The pyramids of Moody Gardens.
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The three glass pyramids at the heart of 240-acre Moody Gardens on Galveston Island, rise 100 feet, and are home to an aquarium, rainforest and IMAX theater. Also within the complex is a golf course, convention center, and a vast water park with a beach made of sand barged across the Gulf of Mexico. Moody Gardens was just a horse farm and hippotherapy center in the early 1980s when Robert L. Moody was seeking physio and cognitive therapy for his son Russell, severely injured in a car accident. “My father immersed himself in understanding neurorehabilitation,” says son Ross, 61.
The vision became grander. Moody, the third-generation head of a famously wealthy and powerful family (in cotton, railroads, insurance and banking) built up Moody Gardens for decades, using funding from his family’s Moody Foundation. Once completed, he gave it all to the Galveston parks department. The complex continues to be a big money maker for the city.
Robert Moody, Sr. died in early November at age 88, leaving control of massive personal and charitable fortunes to his four direct offspring. “Moody Gardens is my father’s greatest legacy,” says son Ross Moody, 61. And, he says, it’s in the spirit of his lifelong curiosity and “love of learning,” that the Moody Foundation announced this week their pledge to invest $1 billion over 10 years into supporting and improving the education system of Texas.
Ross Moody and daughter Elle, October 2023.
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The timing, Ross says, has nothing at all to do with his recent dealmaking. Last year he sold publicly traded American National insurance company to Brookfield Reinsurance for $5.1 billion cash. Still pending is the sale of publicly traded National Western Life for $1.9 billion to Prosperity Life. (Ross was CEO and Chairman of both companies.) From these deals, the Moody Foundation will eventually receive upwards of $2.5 billion, with trusts for the benefit of family members to glean around $900 million, before taxes.
“After the sale the foundation is in a fortunate position to have the ability to give away additional tens of millions in gifts a year,” says Ross. They’re up for the challenge. There are already plenty of buildings with the Moody name on them. Drive north a bit to the campus of Rice University and you’ll find a striking new student center funded with a $100 million gift. Ross’s daughter Elizabeth, a foundation trustee for 5 years and Rice graduate, spearheaded that one.
At Ross’s alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, the Moodys (no relation to the bond rating agency) began their big gifts a decade ago with $50 million for the Moody College of Communications. Since then they’ve added $130 million for the new Moody Center arena, and $20 million to fix up the Blanton Museum of Art. The foundation’s other trustee, Ross’s half-sister Frances Moody-Dahlman, 54, went to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which in 2021 received $100 million from her to build the Frances Ann Moody Hall to house the new Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.
W.L. Moody Jr. bought what’s now known as the Moody Mansion for $20,000 after the deadly hurricane of 1900.
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As fun as it is to cut the ribbon on a building with your family name on it, “What moves us the most are gifts to those smaller nonprofits that have their feet on the ground and make positive differences for Texans every day,” says Ross. The foundation gives out hundreds of grants every year. Many checks are for $25,000-$75,000 to food pantrys, United Way chapters, Austin Diaper Bank, and every manner of early childhood education provider, like $65,000 for Mi Escuelita Preschool in Dallas. A favorite project of Ross’s is Achilles International, which helps people with disabilities get involved in organized athletics and form social connections.
Small is great. But when you’re trying to give away as much money within Texas as the Moody’s have pledged, you have to do it in big chunks, meaning there will be more buildings with the Moody name on them.
Which might be what great-grandpa had in mind. The Moody fortune began in the mid 1800s with W.L. Moody, Sr., a Virginian who fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War, later settling in Galveston where he founded the Galveston Cotton Exchange.
His son W.L. Moody, Jr. expanded into railroads and banking, including what today is $1.6 billion assets Moody National Bank. After the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900 he bought one of the city’s grandest mansions for $20,000, cheap even then (it’s now a museum). In 1905 he founded American National insurance company.
W.L. Jr. was grooming his son Shearn to take over, but he died at age 40, his sons Robert (Ross’s father) and Shearn Jr. just babies. Their mother sent them to boarding school and busied herself as a socialite. In 1942 W.L. set up the Moody Foundation and the Libbie Shearn Moody trust, after his wife. He created smaller trusts for grandchildren, but made sure to keep the bulk of assets off-limits. Texas Monthly called W.L. Jr. “a legendary tyrant and skinflint who cared so dearly for his fortune that he placed it out of reach of his heirs.”
The Moody Center at U.T. Austin was designed by Gensler.
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In 1954 W.L. Jr died and his daughter Mary Moody Northen took over management. Time Magazine did a story that year on Mary and calculated that the Moody empire then amounted to $400 million. Aunt Mary, “loved to travel around the state, meeting with folks of all backgrounds and beliefs and hearing their stories,” says Ross. She wanted to have an “impact on lives and communities in every nook and cranny of Texas” — and she devoted herself to it. Northen didn’t have any children and her husband died the same year as her father. She chaired the foundation until her death in 1986 at 96, at which point Robert Sr. took the reins.
Naturally there has been family infighting. Robert Sr.’s brother Shearn Moody Jr. (d 1996) was convicted of wire fraud and mail fraud in his attempts to steal millions from the Moody Foundation. He tried to set up his own insurance company but was booted by the board on fraud suspicions, which landed him in federal prison. Texas Monthly judged him “the sleaziest man in Texas” and detailed his exploits, involving importing penguins from Antarctica to the pool in his Galveston compound and building a slide into it from his bedroom window.
Shearn Jr. resented being frozen out of a role at American National. A fascinating 1972 New York Times
NYT
There has also been consternation between Ross and his elder brother Robert Jr., 63, who according to a court opinion harbors deep-seated resentments for having been passed over for roles as trustee of the Moody Foundation or board member of the insurance companies. Robert Jr. sued Ross and American National for $100 million after his special commission deals got cut off, alleging that Ross was mismanaging the company. Two courts have dismissed Robert Jr.’s “threadbare” allegations.
Though not a part of the Moody Foundation, Robert is a boardmember of another charity, the $700 million Moody Endowment, formed out of the Mary Moody Northen Endowment. His daughter Frances Buzbee helps direct Moody NeuroRehabilitation Center.
With their new $1 billion pledge, the Foundation aims to launch the “M-Pact Fund” which will focus on improving ways in which the many recipients of gifts can work together to share opportunities and methods. In recent years they’ve given $24 million to the Moody Scholars Program and $55 million to a K-12 initiative on Galveston called Generation Moody.
So many trusts and endowments and funds. It’s a funny thing to be responsible for so many billions, but have them sitting just outside your reach. Ross says some Moody family trusts have only income beneficiaries, with no distributions of the corpus. Thus fulfilling W.L. Moody Jr’s vision of his pile of capital slowly compounding, insulated from the squabbling siblings and generational whims.
One of the most surprising beneficiaries of the American National Insurance windfall is Galveston’s Moody Memorial United Methodist Church, which is set to receive $400 million of the proceeds in a special distribution from the Libbie Shearn Moody Trust. The church already had a $120 million endowment. Settled by W.L. Jr some 75 years ago in his wife’s name, the trust will now dissolve, having served its purpose in getting a pile of money across the generations to Libbie’s beloved church, which will now be able to give millions more each year to charities serving Texas’ most needy.