibit 5740, Mr. Safford, refers, in the first couple of paragraphs, to the activities of Mr. Tips in operating a glass plant at Caney, Kansas. Did he have a license with Hartford for that plant?” — “No, he didn’t.” Hartford took no action, Safford said, because “the matter died a natural death, as Tips could not raise money enough to continue the operation of that plant” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10215].

This is one of the few facts in this article that is corroborated from an entirely separate lineage. A contemporary newspaper report — the Bartlesville, Oklahoma Morning Examiner of August 25, 1936 — confirms that “Tips Glass company of Three Rivers, Tex., has leased the Connelly glass plant here from G. W. Connelly and plans to start operations in the immediate future” [ev-0073]. That dates the lease to August 1936, a month earlier than Mackey’s recollection, and names the specific plant and lessor. Kevin Mackey, working from Texas records and with no access to the antitrust transcript, gives the same venture, the same state, and a reading of its purpose: Tips “was making feints to get a factory, to help give him more leverage with the glass contracts, also with the possibility to open a factory to employ the Three Rivers workers. A feint was made for a Caney Kansas plant in Sept. 1936” [ev-0019]. Mackey also dates the incorporation of Tips Glass Company, a glass company with no plant, to October 1936 [ev-0019]. The two accounts differ on what Tips was doing — Hartford’s lawyers thought he was running a plant and had run out of money, Mackey thinks he was manufacturing leverage — and that difference is preserved here, not resolved. A third source, from a former employee, records what came after: Tips “attempted to organize another Glass Factory at Houston, Texas. So much money was withheld from my pay check each week and I received 5 shares of stock in the new company which never got started,” with the stock certificate of Tips Glass Company reproduced [@ev-0041, p. 57].

What the Government said had been done to him

Among the practices complained of against Ball Brothers, the Government listed as its fifth: “Ball Brothers acquired and shut down and is continuing to keep closed the plant of Three Rivers Glass Company, its principal competitor in the State of Texas” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. Among the relief requested was “an order directing Ball Brothers to divest itself of the plants and other assets acquired from Three Rivers Glass Company” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. That is a charge, not a finding. The case reached the Supreme Court as Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 386 (1945) — a civil equity suit, not a criminal prosecution, decided at Toledo [ev-0063]. Tips’ own account tracks the decision more closely than Smith’s: Tips correctly identified it as a Toledo case and named multiple defendants, while Smith named only Ball Brothers and invented a fine that was never assessed [ev-0063].

After 1936

An earlier version of this article said it held no biography of Tips after 1936 beyond two sentences, and withdrew a second career as resting on unadmitted research notes. That was wrong. Three admitted sources carry it.

Tips’ memoir puts the departure in his own words: “after a long, losing battle with the glass trust, I left Three Rivers completely broke, without a dollar in the world and not knowing where my next meal would come from” [ev-0075]. The family account, from his granddaughter, gives the same fact in the third person: the Tipses left Three Rivers in 1936 never to live there again, and quotes him saying he left “without a penny to his name and not knowing where the next meal was coming from” [ev-0037]. They moved to San Antonio, where he had business interests, “and he also went back into the army and served in World War II” [ev-0037]. Afterwards he and Hazel moved to Dallas, where he worked in real estate and subdivision development and subdivided more than a thousand acres; they lived there the rest of their lives [ev-0037]. He did not stop acting for the town: the same account records him fighting for flood-control legislation for Three Rivers, which flooded often in its early years [ev-0037].

The hotel is documentary, not recollected. Preserved in the marker binder is a letter Tips sent to Three Rivers, postmarked 22 July 1971, on the printed letterhead of the Ambassador Hotel, C. R. Tips, President, 1312 South Ervay, Dallas, Texas 75215 [@ev-0041, p. 41]. That fixes the hotel, his office in it, and the address, at a date, from an artifact rather than from a note. The address is confirmed as the Ambassador Hotel, which Tips purchased in 1954 and converted to a retirement community using the “Lavin Plan” — an economical elderly housing model — with the Ambassador Hotel Company formed in 1955 and his son David Tips as president [ev-0061]. He was also a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging and a consultant to the Department of Defense on housing for the elderly [ev-0061].

The same sheet carries his own capsule history of the company, which is worth setting beside the rest of this article:

“The Three Rivers Glass Company was organized in 1922, to build and operate a glass container factory. This was the pioneer glass container factory in Texas, manufacturing milk bottles, beverage bottles and general food and cosmetic containers. Colonel Charles R. Tips was President of the Company and General Manager of the factory which was built up to a volume of one million dollars a year, Serving all of Texas and adjoining states. Because of its successful operations other competing Glass Container Factories were built in Texas. The factory was sold to a northern concern in 1937 and dismantled shortly afterwards.” [@ev-0041, p. 41]

He calls the factory “the pioneer glass container factory in Texas.” The federal Census of Manufactures and contemporary newspaper evidence show at least five glass factories in Texas before Three Rivers, including predecessors at Wichita Falls and Henrietta [ev-0065]. “Pioneer” is the word Tips chose; it is not a fact the record supports.

He leads with milk bottles. On the evidence set out above, milk bottles were the one line he was never licensed to make, made on the one feeder Hartford held to be infringing, and the sticking point on which his merger into Thatcher died. Whether he wrote that sentence knowing what it meant cannot be settled here, but nothing in this record suggests he had forgotten.

His public offices are in his own dedication speech of May 1973. He had “just finished [his] second term as President General of the Sons of the Republic of Texas” when Governor Allan Shivers established the state’s historical committees; Shivers appointed him “one of the first eighteen members of the Survey Committee and the Foundation,” and he “served as the first Vice-President and the second President of both organizations,” and had “helped in placing many Historical Markers over the State” [@ev-0041, p. 16]. The page is duplicated in the binder, appearing identically as pages 16 and 17.

He died in 1976; Hazel died in 1977 [ev-0037].

What this expert does not hold

• The dated particulars of the Dallas business career. The Ambassador Hotel purchase (1954), the Ambassador Hotel Company (1955), the Lavin Plan retirement community, the White House Conference on Aging and the Department of Defense consultancy are now held via an admitted research note [ev-0061] and are set out above. What is still not held: the terms of the hotel acquisition, the Cedar Crest area developments, and the full scope of the real estate and subdivision work the family account describes.
• The promotional apparatus of the town founding. Handbills, and a photographer hired to sell lots, appear in no admitted source. The rest of the narrative — the empresario ambition, the Hamilton purchase, the five-thousand-dollar railroad bonus, the seven-director land company, the 4 July 1913 opening and the 1 May 1914 renaming — is held by three sources and is set out above [@ev-0039, pp. 13-14; @ev-0037; @ev-0075]. An earlier version of this article withdrew all of it as resting on unadmitted research notes. That was a failure of search, not of judgment, and it is corrected here.
• Any independent military record. Tips’ memoir gives the fullest account held: West Texas Military Academy, volunteered April 1917, private to Lieutenant Colonel by 1919, with intermediate ranks of Lieutenant, Captain and Major [ev-0075]. The family account corroborates the endpoints [ev-0037]. The Live Oak County Historical Commission listing and the WWI temporary-promotion analysis are held as a research note [ev-0060], but no primary service record, discharge, unit roster or decoration is held for either war. The gap between a 1931 profile that does not use the rank [ev-0030] and a 1932 notice that does [ev-0033] is recorded and not explained.
• Whether Tips retained William C. Church. Tips’ own 1973 account is precise and is not the version the compiled article carried: “The Tulsa firm had an Attorney named William Church representing them. I went to San Antonio to see Church… if we would give him $500.00 to pay for his time and the cost of his trip, he was sure he could get them to agree. We gave him the five hundred dollars and he went to Tulsa” [@ev-0041, p. 19]. On Tips’ own telling Church was the lender’s attorney throughout and Three Rivers paid his expenses; Church’s own 1936 circular says he solicited no professional employment and represented the purchaser [@ev-0059, part 18, line 66509]. The conflict is set out in this expert’s article on Church and is not re-adjudicated here.
• Whether Hazel Woodward Tips and D. J. Woodward were related. The memoir settles it: “My future father-in-law, David J. Woodward, of San Antonio” [ev-0075]. D. J. Woodward was Tips’ father-in-law. Whether his role as the company’s “first vice president” after mechanization [@ev-0039, p. 19; @ev-0042] followed from that family connection is not stated in any held source. The memoir does not mention Woodward in connection with the glass company.
• The Moody transaction’s date and shape. Smith has Tips approaching Moody and Moody buying in [@ev-0039, p. 23]; a July 1930 column reports the board election as recent [ev-0029]; Mandeville heard of an unnamed Dallas oil man in November 1929 [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60716]. Three descriptions, not obviously of one event.
• Tips’ own side of the Thatcher correspondence beyond two letters. The file put in evidence is Mandeville’s, produced from the law offices of Thatcher’s general counsel, and it preserves what Thatcher and Hartford wrote about Tips far more fully than what Tips wrote to them.
• The other fifty-four parts of the transcript, unsearched, and the page images, unmatched. Every quotation from that source above is OCR and provisional in wording.