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Yes. Yes, he's a big rough Texan who always had a cigar in his mouth--he didn't smoke it, he just chewed it. Bald head, always worried about his health--because his father died of a heart attack at '53. And I remember when he got to '54 it was a great relief to him that he'd [laughter]--nice fellow.
So at some point, I think I said to Mike Buckley: “Well, it would be pretty bad if Temple got bought by somebody else.” And he said: “Yes, it'll be very bad for us.” So--these things don't happen overnight, but in due course I said: “Well, maybe we should consider merging with Temple ourselves.” Mike was absolutely flabbergasted because he assumed that the one thing we didn't want to do was to get any further into that area. But the Champion deal fell through for a very simple reason. The head man of Champion, who was a snot, wouldn't personally deal with Arthur Temple. That was an absolute slap in the face to Temple.
What was the reason?
Oh, if you knew Karl--what was his name? Oh, we'll look it up--who was head of Champion--he was a martinet, very impressed with himself, and he wasn't going to deal with that “peasant” down there. That's literally why it fell through.
So then--but you know, if a company puts itself on the block you know that sooner or later it'll go. So we then started discussions with Arthur and ended up by merging Temple and Eastex and paying Arthur with Time stock--probably more than we should have. You can never tell over the long-period whether it was or not.
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