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Schulenberg, a town of German immigrants east of San Antonio, Cullen followed, taking a job in a cotton-buying firm, Ralli Brothers. At eighteen he knew enough about cotton to become a buyer, the roving company representatives who negotiated with farmers for their crop. A Houston company hired him and dispatched him to the town of Mangum in western Oklahoma, where his rehabilitating father had resettled.
    In 1900 Oklahoma Territory was still the Wild West, and Cullen did his business on horseback, almost dying at one point during a blizzard. In his spare time he expanded his father’s forlorn farm, building up a herd of cattle until rustlers stole most of the animals one dark night; Cullen strapped on a Colt revolver but, to his relief, found his livestock unguarded in a remote pasture. In December 1903 he returned to Texas long enough to marry a quiet Schulenberg girl named Lillie Cranz he had been courting for five years. They settled back in Oklahoma. Cullen bought land and built a shack, where their first child, Roy Jr., was born followed by two girls, Lillie and Agnes.
    For seven years Cullen made his way as an independent cotton broker, but he lost most of his savings in the financial panic of 1907, and cotton markets were slow to recover. By 1911, when he turned thirty, Cullen was itching for a change. He made an impromptu study of southern cities, and was impressed when he read in the newspaper that city fathers in Houston, hoping to lure shipping after a hurricane devastated nearby Galveston in 1901, were planning to dredge a ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico. As it happened, Lillie’s parents owned a parcel of land on its path. Liquidating his holdings in Oklahoma, Cullen took a leap of faith and moved his family to Houston. He rented a bungalow on Hadley Street, leased an office downtown, and set his sights on learning about real estate.
    Houston in 1911 was a sleepy bayou city of seventy-eight thousand men, women, and children who spent their days swatting mosquitoes, mopping their brows, and sipping iced tea. It was oppressively humid, so hot diplomats at the British consulate received hardship pay. Few streets were paved—the main avenue downtown, Travis, was a bed of seashells—and when it rained the roads were often impassable, stinking green water sloshing out of the ditches into the roadways. The air was so damp that bedsheets stayed moist nine months a year. There were oil fields scattered north and east of the city but few real oilmen, with the notable exception of the Hughes family, whose odd little boy, Howard, could be seen tooling his tricycle around his south-side neighborhood. The wealthiest men in Houston, magnates like John Henry Kirby and Big Jim West, made their fortunes in East Texas lumber and dabbled in oil, cotton, and cattle.
    Cullen managed to sell his wife’s family parcel to an oilman named R. E. Brooks, a friend of his new neighbors, but beyond that he bought little and sold less. “The real-estate business,” he noted years later, “was not exactly booming in Houston in those days.” He stuck it out for four frustrating years before giving up and returning to the only business he knew, trading cotton, buying a seat on the Houston Cotton Exchange and placing advertisements in Texas papers announcing his willingness to buy bales sent to Houston. He had bank credit behind him and what remained of his savings, but he also had children to support, and business, at least initially, was torpid. He was brooding on his dismal prospects one day in 1915 when, as he trudged into his office, a man named Jim Cheek stuck his head into the hall. Cheek was a real estate developer who was busy building houses around town.
    “Roy, I’ve got a proposition for you,” Cheek said. “Can you come into my office for a minute? ”
    Like many businessmen across Texas, Cheek was thinking about getting into oil. He didn’t know the first thing about it, but he knew real estate, and he figured if he