The Hemisphere: Tycoon’s Wing-Ding

In the waiting room of Calgary airport one 18° morning last week, a stocky, greying man staggered cheerfully under the weight of a pile of enormous, fleece-lined coats. To arriving friends the man said: “Here, you better take this. It might be cold up there.” It was. The gathering party’s destination, Fort St. John, B.C., lay smothered under snowdrifts 8 ft. high. But to Francis Murray Patrick McMahon, temporary coat-dispenser and full-time oil-and-gas tycoon, a town buried under snow was no problem. Calling for “all the tractors from Dawson creek to the Alaska border,” McMahon’s men within hours cleared off Fort St. John’s airport, spread gravel on the walks at nearby Taylor and overlaid it with miles of corrugated cardboard.

With those details accomplished, Frank McMahon, 55, went on to the business at hand. From Texas and Montreal, from London and Manhattan, McMahon had invited some 400 bankers, oilmen, businessmen and their wives to a razzle-dazzle two-day blowout in celebration of the link-up of his Westcoast Transmission Co. Ltd. pipeline to the U.S. Northwest. Chartering five four-engine aircraft (at a cost of $13,000 each), McMahon got the wingding off in high gear by serving cocktails with breakfast on the flight to Fort St. John. There the guests were provided with more clothing—350 pairs of overshoes and 350 raincoats flown in from Vancouver. Eight chartered buses, which had churned through a blizzard from Edmonton to get there on time, took them to Westcoast Transmission’s huge gas-scrubbing plant (TIME, Sept. 2). Then, at the turn of a valve, gas roared through the 30-in. pipe heading south for Vancouver, and a gas flame leaped symbolically skyward. Said Frank McMahon: “So far it has all been going out. Now it will start coming in.”

In Line at 8. Hardheaded Frank McMahon has worked for 20 years to see it come in. Son of a British Columbia wildcatter, McMahon attended Spokane’s Gonzaga University (where he was a campus mate of Bing Crosby), began wildcatting in the 19303. In 1939 he formed Pacific Petroleums Ltd., which in less than 19 years has piled up total assets of $34.5 million, holds interests in 7,500,000 acres of potential oil-and-gas lands.

Increasingly, McMahon turned his attention to natural gas, hounded the B.C. government to open up lands for exploration. When the go-ahead came in 1947, Frank McMahon was in line at 8 a.m. at the government offices; he bought permits No. i, 2 and 3 for $1,800,000, thus obtained rights to 3,000,000 acres. Incorporating Westcoast Transmission Co. Ltd. in 1949, McMahon three years later brought in his first gas well, Pacific Fort St. John No. 3. By 1955 McMahon won permission from the U.S. Federal Power Commission to export gas to the U.S., started to build a $170 million, 650-mile pipeline from the Peace River area to the U.S. border, to hook into the Pacific Northwest Pipeline Corp.’s six-state gas grid.

Man of Distinction. A millionaire many times over (estimated worth: $50 million), McMahon, as a result of the gas boom, is at or near the top of the list of Canada’s big rich. He lives with his dark-haired wife Betty and baby daughter in a house in Calgary and an apartment on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, has been able to indulge his wildcatter taste for gambling by racing (he is part owner of Alberta Ranches, won the Hollywood Gold Cup with Royal Serenade in 1953), high-stakes poker and Broadway play-backing (Pajama Game, Damn Yankees). So successful have his many ventures proved, that the distillers of Lord Calvert whisky asked him to pose for their “Man of Distinction” ads (but backed down hastily when they learned that McMahon has a major interest in rival Alberta Distillers Ltd.).

McMahon’s pipeline may turn out to be the most profitable of all his ventures. In the ballroom of the Vancouver Hotel last week, McMahon and his guests topped off the two-day party by watching Premier W. A. C. Bennett flip a valve that sent Peace River gas flowing into U.S. pipelines. Dal Grauer, president of the British Columbia Electric Co. Ltd., then rose to announce that to ease the province’s power shortage B.C. Electric will build four to six new steam plants and power them with Westcoast gas. Said McMahon: “I am greatly overcome.”