The late Corbin Robertson, Sr. was a bright business mind when he came to Texas as a young man from Minnesota in the 1940’s. After marrying Wilhelmina Cullen — the daughter of famous Houston wildcatter Hugh Roy Cullen — Mr. Robertson ultimately became the brains behind the investment of the Cullen Family oil and gas fortune, a role that Richard Rainwater successfully emulated decades later for Ft. Worth’s Bass Family. Houston benefitted greatly from Mr. Robertson’s business acumen as both the Cullen and Robertson families became among Houston’s greatest philanthropists, contributing huge amounts to institutions such as the University of Houston and the Texas Medical Center.

Mr. Robertson’s son — longtime Houston businessman Corby Robertson, Jr. — has continued his legacy of astute business acumen and philanthropy. After starring as an outside linebacker for the University of Texas football teams of the late 1960’s, Mr. Robertson returned to Houston and worked his way into assuming leadership from his father of the Robertson Family’s closely-owned oil and gas business, Quintana Petroleum Corporation. However, over the years, Mr. Robertson has branched his family’s fortune into the ownership of a non-sexy but more plentiful (and potentially more lucrative) alternative energy resource — coal.
As this Chronicle article reports (here is an earlier Forbes article), Mr. Robertson’s Natural Resource Partners, a Houston-based master limited partnership — has a market capitalization of $1.6 billion and, since going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2002, the value of the partnership’s units have more than tripled to a recent price of $63. Quarterly distributions have also increased 62 percent since the partnership went public.
By the way, one item the Chronicle article missed is that, among his many civic duties, Mr. Robertson is currently the chairman of the board of Baylor College of Medicine, where he has led Baylor’s board during its historic split last year with its longtime primary teaching hospital in the Texas Medical Center, Methodist Hospital. Nevertheless, the Chronicle article is a good overview of the business background of Houston’s First Family of energy and highlights the business talent that has helped make Houston the energy capitol of the United States.