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Chapter 24
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24 WHEN W. L. Moody, Jr., died in 1954, leaving his oldest daughter in charge, he deliberately placed the Moody empire in the hands of a woman who had never had a day of formal schooling. The Old Man didn't believe in education for women, and whatever Mary Elizabeth Moody picked up along the way came from her father or from nannies or servants. She was sixty-two when her father died, a childless widow who had never made a bed, cooked a meal, signed a check, or had sex. At least that's what she told friends. Though she was married to Edwin Clyde Northen for nearly forty years, Mary Moody claimed to have remained a virgin. Old Man Moody liked Clyde Northen, and in fact handpicked him as a son-in-law. Northen was a quiet, studious man who grew oleanders as a hobby and enjoyed hunting and fishing. He came from solid Anglo-American stock: his ancestors were among the first English settlers in the New World, landing on the banks of the James River in 1635, and a branch of the family migrated to East Texas before the Civil War. Clyde Northen was born in 1873, which meant that he was just twelve years younger than W. L. Moody, Jr., his future father-in-law. Northen came to Galveston in 1904 to attend medical school, but was forced to drop out because of chronic eye problems. He was working as night clerk at the Tremont Hotel when W. L. Moody, Jr., befriended him and helped him start his own small insurance company. Later Northen joined Old Man Moody's company, American National Insurance Company 264 Gary Cartwright (ANICO). The Old Man probably wasn't thinking about grandchildren when he arranged for Northen to marry his daughter. Clyde Northen was forty-two and Mary Moody was twenty-one. Moody built a home for his daughter and son-in-law on Broadway , just west of his own mansion. After the humiliating downfall of his namesake, W. L. Moody III, and the premature and crushing death ofhis other son, Shearn, Old Man Moody developed an almost pathetic dependency on his daughter Mary. They ate together every night, and when he traveled, Mary traveled with him. They spent the summers together at their vacation retreat at Mountain Lake, Virginia, and in the autumn they went to his hunting lodge at Lake Surprise. During these interludes Mary's husband usually remained in Galveston, looking after the family business. Clyde Northen was listed as vice president of the Moody banks, hotels, insurance, and publishing companies, but the titles were mainly for show. W. L. Moody, Jr., remained in absolute control until his death. In 1942, when the Old Man was seventy-seven and still in excellent health, he created the Moody Foundation, which was the first step of his master plan to place the bulk of his fortune out of reach of both the tax collectors and his own heirs. Under Texas community property law, halfof the fortune belonged to his wife, Libbie Shearn Moody. She died about a year after the foundation was formed, but on her deathbed she signed a will creating a second tax shelter, the Libbie Shearn Moody Trust, which provided an income for her children and grandchildren. Though the corpus of her part of the estate remained in the trust, her heirs would receive annual dividends from its interest: over the years this has paid each of them from several hundred thousand to more than a million dollars a year. The crown jewel of the Moody fortune-its cash cow-was the giant insurance company, ANICO, which had become one of the ten largest insurance companies in America. But the key to the treasure was the Moody Foundation. The Old Man fixed it so that after his death, 35 percent of the stock in ANICO went to the Moody Foundation, and another 35 percent went to the Libbie Shearn Moody Trust. He additionally provided that the stock controlled by the Libbie Shearn Moody Trust would be voted by the trust department of the Moody National Bank. Whoever controlled the Moody Foundation also controlled the bank, and therefore controlled ANICO, not to mention the newspapers, hotels, ranches, and [3.80.129.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:09 GMT) GALVESTON 265 other property Will Junior had accumulated. Originally, the foundation had two trustees-Mary Moody Northen and the Old Man's attorney, Louis J. Dibrell-but...