Some data taken from the biographic study of the late J. H. Osterman,
multimillionaire and oil king, prepared for Lingley’s Magazine and by
it published in its issue for October, 1917.
In order to understand the late J. H. Osterman and his great success
and his peculiar faults one would first have to have known and
appreciated the hard and colorless life that had surrounded him as a
boy. His father, in so far as I have been able to ascertain, was a
crude, hard, narrow man who had been made harder and, if anything,
cruder by the many things which he had been compelled to endure. He
was not a kind or soft-spoken man to his children. He died when John
Osterman, the central figure of this picture, was eleven. Osterman’s
mother, so it is said, was a thin and narrow and conventional woman, as
much harried and put upon by her husband as ever he was by life. Also
there was one sister, unattractive and rough-featured, an honest and
narrow girl who, like her mother, worked hard up to nineteen, when her
mother died. After that, both parents being dead, she and her brother
attempted to manage the farm, and did so fairly successfully for two
years when the sister decided to marry; and Osterman consenting, she
took over the farm. This falling in with his mood and plans, he ceased
farming for good and betook himself to the Texas oil fields, where he
appears to have mastered some of the details of oil prospecting and
refining.
But before that, what miseries had he not endured! He was wont to
recount how, when grasshoppers and drought took all of their crops for
two years after his father’s death, he and his mother and sister were
reduced to want and he had actually been sent to beg a little cornmeal
and salt from the local store on the promise to pay, possibly a year
later. Taxes mounted up. There was no money to buy seed or to plant or
replace stock, which had had to be sold. The family was without shoes
or clothes. Osterman himself appeared to be of the fixed opinion that
the citizens and dealers of Reamer, from near which point in Kansas he
hailed, were a hard and grasping crew. He was fond of telling how swift
they were to point out that there was no help for either himself or his
mother or sister as farmers and to deny them aid and encouragement on
that score. He once said that all he ever heard in the local branch of
his mother’s church, of which he was never a confessing communicant,
was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”; also “with whatsoever
measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” Obviously such
maxims taken very much to heart by a boy of his acquisitive and
determined nature might bring about some of the shrewd financial tricks
later accredited to him. Yet he appears to have been a man of some
consideration and sympathy where boys were concerned, for it was said
that he made it a rule in all his adventures to select the poorest if
most determined youths of his organization for promotion and to have
developed all of his chief lieutenants from the ranks of farm or orphan
boy beginners whom he encouraged to work for him. How true this is the
writer is not able to state. However, of the forty or more eminent
men who have been connected with him in his enterprises, all but four
were farm or orphan boys who had entered his enterprises as clerks or
menials at the very bottom, and some seven of the total were from his
native State, Kansas.