made a lot of money. But he was under intense pressure, and he kept
 everybody else under that, too. I was with him for a while.

P: Was your income also going up as you were moving from these [positions]?

M: Nominally. I have forgotten what I was paid. I got a little bit more, but not
 much. I still was not in the classifications that you see around here. When
 I started practicing law and received $400 a month.

P: That is a lot better, though, than that $50 a month that guy was reporting
 back in 1941.

M: That is right. I think that by the time I went with Bintliff I was getting about
 $500 a month. It was somewhere close around there.

P: That was not easy street. It also seems to me that you were being offered
 jobs--you were not having to go out and look for positions.

M: After the first time, which was when I got out of school and went to work
 for the accounting firm, every job that I took, somebody came to me about.
 I was then approached by four other young men, all of whom had some
 inherited money, to start and run a mortgage banking company, the
 Investment Company of Houston, and I decided to go into that. I stayed
 with that until it became insolvent in 1957.

P: I see a Columbian development corporation in your dossier. Is that this
 investment company?

M: This was a subsidiary of that. Houston was growing very fast because of the
 oil development and the growth. There was a lot of financing and mortgage
 banking activity, too. Everybody in Texas did things on somebody else's
 money. People thought that the rich oil people were putting up money.
 Well, the rich oil people were in hock up above their ears.

P: That kind of reminded you of the Florida boom of the twenties.

M: I was doing general financing things, but we really got into it a little late.
 The northern savings banks and other insurance companies had all gotten
 what they called their servicing contacts. This meant getting a contract with
 a large bank or an insurance company and servicing their loans. In other
 words, you ensured that people paid every month. If they did not, you went
 out and collected or you then initiated action to kick them out if they did not
 pay. You checked to see the condition of the property, saw that it was kept
 up, and things like that.

P: Did the name Columbian have any indication that you were working outside
 of the U.S.?

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