Ted Turner, RIP

I am stunned to realize Mr. Turner was only 87 years old.

19 years ago in 2007, I had the task of making a presentation to the board of directors of an oil and gas company that I'd gone to work for as director of government affairs a couple of months earlier. As it happened, that company, El Paso Corp., operated about 1,200 natural gas wells on Ted Turner's ranch in north central New Mexico - the Vermejo Ranch.

The website calls the ranch - one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting - a Ted Turner Reserve and boasts that it is “Half a Million Acres of Rewilded Solitude.” It makes no mention of those 1,200 gas wells which generated a good portion of Turner’s sizable fortune.

Turner was a member of the company’s board then, and the BoD meeting was held at his ranch headquarters. He was in poor physical condition even then, when he would have been just 68 years old. Frail, haggard, weak, barely able to climb a few stairs or even stay awake at 7:00 in the evening. I had assumed he was closing in on 80 at that time.

Anyway, he didn't agree with anything I said in my presentation about the challenges of drilling in the Rocky Mountain states due to all the environmental activism at the time, but he was good humored and cordial about it. At one point, he smiled and said, "You do realize that I give millions of dollars from my personal fortune to all those groups every year, don't you?" At which point everyone at the table tensed up. I smiled and said, "Yessir, I sure do," and the room burst into laughing.

Once he had stopped laughing, all he said was, "Well, ok. Keep going."

RIP to a man who, agree with him or not, was a real American legend.

That is all.