The American economy is like a great kite, flying high in the marital of sky, spreading sunshine

to 160 million people.

The first 30 years of Robert S. Kerr's life reads like a script the most uneven old John Wayne

movie ever imagined.

Bob was born in 1896 in a log cabin on Native American lands in rural Oklahoma.

He grew up big and healthy and strong.

Join the military during World War I but never saw any combat.

So he returned home, got married, started practicing law, never missed the day of church,

never at a sip of alcohol.

It was the next 30 years of Bob Kerr's life where things started to get interesting.

Failed businesses led to suffocating deaths followed by tragic personal losses.

The turning point happened in 1924 when Bob's wife Reba died giving birth to twin daughters,

neither of which survived.

Experiences like that are enough to drive any normal man to drink, but Bob Kerr was not

a normal man.

Bob Kerr exemplified grit.

He could get knocked down a thousand times and get up a thousand and one.

So like every great American hero of years passed, Bob Kerr pulled himself up by his bootstraps

and he remarried into a wealthy family who loaned him the money to purchase an oil company.

The kind of good old fashioned hard work that millennials would just never understand.

Kerr eventually partnered with Dean McGee, one of the oil industry's most talented geologists

to form the Kerr McGee Corporation.

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