“There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.” --Sir Edmund Hillary
Thomas B. Slick lived a life that could have
inspired a work of fiction. His famous
namesake father, Tom Slick, was the “king of the wildcatters” who came out of
Pennsylvania to make a fortune in the oilfields of Oklahoma and Texas. Tom
Slick the elder died of a stroke on August 16, 1930, at the age of 46. Two days
later the oil derricks in the Oklahoma City Field stood silent for an hour to
honor his passing. Slick’s widow married Oklahoma City oilman Charles F.
Urschel, who was a kidnapping victim of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933. Young Tom
was back east, attending Phillips Exeter; he would later go on to Yale, serve
in the US Navy during World War II, and also do graduate study at Harvard.
Young Tom Slick had great
success in business. He had become
chairman of Slick Oil and also Transworld Resources Corporation, and sat on
several other boards. Tom Slick was also “instrumental” in developing the
Texstar Corporation. In his twenties,
before World War II, he had plans for creating a series of research
enterprises, which he later fulfilled in the 1950s. His children carried on those efforts,
endowing multiple research enterprises, some in the family name. Among the institutions he or his family
created, endowed, or assisted were the Southwest Research Center, the Southwest
Research Institute, the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, and
the Southwest Agriculture Institute; Trinity College in San Antonio; and
positions and lectureships at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the
University of Texas.
During
the 1950s Slick made his public name as an adventurer and mystery seeker. He had crashed his plane in the Brazilian
jungles while seeking diamonds, but walked out of the rainforest unscathed.
Slick financed and undertook expeditions to search for the Loch Ness monster,
the Yeti, and Big Foot. An accident on the Nepal Yeti expedition had also
nearly claimed his life. The Yeti-seeking expedition of the late 1950s so upset
the Soviet Union that the Communists claimed the expedition was a cover for
destabilizing Communist Chinese influence in South Asia:
The engineering of the incidents between Nepal and
Communist China . . . was the missing link in the story of the mysterious
scientific expeditions sent to the Himalayas in quest of the “snowmen” . . . Izvestia told its readers of the
current “sensational clamor” in the United States press asserting that the
snowman is one of the earliest ancestors of man and a sort of herd-living
Himalayan pithecanthrope. A dispatch
from Peiping warned that searching parties now “intensively reconnoitering” the
China-Nepal border resembled dangerous, missions once sent to snoop around the
Soviet-Turkish frontier in search of the remains of Noah’s Ark. Izvestia
presumably was alluding to an expedition led by Tom Slick of Texas and
sponsored by the San Antonio Zoological Society to try to determine whether the
“abominable snowman” of the Himalayas is an ape, a man, or possibly a myth.
Slick had also been involved in more credible and
serious pursuits than cryptozoology. His
annual conference at Columbia University was a vehicle for seeking paths to
world peace; Slick also wrote on the topic, including his publication of the
book Permanent Peace by Prentice-Hall
in 1958.
On October 7, 1962, Slick
and Shelly Sudderth, his friend and pilot, were returning from a hunting trip
to Canada, bound for Salt Lake City, Utah.
Their craft, a twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza 35, crashed in the
mountains of southwestern Montana, in Beaverhead County. Little is known about the crash. As reported
at the time, the’re best theories were speculative:
Harold Briggs, search and rescue coordinator for
the Federal Aviation Agency and the Beaverhead County sheriff’s office, said
the plane, a Beechcraft Bonanza 35, apparently disintegrated in flight. There were storms in the area Saturday night,
and Mr. Briggs theorized that the plane had been had been struck by lightning
or was traveling too fast and tore itself apart.
