36 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
36 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "City"
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tags:
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- Place
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- Shreveport
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- Louisiana
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- HuntOil
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- HLHunt
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- SouthernResearchCompany
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- PrivateInvestigators
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alias:
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- Shreveport
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summary: "Louisiana city where H.L. Hunt kept his second household and met his third wife, where Frania Tye Lee's suit was tried in 1978, and where the Southern Research detective firm was chartered in 1958."
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location: "Louisiana, United States"
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created: 2026-09-21
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updated: 2026-09-21
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---
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Shreveport is a city in northwestern [[Louisiana]], the commercial center of the oil country that runs into [[East Texas]] and southern [[Arkansas]].
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### The Hunts
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[[H.L. Hunt]] married [[Frania Tye Lee|Frania Tye]] in [[Florida]] in 1925 under the name [[Franklin Hunt]], while married to [[Lyda Bunker Hunt]]. They lived in Shreveport and then in [[Dallas, Texas|Dallas]] and had four children. [[Hunt Oil Company]] kept an office in the city. In 1940 [[Ruth Ray Hunt|Ruth Ray]], of [[Idabel, Oklahoma]], came to Shreveport to find work, became a legal secretary at Blanchard, Goldstein, Walker and O'Quinn, and went to Hunt Oil when the partner Claude O'Quinn did. Hunt said he first noticed her waiting for a bus outside the office. She left in the fall of 1942 and bore his son [[Ray Hunt|Ray]] in [[New York City|New York]] the next April. In the first years of the [[World War II|Second World War]] Hunt had two employees move his son [[Hassie Hunt|Hassie]] from Dallas to Shreveport to [[Jackson, Mississippi]], "changing draft boards with each move."[^1][^2]
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On November 11, 1975, the fiftieth anniversary of the Florida wedding, Frania Tye Lee sued Hunt's estate in the federal court in Shreveport, claiming a wife's share. At the trial in January 1978 Ray Hunt, as executor, acknowledged from the witness stand that his father was the father of her children. [[Margaret Hunt Hill]] waited in a motel, and Ruth Hunt stayed in Dallas on the advice of lawyers who feared she would be asked about the birth of her own children.[^1][^3]
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### Southern Research
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The [[Southern Research Company]], Inc., a private detective firm, was chartered in Shreveport on December 2, 1958, and still operates there. A credit report of 1960 in a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] security file describes its [[New Orleans]] branch, managed by [[Joseph Oster]], a former associate of [[Guy Banister]], as the office of a firm "whose home office is in Shreveport." That branch investigated [[David Ferrie]] for [[Eastern Air Lines]] in 1962 and 1963. In 1996 the Shreveport company's president, [[Thomas Ostendorff]], gave its Ferrie file, number 11-N-224, to the [[Assassination Records Review Board]].[^4]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Hurt, Harry, III. *Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash*. W.W. Norton, 1981, pp. 16-17, 131-133, 135.
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[^2]: Hurt, Harry, III. "Daddy's Money," *Texas Monthly,* April 1978. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/daddys-money/
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[^3]: Lee v. Hunt, 431 F. Supp. 371 (W.D. La. 1977); Lee v. Hunt, 631 F.2d 1171 (5th Cir. 1979).
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[^4]: Louisiana Secretary of State, business filings, charter 24407110D; Central Intelligence Agency, report of investigation, September 13, 1960, JFK record 104-10109-10379, p. 14; Golrick, Philip D. Memorandum to David G. Marwell, "Phone Conversation with Joseph Oster," January 19, 1996, Assassination Records Review Board electronic files.
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