Lyda Bunker Hunt

Lyda Bunker was the daughter of Nelson W. "Pop" Bunker of Lake Village, Arkansas, a carpenter from the North who had come after the Civil War and become a storekeeper, cotton ginner, landlord, postmaster, and lender of money. The family traced its descent to the whaling captains of Nantucket. She studied at Maddox Seminary in Little Rock and Potter College in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where she took voice, and taught school at Jonesboro, Arkansas.¹

In the summer of 1914 H.L. Hunt, then a cotton planter and professional gambler at Lake Village, was courting her younger sister Mattie. Lyda, who was close to engagement to a man from Dermott, broke with him that fall and married Hunt. Their first child, Margaret, was born on October 19, 1915, and Haroldson Jr. on November 23, 1917. She went back to teaching to give the household a steady income while her husband gambled and speculated in land. The later children were Caroline, Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar.¹

Hunt married Frania Tye in Florida in 1925 and had four children by her, and from 1943 had four more by Ruth Ray, a Hunt Oil secretary whom he kept in a house two minutes' drive from the family home, Mount Vernon. Lyda "had suffered the revelation of Hunt's relationship with Frania and had heard rumors of his relationship with Ruth." A friend from Tyler said: "She always seemed very lonely." Her son Hassie, in his illness, threw a piece of fruit at her and broke her glasses. The shares of Placid Oil Company and the Loyal Trusts were settled on her six children, who by about 1970 held over a billion dollars, against about three million in the trusts of Ruth's children.²

She suffered a stroke in 1955. Hunt, who did not trust the Dallas doctors, chartered an airplane to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she died on Friday, May 6, at sixty-six. Her estate was valued at less than five million dollars. Herbert was executor. Her children were still in mourning when Ruth Wright and her children began to appear at Mount Vernon. When Margaret later gave a copy of the family genealogy to the New York Public Library she struck out "Prepared for Mrs. H. L. Hunt" on the title page and wrote "Lyda Bunker Hunt."³