Opting for an early out with the Navy Reserve, Roger was
back in Chicago by 1919, living with his father in suburban Franklin Park and
dating Clara Morgan, having kept in touch with her through long letters from
Colorado and later from Boston. There was talk of marriage, but Roger set off
for the west again, landing in Drummund, Oklahoma where the oil business was in
full boom and fortunes were being made overnight.
"I didn't know
any more about the oil business then a mink knows about sex hygiene, but I
could learn....The Sinclair Oil people, in a moment of laxity hired me as a
scout. The experience I had in that line was confined to watching silent
western movies in which army scouts killed Indians,"says Tuohy.
Actually the position
he filled was as a driver to the world famous geologist Dick Raymond who had
been brought in to determine which wildcat wells were producing the most oil
and from that, decide which land was worth leasing. "There was
nothing," he wrote "against my buying leases that Raymond
recommended."
Learning everything
he could about the oil business from Raymond, Roger took $1,000 out of his
savings and purchased a 150-acre site that Drummond recommended. Within a
month, he resold the lease for a 200 percent profit. He repeated the process
twenty times in one year. Of that time Touhy said, "[I] never lost on any
of them...the money was good, but I was a guy who liked the city. And my mind
was on the girl at the telegraph key in the Blackstone Hotel."
He returned to
Chicago with $25,000, a respectable fortune in 1920, "and,"he liked
to point out, "it had taken me less than a year to earn it."