?Roy M. Huffington, who started his career as a geologist for Humble Oil and Refining Co. and went on to found Huffington Corp., which he sold in the early 1990s for about $600 million, before serving as ambassador to Austria under former President George Bush, has died at 90.


Huffington founded the Huffington Foundation, which donated millions of dollars to Houston charities, and also served as chairman of the New York-based Asia Society for more than seven years in the 1980s.


In 1956, he founded Huffco and started exploring in Indonesia in the 1960s. The company made a major gas strike in Indonesia in 1972, earning millions in a two-decade partnership with the Indonesian government. He is noted for being the first independent to develop a production-sharing contract abroad. He later received a master’s and Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University.

John Horton Atwood, a World War II veteran and the founder of Houston-based Atwood Oceanics Inc., died July 13 at his home. He was 85. After serving in World War II and playing professional football for the New York Giants, Atwood was hired by Standard Oil of Ohio, and in 1957, went to Houston, and joined Global Marine Co. where he became an executive vice president.


In 1968, Atwood founded Atwood Oceanics, a drilling company that operates today in the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, Australia, West Africa and Brazil. He retired from the energy industry in the 1990s.

Warren Allen Stockard, an independent oil operator and partner in a barge line that traveled up and down the Mississippi River, has died at his Houston home at the age of 96. Stockard started in the energy industry as an oil operator in shallow-well drilling and dealing in real estate and partnerships. With Weldon Smith, Stockard was a partner in the Big 6 Drilling Co. He also had an interest in Alamo Barge Lines with Smith’s brother, Edgar A. Smith.

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