Surf Cat

Ross Perot’s life was a kaleidoscope of brightly colored moving patterns.

The 89-year-old self-made billionaire, who died early Tuesday, was a steadfast family man, corporate leader, patriot, advocate of veterans, proponent of education and funder of medical research.

He was a man for all seasons — and a world-class prankster.

Ross Perot Jr. said you knew you were on his dad’s A-list if he pulled a gag on you. 

“When our friends got a practical joke, I’d tell them, ‘You’re really fortunate. You’re at the top of the pyramid of Dad’s friend group,’ ” he said with a chuckle. “ ‘But be careful. If you try to compete, he will win. He’ll be more creative. He has more time. And, if he has to, he’ll outspend you.’ ”

With the permission of Ross Jr. and his four younger sisters, I’ve been mining Ross stories from those who knew this remarkable man best.

Daughters Nancy Perot, 59, Suzanne Perot McGee, 54, Carolyn Rathjen, 51, and Katherine Reeves, 48, typically leave interviews up to their 60-year-old billionaire brother, who’s more accustomed to dealing with the media.

But as the patriarch’s health began to decline, all five offspring sat down for interviews to share their favorite memories of growing up with one of the richest and most influential men in the world. 

 “Dad didn’t have to be the center of attention in the family,” said Nancy. “He was just a lot of fun, a lot of love and a lot of tenderness. He gave the biggest hugs. You knew he was always there for you.”

Home but never alone

The Perots moved to their 17-acre homestead on Strait Lane when it was a neighborhood of quiet country estates with horses and barns. Ross Jr. was 12 and his sisters were 10, 6 and 2. Katherine was born the following year.

Life there always included a menagerie of animals — and not just horses, ponies, cats and dogs.

Perot was smitten by a dog act that the family saw at a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus show in Florida. He thought Strait Lane could use a performing canine, so he bought Blitz the Spitz from the circus. He delighted in getting Blitz to do backflips and jump rope over his swinging belt.

“We had Blitz the Spitz forever,” Suzanne said. 

Phousey, a sun bear cub, was given to Perot in April 1970 during his visit to Vientiane, Laos, where he met with enemy POWs being held by U.S. forces. 

Perot brought the cub home on his Braniff International charter. The cub bit the Braniff flight attendant in the breast — but that’s another story.

Suzanne was a hit with her kindergarten class when her mother brought the cub for show and tell.

Phousey lived in a stall in the barn with the horses for about six months but was given to the Fort Worth Zoo when he grew too large. 

And then there was Al, a palace fishing eagle that was a gift from EDS executives poking a little fun at Perot’s saying: “Eagles don’t flock. You have to find them one at a time.” 

It had limited residency at Strait Lane before finding a permanent home at a nature sanctuary. 

“Do you remember the kangaroo?” Katherine asked Suzanne. “He hopped around the house with a diaper on.”

‘Every wise man needs a camel’

But the most unusual Strait Lane tenant was Teddy the Camel, given to Perot by Suzanne’s husband, Patrick McGee, as payback for the countless Christmas gag gifts and impractical jokes his father-in-law had played on him.

The most elaborate ruse happened 25 years ago when Suzanne and Patrick were moving back to Dallas from New York and planning to temporarily live with her parents.

The couple and their two little boys — a baby and a toddler — arrived to find a trashed-out trailer from someone’s hunting lease (complete with dirty sheets and beat-up furniture) and a wooden outhouse with a crescent moon door both parked on the motor court in the front of the house. A sign welcomed them to their new home.

“There was a barrel with burned trash and a Weber grill,” said Suzanne. “So we had everything we needed.”

The trailer’s outhouse then became a traveling roadshow, with Perot parking it in the front lawns of such Dallas notables as his buddy and late advertising legend, Liener Temerlin, and the late Sally Young, who took great pride in her immaculately landscaped yard on Turtle Creek.

So when Patrick saw a classified ad in The Dallas Morning News for a camel just three days before Christmas in 2000, he couldn’t resist.

 “He said, ‘This perfect,’ ” Suzanne recalled. “ ‘Every wise man needs a camel.’ ”

Too big for comfort

Suzanne researched what a camel required and whether Teddy might bite.

“The woman on the phone said, ‘No he’s a one-humper, so he’s really nice. One-humpers spit. Two-humpers bite,’ ” recalled Suzanne, who inherited her dad’s storytelling gene. “So we knew it was a spitter, but we really didn’t know what that meant.”

Patrick arranged for Teddy, adorned with a huge red bow, to arrive Christmas morning when the family was gathered at the homestead ready to open presents.

“This camel shows up, and it’s the biggest beast I’ve ever seen in my life,” Suzanne said.

Katherine remembered looking out the window and thinking that she didn’t know FAO Schwarz made stuffed animals that big. It never occurred to her that the camel was real. Senior’s reaction was everything they’d hoped for. 

“ ‘Dad was like, ‘Ho, ho, ho, this is hilarious! We’ve got to get it over to Charron Denker’s house. We need to take it to Ruth Altshuler’s house. We need to take it to Margaret McDermott’s house before it goes back.’

“My husband’s like, ‘You can do whatever you want with it, because it’s yours. It’s staying.’ ” 

After a year on Strait Lane, Teddy moved to Ross Jr.’s Circle T Ranch in Westlake, where he became a popular roadside attraction.

“Teddy lived very happily ever after,” said Suzanne. “And Dad never played a practical joke on my husband again.”

So what was Ross Sr.’s gag gift to his sons-in-law that year? 

“Tenny Lamas,” Katherine said. “Tennis shoes with a boot upper. They were horrible.”

“Horrible,” Suzanne echoed.

“I was exempt,” Ross Jr. said.

Never had a PC

As busy as Perot was, he was always home for dinner in time to say grace if he was in town. One reason he bought an airplane was so he could usually get back home for dinner and to sleep in his own bed.

“You didn’t know how special that was until you got to be older and had children of your own,” said Nancy, who has a blended family of five sons and a daughter. “Then you realized what a careful and deliberate decision that is — to make certain every single day that your children are the center of your world.”

Carolyn, who is vice president and executive director of the Perot Foundation and the mom of a son and a daughter, agreed. “I go back through his timeline of what he was doing outside of family, and he was wildly busy. He obviously had incredible time-management skills, and he was great at delegating.

“At the same time, he was so granular. He could keep tabs on all of it.”

The only work he did on weekends was Sunday evening before dinner. He’d sit down at his Remington Rand manual typewriter and type out his to-do list for the next week.

“As far as I know, he never had a personal computer,” said Carolyn. “Isn’t that hilarious? He was a phone guy.”

Great civilizations 101

“My parents always had the philosophy that you could never spoil children with pets or with travel,” said Nancy. “And I think that’s true.”

In the summer of 1971, her father arranged a 30-day tour so that she, who turned 11 on the trip, and her brother, 12, could see the great civilizations. They started in Japan, Hong Kong and Macau, then went on to Thailand and Laos.

Keep in mind this was in the midst of the Vietnam War.

Ross and Ross Jr. were flown out to an aircraft carrier in Yankee Station off the coast of Vietnam, where they saw sorties doing bomb runs and recon flights.

That was ultra-cool, Ross Jr. said.

The Perots (Margot was also along) finished their monthlong sojourn with visits to Greece, Israel, Egypt and Italy.

“It was a trip that shaped you forever,” Nancy said.

Bucking ponies and hovercrafts

Suzanne, Carolyn and Katherine talked about learning to ride horses as wee ones seated in front of their dad on his saddle. He’d tell adventure tales made up on the spot that were in rhyme and told in the cadence of the Tennessee Walking Horse’s smooth gait.

The girls progressed from Shetland and Welsh ponies to horses.

“It was the school-of-hard-knocks kind of riding,” said Suzanne. “They were ornery ponies that would buck us off.”

 “You just got back on,” said Katherine. “They weren’t always perfectly trained. It was so empowering, really.”

“I’m sure we had several concussions,” Carolyn said.

Every Saturday after horseback riding at home, the happy entourage loaded into the Woodie station wagon and headed to Lake Grapevine in the early years or to Lake Texoma, in more recent ones, for boating, waterskiing or Hobie Cat sailing.

“As the boats got faster, Dad needed a bigger lake,” Suzanne said.

“On the way to the lake, we would pull into the 7-Eleven for Slurpees and bubblegum,” Carolyn said.

Beginning in the early ’80s, Perot would take his youngest daughters to ride horses all around the thousands of acres of farmland he’d purchased for what would become his Legacy development in Plano.

“It still had barns and houses on it,” Carolyn said. “I remember distinctly sitting at the intersection of Preston [Road] and [Highway] 121 on my pony — or later on my horse at the intersection of 121 and the tollway — and he’d say, ‘Some day, EDS will be out here.’

“On Saturday night, after we came home from our adventure, he’d take Mom out on a date.”

Windsurfing in khakis

There were family ski trips to Vail, where he acted like the Pied Piper leading his kids down the mountain.

Perot loved speed boats, jogged before aerobics became popular and biked for miles.

“Dad was a windsurfer before anybody ever windsurfed,” said Nancy. “He’d get on his windsurfer, fully dressed in his khakis, tennis shoes and hat, and he’d go sailing across the lake and back. And we all were just dying for him to fall and get wet. He never did.

“He was showing off in a funny, cute way.”

Ross Jr. laughed at the recollection. “He’d come back to the dock and say, ‘Here, you do it.’ ”

He asked if I’d heard about the hovercraft that his dad would shoot across Texoma in and terrorize people on the shore.

“There was a big point of land where he could hit the beach,” he said. “He had a reporter from Life magazine, and I think he scared the hell out of her running her around on this hovercraft.”

Weedless garden

Early one summer, Perot decided to plant a carpeted vegetable garden that he’d read about. He put down indoor/outdoor carpet, cut holes in it and planted seeds.

“It was a weedless, mudless garden, and it went gangbusters,” Suzanne said. “I did not like picking vegetables in the Texas heat.”

Katherine thought differently. “It was fun. I loved it.”

But their dad was an utter failure at one thing: the kitchen.

One really cold night, Perot thought the dogs need a warm meal. “So he put a can of [unopened] Ken-L Ration right on the eye of the stove, and it exploded all over the kitchen, including the ceiling,” said Suzanne. “I don’t think he ever cooked again.”

NYC police horses

In 1977, Suzanne read an article in the Weekly Reader classroom magazine about how the New York City police department didn’t have money to replace its aging horses. So she asked her father to buy new horses for New York as her Christmas present.

He gave the police 20 Tennessee Walking Horses that cost $50,000 and all of the equipment that was needed.

Suzanne got to name four: Lone Star, Liberty, Freedom and Ross.

“Ross was the best police horse they ever had,” said Carolyn. “The police in New York City would go in on horseback when they were trying to break up riots in the ’70s. Ross was great at that.”

Little kind acts

After church at Highland Park Presbyterian one Sunday, the family spotted a duck with a six-pack plastic ring choking its neck. They went home, changed clothes and then went back to the lake. The two Rosses paddled around Goar Park in a rubber raft trying to rescue a duck that had no intention of being caught.

“He and Ross finally got this little duck, quickly got the ring off its neck and set it free,” said Nancy. “That personified Dad. He couldn’t walk away from anything in need.”

When Suzanne was in the fifth grade, her beloved — but prone to roaming — collie, Charger, went missing for longer than usual. Her father rode his bike around the neighborhood posting signs that he’d made: “Lost dog. Child’s pet. Reward. Call” with the phone number.

“Someone called and said, ‘OK, what’s the reward?’ ” Suzanne said. “I can’t remember what it was. It wasn’t much. And they said, ‘OK, we’ll meet you at the corner of Preston Road and LBJ.’ There was this big handoff of money for the dog. He went alone because it was a little scary.”

“Well, he did know how to negotiate with terrorists,” Katherine said with a chuckle.

Going full tilt

On Aug. 1, 1982, Ross Jr. read in The Dallas Morning News that Dick Smith, a record-setting Australian aviator, was intent on being the first person to fly a helicopter solo around the world and was about to start his mission at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth in four days.

“I get to the office and there’s a message, ‘Call your father.’ So I call Dad, and Dad said, ‘Did you see that article?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Dad, I want to beat him.’ ”

The 23-year-old decided to fly a helicopter with a co-pilot around the world in 30 days — thus beating Smith to the circumnavigation finish line.

Initially, his dad was gung-ho, but a few days later, he had second thoughts, saying it was too risky for his only son.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Dad, this is how you raised me. All my life I’ve watched you do these things. You go to Vietnam. You go to Iran. What do you expect me to do?’ I kinda shamed him into saying OK.”

But it came with one non-negotiable: Senior would be in charge of safety.

“I thought that was the greatest deal ever and quickly left the room before he could change his mind,” Ross Jr. said. “But I had no idea how extreme these safety measures would go.

“He bought so much gear that the helicopter couldn’t take off if we carried it all. We ended up leaving stuff all over the world because it was too much of a hassle.”

Senior also nixed night flights.

“Well, you can’t fly around the world in 30 days and not fly at night,” Ross Jr. said. “I avoided calling him because I didn’t want to lie.

“He’d ask, ‘Are you flying at night.’ I’d squirm and say, ‘Umm, it was a little dark.’

“He loved to tell people, ‘Oh, yeah, Margot’s so worried about Ross going around the world.’ But my mother was completely calm. He was the one who worried every step of the way.”