Mitchell: Man and work were inseparable
As a major newsmaker in my general orbit, George Mitchell was in my head for many years. But I spoke to him only once.
It was 1977, and I was reporting for the Conroe Courier, my first newspaper job out of college. I was working on a progress report on The Woodlands, the innovative master-planned community emerging amid the pines and oaks between Conroe and Houston, and Mitchell saw fit to give a cub reporter a few minutes on the phone to talk about the 3-year-old project.
I remember little about the conversation except that Mitchell, then 58, deflected questions about himself. I had done a bit of research and knew that he was an interesting guy — the son of an impoverished Greek immigrant, a self-made man, a visionary of sorts. But Mitchell wanted my article to focus on his work.
It turns out that the man and the work were inseparable. As Loren Steffy’s new biography makes clear, Mitchell had little interest in vacations or leisure time beyond his daily tennis game and occasional fishing trips with family and friends. He was driven, even obsessive, but this is true of many successful people; what distinguished Mitchell was the nature of his obsessions and their inherent contradictions.
From early in his career, Mitchell was drawn to big thinkers who toiled in dense realms such as particle physics or wrestled with vexing global issues such as overpopulation. His enormous investment of time, money and creative passion in The Woodlands — a project subsidized for years by his oil-and-gas-exploration company — reflected his commitment to sustainable development.. Yet he made a fortune in an extractive industry widely seen as the chief contributor to the existential threat represented by climate change.
Though Mitchell is known as the “father of fracking,” Steffy explains that neither he nor his engineers invented the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing. Instead, Mitchell and his colleagues figured out, after years of expensive trial and error, how to use fracking profitably on a broad scale. Depending on your point of view, this was his signature achievement or a stain on his legacy.
“Both of George’s biggest endeavors represent progress, and both are steeped in controversy,” Steffy writes. “Fracking has reduced oil and natural gas prices, transforming the U.S. energy landscape and the world of petro-politics. Yet it has come at a cost to the environment and communities. Sustainable development has created more livable neighborhoods and greater harmony with nature even as it has added to the problems of urban sprawl and increased demand for electricity and gasoline.”
This measured assessment is typical of Steffy’s approach in this well-researched, thoughtful and engaging biography.
Though Steffy, a former Houston Chronicle business columnist, clearly admires his subject, this is not hagiography. Steffy recounts Mitchell’s notorious tardiness in paying vendors and suppliers. He writes that Mitchell could be “private, distant and even hypocritical,” qualities that contributed to years of strife in his long marriage to the philanthropist Cynthia Woods Mitchell. And he notes that Mitchell carried on an affair with a married employee at his energy company, a relationship that was known to his wife and was an “open secret” within the company.
(Throughout the text, Steffy refers to Mitchell as “George,” a choice I found a bit off-putting, although it’s useful in distinguishing George Mitchell from the many other Mitchells — his wife, 10 children, parents and siblings — who populate the narrative.)
The book follows a conventional, chronological arc, starting with the origins of Mitchell’s father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, born in a Greek village in 1880. (He became “Mike Mitchell” when his boss on an American rail gang complained he couldn’t pronounce or spell the young laborer’s name.) The book recounts the Mitchell family’s life in Galveston, where Mike Mitchell ran a shoe-shining and suit-pressing shop. It continues through George Mitchell’s education at Texas A&M University, military service, courtship of and marriage to Cynthia Woods, the long development of his business career in energy and real estate, and his sponsorship of research and conferences reflecting his growing interest in basic science and sustainability issues.
Mitchell’s intelligence, resourcefulness and work ethic are consistent themes. As a boy growing up in Galveston, Mitchell was so studious that he skipped two grades in school. He caught fish and sold them to tourists for $2 each, or to local restaurants. As a student at A&M, he sold candy in the dormitories to help pay his school expenses. When he started out in the oil-and-gas business, Mitchell borrowed vital records known as well logs from a friend who ran a geological library, worked with the data until 2 or 3 a.m., then returned the logs in the morning.
Although Steffy doesn’t emphasize it, these anecdotes reflect the very qualities that embody the mythology and, in many cases, the reality of the American immigrant experience. At a moment when immigrants are vilified as criminals or lazy public charges, Mitchell’s story reminds us of their true contributions to our economy and culture.
It is ironic, then, to consider some of the things happening in The Woodlands — Mitchell’s grand passion project — some 20 years after he sold the development and just a few years after his death at age 94 in 2013. After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, wealthy Mexicans who had bought homes and established businesses in The Woodlands began moving out after experiencing intolerance fueled by antiimmigrant sentiment.
The Woodlands has been wildly successful as a realestate development. But as Steffy acknowledges, it does not reflect Mitchell’s vision of a community where people of varied race, ethnicity and income levels could live and work; instead, it’s mostly white and wealthy. Companies with offices in The Woodlands provide few jobs for poor or working-class people.
“He really wanted an ethnic mix in The Woodlands, and it’s the one thing that really didn’t quite work for him,” Mitchell’s son,
Scott Mitchell, tells Steffy in the book. “We didn’t have the blue-collar jobs nearby that Dad really wanted.” (In fairness to Mitchell, some of the best urban thinkers in the country have failed to find a successful strategy for creating places where business executives live a few blocks from their landscapers or housekeepers.)
Yet Steffy argues persuasively that Mitchell’s failures of execution, or his flaws as a human being, shouldn’t diminish our assessment of his contributions, from creating livable neighborhoods in The Woodlands to revitalizing derelict areas of his hometown, Galveston, through careful investments.
Although I spoke to Mitchell only once, I saw him from time to time in his final years. On my way to fetch lunch in the downtown tunnel system, I would spot a bald, slightly stooped figure dressed in a business suit, talking to a colleague or striding purposefully toward … something important, no doubt. To the very end, George Mitchell was a man on a mission.