R. E. Smith
American businessman (1894–1973)
Robert Everett Smith (August 28, 1894 – November 29, 1973) was an American oilman, real estate developer and rancher based in Houston.
In 1957, Smith was included in Fortune magazine's list of the seventy-six richest Americans. He was listed by author Kenneth Lamott in 1969 as one of the "Great Big New Rich".
Biography
Smith graduated from Humble High School in 1911. He was a semi-professional baseball player for almost ten years. He graduated from the Officers' Training Corps at Camp Pike, Arkansas during World War I, but did not see action. Before and after the war, he was an oilfield roughneck or warehouse worker for Humble Oil, Gulf Oil, and the Texas Company. He was a sales manager for Peden Iron and Steel and for the W. K. M. Company. In 1920 he became an entrepreneur as a drilling contractor and producer. With business partner Claude Hamill, Smith concentrated on Houston and began buying land near the William P. Hobby Airport in southeastern Harris County, which increased in value over time.
“R. E. Smith” enters the record as american businessman (1894–1973). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Smith, American and businessman can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “R. E. Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.