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detested Communists, “pinkos,” and especially Roosevelt, who preferred “niggers and spics” and “New York Jews” to know their place, and whose favored politician was the red-baiting Joe McCarthy. The image is not unfair, but there was more to Cullen than his political views, which were hardly unusual for mid-century southern millionaires.
    A man whose life spanned the years from Jesse James to Elvis Presley, Cullen grew up poor in San Antonio. By his own account—the only one that survives—he endured a difficult childhood, marked by family turmoil, financial reversals, and frequent fistfights with other boys. His mother, Louise, whom Cullen idolized, was a slender South Carolina woman who moved to Texas after Union troops burned her family’s plantation during the Civil War. She married a cousin named James Beck, settled in San Antonio, and gave birth to five children. After Beck’s death in the 1870s Louise wed an itinerant cattle buyer named Cicero Cullen and moved to a farm outside Denton, north of Dallas. Roy, the first of the Cullens’ two sons, was born there in 1881. When he was two the family returned to San Antonio.
    Cicero Cullen’s father, Ezekiel Cullen, had fought during the revolution against Mexico in 1836 and had played a part in the formation of the state’s first public schools. Unfortunately, his lineage was Cicero’s only apparent asset. He abandoned the family when Roy was four and reappeared only once, two years later, when he arrived in San Antonio unannounced, persuaded Louise to let him take the two boys for a photograph, then promptly spirited them off to Dallas. Louise hired a lawyer and gave chase, but Cullen fled, taking Roy and his brother, Dick, in a covered wagon all the way to Phoenix. Not for several weeks did he return, sheepishly, after an episode in which Roy fell from the wagon and was run over. Though the boy was unhurt, Cicero Cullen apparently realized he was unsuited for fatherhood. He returned the children to Louise. Roy didn’t see his father again for years.
    The kidnapping episode imbued the Cullen household with a bunker mentality, drawing Roy even closer to his mother. So frightened was the family of a repeat incident that Louise kept Roy out of school till he was eight, making him at least two years older than other children when he finally began attending classes. From stories he told in later years, Cullen appears to have been a stubborn, prideful child, qualities that would follow him into adulthood. Ashamed of the family’s poverty, he clung to his mother’s stories of his grandfather Ezekial Cullen’s prominence and her memories of the antebellum South. The latter instilled in Cullen a distrust of most things eastern and northern, a mind-set that also stayed with him throughout his life.
    A lonely boy, Cullen hung a blanket over his bed and at night retreated inside with a lantern, maps, and dozens of books: Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blackstone, and plenty of history. He day-dreamed of traveling the world, of owning his own business. His favorite dream was of the massive white plantation home he would build someday, with porticoes and trellises and gardens, just like the beloved family plantation the hated Union men had burned. Someday, he promised his mother, they would live in it together.
    His older half brothers left the house in their teens, and by the fifth grade, when Cullen was twelve, the money ran out. Defying his mother, he dropped out of school to work ten hours a day in a candy factory. Yet he itched to see the world. At sixteen, hearing his father was ill, Cullen left home for Dallas, where he lived with a half sister and attempted a rapprochement with his father. It didn’t take. Searching for a path in life, Cullen joined the military to serve in the Spanish-American War but was rejected when his father informed an officer his son was underage. When Cullen’s half sister and her husband moved to