OK, bear with me on this one. I have finally rejected this idea, but only after checking out a lot of stuff to see if it fit together.
My idea for why the boat was named “Cracker” or “The Cracker” and then a company was formed by the same name:
ANS and HKS said it was a nickname for Daniel - but nowhere could I ever find her calling him that, only “Pumpkinhead,” which she even included in the tattoo for him (the one that disappeared, apparently).
I felt it was some kind of inside joke between the two of them, like ANS making fun of herself as a “backwoods hick” (GA cracker) or as a white person living in a black community (corruption of bullwhip-cracker) in Nassau. Both of those could fit - and it may also be something we’ll never know.
Also wasn’t sure why they tied it to Daniel, either. If it had been a childhood nickname, I would think it was something like an abbreviated form of “firecracker” (’cracker) or short for “cracker jack,” which is closer to the Shakespearean, lol, but also relating to a confection kids love for the toy inside.
Well, as an oilie myself, I just kept coming back to “cracker” being a cracking unit at an oil refinery. Simplistically, the cracker is the piece of equipment in the process that turns crude oil into gasoline. To “refine” it, you put crude oil in, either heat it or treat it with chemical catalysts, and the crude divides itself - or “cracks” - into various forms of hydrocarbons, from jet fuel to kerosene to gasoline.
The reason this matters is because I feel like the Marshall money - or the false hope of obtaining some of it - was the only glue that made ANS allow HKS to stick around. It was their common obsession.
And the main reason no one outside the Marshall family will ever get their hands on any of the core money - that big number always being headlined - is that it is tied up in private stock in a privately held company that is only owned by a handful of people, mostly in one family.
I’ve gone on about it, ad nauseum, before, and here I am again. Back in the 1920s, Fred C. Koch was a young engineer who devised an improved method of thermal cracking - that is, using heat and high pressure - which produced much more gasoline out of a barrel of crude oil than was possible before.
This became important as the automobile caught on more and more in the US. Koch designed a cracking unit with two partners and formed a company to build and install them in refineries. That was the Keith-Winkler-Koch Engineering Company, soon just the Winkler-Koch Engineering Co.
His company was one of about 30 in the US who were doing similar types of cracking design work and installation. When trying to get patents on his units, he ran into a lot of opposition from the major oil producers, who wanted to keep the number of patents within the industry small and mostly proprietary to their companies.
He was in court so much defending himself against the Patent Club, that he finally went to Russia to install his Winkler-Koch units - and they bought 15 of them (these are enormously expensive processing units and could take 1-2 years to build). The oil business was not as high-demand there back then (I think I read there were only 850 cars in the whole enormous country!), but their oil reserves were huge, so they produced vast amounts of refined oil products for export, close to 90% of it.
more in my next post ...
Continuing ...
Back in the US, Koch’s company was growing from its big sales to Russia. Koch and five business friends got the chance to buy a refinery in 1940 outside of East St. Louis, which Koch would design and operate, so they all formed another company, called Wood River Oil & Refining Co., which much later became the basis of what is Koch Industries today.
Next came a new subsidiary, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in 1946, when Koch bought more refineries, including one near Duncan, OK. The gathering system in that purchase became the foundation of the much larger business later.
The company spread out into all forms of transporting crude oil and refined products, trucking, pipelines, tankers, and eventually into trading oil & gas related commodities. The main business, Koch Engineering, went through several parallel transitions during the 1940s-1960s, and eventually became the umbrella company called Koch Industries in 1967, upon Fred Koch’s death.
So, why am I going on and on about this one man who has nothing to do with the boat bought in FL or the little baby born to an addled mother and then-unknown father in The Bahamas in 2006? For heaven’s sake, Fred Koch died in 1967!
Well, go back to 1959. He had bought a 35% interest from Sinclair Oil in the Great Northern Oil Company, which owned a refinery in St. Paul, MN. The other two owners were Pure Oil Co. and the GNOC’s founder, J. Howard Marshall II.
I had read several references implying that Koch and JHMII were close friends, but I haven’t found anything definitive online that confirms that - I don’t have JHM’s bio on-hand, either. So, maybe, maybe not, but it’s kind of important to my scenario.
Fred Koch was one of the three founders of the John Birch Society in 1958. During his time spent in Russia, he had seen communism up close and had a deep hatred for the system. He also eschewed big government and paying taxes (like some others we know of in this saga).
Koch had four sons, three of whom went into the family business. By now, most of us know all about the proxy fight and the desire of some Koch family members to take the company public. It didn’t happen, but no thanks to one of JHM’s sons, JHMIII, who wanted, like some of the Koch brothers, to be able to sell his ownership shares on the open market, to have easy liquidity and access to the now multi-millions of valuation in those shares.
Fred Koch’s overriding philosophy, which was passed along to son Charles Koch, now CEO, was that Koch Industries must always reinvest the majority of its profits in the company and yield a smaller return to its shareholders in the process. Each one, both Fred and Chas, has said the company would only go public “over my dead body.”
Thus, there is just a handful of people in the world who can buy or sell the stock or who even know the value of each share. (This is the info which HKS stole off of opposing counsel’s table in the Houston probate trial of ANS and HKMIII against the estate of JMHII.)
In order for any payment to ANS or DL to come out of the remaining holdings of the late JHMII’s, now E. Pierce Marshall’s estate, a very large amount of Koch Industries stock would have to be liquidated or sold to other Koch family members. It’s incomprehensible to me that one selfish couple of people (ANS/HKS) would even think of trying to destroy the world’s largest or #2 private company for their own fun! The arrogance is baffling.
All right - back to my commentary. I looked high and low for anecdotes of JHMII talking about his “good friend” Fred Koch and haven’t found any, other than he was obviously close to Chas Koch, when he (JHMII) disinherited his own eldest son simply for taking the dissidents’ side in the proxy fight at Koch.
What I’m getting at, is that it has been said that JHMII often extolled the virtues of the elder Koch’s talents in the crude oil cracking process and the selling of same, which eventually led to JHM’s great amount of wealth.
If this is true, which I just can’t confirm (any funny stories or quotes from JHMII), altho I’m told it *does* appear in JHM’s bio, then I can picture JHMII “cracking” jokes about it around ANS.
Perhaps “Vickie” was bragging about Daniel’s good grades to the old man and he said, “Maybe he’ll grow up to be as smart as that cracker I invested all our money with!” Thus, making the founding Koch both the man who knew how to make money by cracking crude oil into the massive amounts of gasoline needed for the fledgling US car industry back in the 20s and the Shakespearean “sharp person.”
Everything in ANS’s life and hence, HKS’s, as well, depended upon “The Cracker.”
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Addendum:
.I had to leave out a whole, whole lot just so someone would read this, lol.
.In 1969, the first major merger Koch Industries made with another refiner was with a large company in The Bahamas.
.Fred C. Koch’s middle name? *Chase.*
.This topic was a hard nut to crack! Where’s a major Christmas ballet company when I need one? If we find out it was called the Cracker because it was short for Nutcracker, as in something ANS did to men or other people did to HKS, welllll ... guess I’d just have to live with that!