Mr. Houghland wins, then cashes out

February 5, 1959: It hadn't taken Mason Houghland long to act. Only two years earlier, the U.S. Court of Appeals had ended a 15-year-old legal dispute by ruling that Fritz von Opel had no legal claim on the large chunk of stock in Nashville's Spur Oil Company once owned by his father, German auto magnate Wilhelm von Opel. A few months after that decision, the U.S. Justice Department sold the 73,000 shares of Spur stock previously owned by von Opel at auction. Mason Houghland's $5 million bid was the only one submitted.

Now, Houghland had more than doubled his investment, selling a million shares of Spur stock for $11.25 in the first large public offering of a Nashville company since World War II. The deal was being handled by Equitable Securities, now at the zenith of its reign as the most powerful underwriting firm in the South.