Editor's Notebook

摘要

I thought about this last month as I sat in a packed Houston church celebrating the life of Roy M. Huffington, an oilman who died on July 11 while vacationing in Venice. He left us just two months short of his 91st birthday. But what a wonderful life. Extraordinary, legendary, visionary, courtly, entrepreneurial - any description comes up short except for one: he was a very nice man. That is why he was my hero.rnI first met Mr. Huffington in 1993 when 1 was doing research for my book The Oil Makers, An Insider's Perspective of the Petroleum Industry (1995 Rice University Press). Someone suggested that I contact him for an interview so I wrote a letter and described my project. A week later 1 took a call from someone with a John Wayne-like drawl who said he would be very happy to meet me.rnShortly afterwards, I sat down with the chairman of Roy M. Huffington Inc. in his 67th floor office in downtown Houston. It was obvious at once that this was a man of enormous presence. Our interview lasted about 90 minutes. It was the first of several we would have in the next two years as my book came to fruition. His first comment was "The real key problem that the oil and gas industry has, particularly in the United States, is the lack of true understanding by politicians of what the oil and gas industry is all about." A timely comment in 1993 that is even timelier today.