"Money from God"

Nearly every Texan knows that United North & South Development Co. of San Antonio is the corporate alter ego of pious, mystical Edgar B. Davis who spent $1,300,000 keeping a feeble drama called The Ladder going for two years on a completely apathetic Broadway. Last week a San Antonio Federal judge disclosed that North & South Development Co. had been declared insolvent last month. Not merely insolvent but absolutely penniless was Edgar B. Davis at the age of 62. He had lost his home in a mortgage foreclosure. He had sold all his automobiles, was living on the sale of personal belongings and the loans of a few friends. Unpaid were the Negro servants for whom, in a year of plenty, he had built a special golf course. But jovial 300-lb. Edgar Davis was not disheartened. Having made and spent four fortunes, given away $6,000,000 to charity and friends because he believed his money "came from the good God Himself," he quietly boasted that his Texas oil company would someday be worth $100,000,000.

Edgar Davis' native town of Brockton, Mass. remembers him best as the man who in 1928 bought control of a local bank for the sole purpose of installing as president a boyhood friend who had played basketball with him at the Brockton Y. M. C. A. In Brockton Edgar Davis was once vice president of a flourishing shoe company. When his health broke down before he was 30, he took a trip around the world stopping, among other places, at Sumatra. There his Yankee business instincts led him to dabble in rubber. He returned to the U. S. to sell U. S. Rubber Co. the idea of establishing a vast plantation. U. S. Rubber sent him back to Sumatra as Managing Director where he remained until after the War. In 1921 Rubberman Davis arrived in Texas to sink his earnings in oil.

Disaster was his from the start. He spent $600,000 drilling wells around Luling, some 60 miles from San Antonio. Not a drop of oil was found. His two geologists, having learnedly proved that the field was dry, packed up and went home. Creditors took his furniture. The banks declined to renew his notes. His neighbors, pointing to a new boundary survey, forced him to move his last drill from a spot he had selected to a spot which, he was afterwards convinced, Divine Providence had picked for him. The day the bank returned his check for $7.40 marked "Insufficient Funds," the penniless wildcatter struck oil. In three or four years North & South Oil Co. made $2,000,000. Promoter Davis mailed checks for $200,000 to each of the two geologists who had left him flat. Later he sold his oil properties to Magnolia Petroleum Co. for $12,000,000, settled down to spend his fortune. One day in Texas he met an old schoolmate named J. Frank Davis, a Boston newshawk who had been grievously crippled in an accident. Edgar Davis suggested that Frank Davis write a play, offered to back it. Result was The Ladder which opened on Broadway in October 1926. Edgar Davis produced it partly because he believed in its theme of reincarnation but chiefly because he wanted to help his friend. Critics lambasted the play, audiences dwindled to a mere handful. This inauspicious beginning cheered Backer Davis who remembered the sequel to his earlier failure. But The Ladder was never a success. After paying its expenses for two years, during which the public was admitted free for eight months, Backer Davis finally came to his senses, stopped the play. At its final performance the cast of 47 played to an audience of 54.

Edgar Davis went back to Texas to drill for more oil. Out of his immense wallet money continued to pour--$1,000,000 for charity in Brockton, $1,000,000 for a land experiment station at Luling, $1,000,000 in bonuses for his employes, $10,000 for the best painting of a Texas wildflower. According to Edgar Davis' theosophic conception of things, Divine Providence had led him to money and it was his holy duty to spend it. But after the failure of The Ladder the Davis successes grew fewer. His North & South Development Co. continued to wildcat in the Darst Creek and Buckeye Fields, but brought in no spectacular wells. Promoter Davis traveled less frequently, gave fewer dinner parties, confined himself to quiet bridge games and an occasional art lecture. All of his remaining capital went into the drilling of hugely expensive "deep oil" holes which invariably turned out dry.

Last week, after an unsuccessful attempt at reorganization, North & South Development Co. was placed under a special master and committee of trustees who began liquidating its assets to pay off $897,000 in claims.

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