The Man Worth Ten Million Dollars

Tips needed two things at once: natural gas for the factory furnace and capital to buy molds and expand production. By the late 1920s both had come through the same connection. W. L. Moody III of Galveston is named in Tips’ own account as the man who extended a gas pipeline to Three Rivers in 1928 and as the man who bought $100,000 of company stock in 1929, giving Tips the controlling interest and the presidency. Tips’ memoir independently confirms Moody as one of the founding investors alongside James Kapp and Harry H. Rogers [ev-0075]. A July 1930 Palacios newspaper independently confirms the board connection and names the Moody-Seagraves gas interests in the same sentence. Independent biographical sources now supply the man’s vital dates and family context, though no independent source confirms his ownership of United Gas Company, the Moody-Seagraves interests, the Depression-era bankruptcy, or any connection to Three Rivers Glass [ev-0072].

The Galveston Moodys

William Lewis Moody III (1894—1992) was born in Galveston and died in Bexar County (the San Antonio area) at age ninety-eight [@ev-0072, WikiTree]. These dates come from crowdsource genealogy and should be treated with the usual caveat that WikiTree entries are user-contributed and not independently verified. He married three times: Edna Willie Haden in 1916, Mary Margaret Guinard Allen in 1934 in Galveston, and Katherine Wilcox in 1947 in San Antonio [@ev-0072, WikiTree].

His father was W. L. Moody Jr. (1865—1954), who built one of the largest business empires in Texas. The elder Moody founded the American National Insurance Company in 1905, controlled City National Bank (later Moody National Bank), and in 1927 created the National Hotel Corporation, which in 1931 took control of a financially troubled Conrad Hilton’s hotels [@ev-0072, TSHA Handbook]. The family was cash-rich during the Depression — buying out Hilton while others were going under — which makes Moody III’s reported personal bankruptcy all the more striking [ev-0072].

When W. L. Moody Jr. died in 1954, his daughter Mary Moody Northen (1892—1986) became head of the family enterprises. William Lewis Moody III is conspicuously absent from the succession. The TSHA Handbook entry for the father makes no mention of gas companies, United Gas, Three Rivers, or Moody III’s business ventures [@ev-0072, TSHA Handbook].

The gas supply

By 1928 the gas supply feeding the factory furnace had begun to fail. Wells the plant had been drawing on were playing out. Tips connected with Moody — whom he describes as someone he already knew — and with a partner named Seagraves, who together had obtained a franchise to supply natural gas to the city of Houston. They had run pipelines northward from wells near Laredo and points south of Three Rivers. Tips persuaded them to extend a branch line to Three Rivers. “Our supply of gas for the factory was assured,” he wrote [@ev-0041, p. 18].

The stock purchase

The gas connection was already in place when Tips went to Moody for capital. The company needed money for new molds and equipment to compete against out-of-state manufacturers who were cutting prices on items Three Rivers could supply. After a directors’ vote to increase stock by $100,000, Tips went to Houston to make the pitch in person.

His account sets the scene directly: Moody, he wrote, “was reported to be worth over ten million dollars, not including his interest in the American National Life Insurance Company which his father controlled.” Tips told him the situation. Moody asked how much stock Tips wanted him to take. Tips told him all of the $100,000 worth — which “would make him and me have the controlling interest in the company.” Moody agreed [@ev-0041, p. 18]. When the transaction was completed in 1929, Tips became president of the company, and the two shared control [ev-0039].

At the board

The board connection is independently documented the following year. The Palacios Beacon of July 3, 1930 — a Matagorda County paper running a column of Texas industrial notes — reported that W. L. Moody III of Galveston “was recently elected to the board, bringing the company in close contact with the Moody-Seagraves gas interests.” The same item reported annual production at fifty million bottles [ev-0029]. The newspaper could not have drawn from Tips’ 1971 letter; the two sources are independent, and they agree on the man and the connection.

The Depression

Tips accounts for Moody’s departure in a single sentence in his 1973 address. “Many people who were millionaires went broke,” he wrote. “This included Mr. Moody, who was my associate in the ownership of the Three Rivers Glass Company” [@ev-0041, p. 19]. Smith 1989 is more specific: “real economic chaos resulted when W. L. Moody, a principal stockholder with Tips, declared bankruptcy” [ev-0039]. In Tips’ 1971 letter to Lindholm, Moody appears as one of two men who “were multimillionaires” who had backed the company and who “lost most of their money in the depression and could not help us” — the other was Harry H. Rogers of San Antonio [@ev-0041, p. 44].

The loss of Moody’s support forced Tips to mortgage his land and home to sustain operations and eventually drove the RFC loan application whose sabotage led to the Ball Brothers foreclosure. Those events are documented in art-0017 and art-0018. In neither the RFC correspondence nor the Ball Brothers foreclosure record does Moody’s name appear again.

What the independent record shows

Independent sources admitted as ev-0072 supply biographical context that Tips’ letters never do, and they carry their own silences.

The strongest circumstantial evidence of Moody III’s estrangement from the family patriarch comes from his own son. William Lewis Moody IV (1924—2014) was described in his 2014 obituary as “especially close” with his grandfather W. L. Moody Jr. — not his father. Moody IV worked under the grandfather at ANICO, managed his eleven ranches, and joined the ANICO board in 1951, serving sixty-three years. The obituary describes the grandfather-grandson bond in warm terms but barely mentions Moody IV’s own father [@ev-0072, Galveston Daily News obituary]. A son raised by and working for the grandfather, not the father, is consistent with a break between Moody III and the family, though the cause is not stated in any held source.

The Rio Bonito Ranch — almost 15,000 acres near Kerrville, built in the 1920s by William L. Moody III — sold in 2018 for $45 million after not changing ownership in eighty-seven years [@ev-0072, PR Newswire]. The ranch confirms that Moody III had substantial personal wealth in the 1920s, consistent with the $100,000 stock purchase Tips describes. That the ranch survived whatever financial trouble befell him during the Depression is itself a data point the held record does not explain.

Moody III’s second marriage in 1934 — Depression-era timing — and his eventual death in Bexar County rather than Galveston are consistent with having left the Galveston family orbit, though neither fact alone is dispositive [@ev-0072, WikiTree].

What this expert does not hold about him

Vital dates, family tree, and marriages are now held via ev-0072, drawn from crowdsource genealogy (WikiTree), the TSHA Handbook (for the father), a 2014 obituary (for Moody IV), and a 2018 press release (Rio Bonito Ranch). The United Gas Company — which Tips credits Moody with owning at the time of the gas supply arrangement — does not appear in any independent source: no held document other than Tips’ 1971 letter names that entity, and no independent source confirms Moody III’s ownership of it [ev-0072]. The Moody-Seagraves gas interests named in the 1930 Palacios Beacon [ev-0029] likewise have no independent corroboration beyond that single newspaper item. Which partner Seagraves was, how their Houston gas franchise was organized, and what became of that business after 1930 are not in any held document. When exactly the Depression bankruptcy occurred — what year, whether it was a personal or corporate proceeding, and whether it preceded or followed the RFC loan attempt — is not stated in any held primary source; Smith supplies the sequence but no date, and no independent source documents the bankruptcy at all [ev-0072]. No independent source connects Moody III to Three Rivers Glass; that connection exists only in Tips’ letters and Smith’s 1989 book [ev-0072]. Moody does not appear in the RFC correspondence, in Hartford’s infringement files, or in the Ball Brothers foreclosure record. What became of his stock in the company — whether he sold it, whether it was discharged in bankruptcy, or whether it was simply worthless by the time the company went into receivership — is not in any held document.