As the summer of 1982 unwound in South Texas, the ranch hands on Matagorda Island saw the gleaming white airliner parked on the tarmac near the sidewalk to the main house. On the tail was the familiar logo of American Liberty Oil.

Despite a near-fatal 1943 heart attack, Dallas’ Toddie Lee Wynne outlived all of his contemporaries and became the sole owner of the lower third of Matagorda Island. In the 1980s, he harnessed his fortune to finance the world’s first private space launch at his island compound. But the countdown for the Conestoga 1 rocket was also the final countdown for Wynne.

Main photo: Toddie Lee Wynne’s plane sits on the tarmac on Matagorda Island. Matagorda was just an hour-and-a-half flight from Wynne’s home in Highland Park. (Courtesy Jacque Wynne)

The boss had arrived.

Livestock and cowboys came and left by barge.

But Dallas oilman Toddie Lee Wynne, owner of the southern third of Matagorda, boarded his plane at Love Field and, an hour and a half later, walked into the labyrinthine one-story house.

Down the familiar main hallway, the 85-year-old Wynne settled in the third bedroom with simple twin beds. An oil portrait of his late wife, Imogen, in her fishing hat hung above the fireplace.

A lawyer by training, Wynne had become fabulously wealthy by embracing the future. He built hotels in Hong Kong and Bali. With his nephew Angus Wynne Jr., he developed Wynnewood and Six Flags Over Texas. His son, Toddie Jr., was chairman of the family’s glittering Plaza of the Americas hotel/office complex in downtown Dallas.

But the future devours even the most glorious past.

After Wynne took control of American Liberty from his partner Clint Murchison, he relocated its headquarters to a rambling Mediterranean house overlooking Turtle Creek. His private office was at the top of the dramatic curved stair. But that house now belonged to H.L. Hunt’s daughter Caroline. She had renovated it and opened an elegant restaurant and hotel called The Mansion on Turtle Creek.

His brother Angus Wynne Sr. was dead, his landmark house on Strait Lane now occupied by Ross Perot.

But on Matagorda Island, he could cling to his past with one hand and reach audaciously at the future with the other.

In the enormous dining room, the elegant oak panels on the walls and coffered ceiling mimicked the interior of a ship. On the long veranda, a teal runner stretched down the middle of the polished wood floor. The view of the high sand dunes and the Gulf of Mexico was unblemished. It was here on May 9, 1937, that Franklin Roosevelt sipped juleps with Wynne and his clique of Texas oilmen while the sea breeze carried laughter and the smell of tobacco and bourbon through the house. It was the tobacco that had prematurely weakened Wynne’s heart. Among Roosevelt’s hosts that day, the chain-smoking Wynne was the actuarial favorite to die first.

But 45 years later, he stood on the same veranda and communed with a gallery of ghosts.

Toddie Lee Wynne was the lone survivor.

Three miles down his private road toward San Jose Island, a modified Minuteman missile stood on a launch pad under a steel A-frame gantry. Nearby on a flatbed trailer, a diesel generator was wedged between two dish antennas and cables ran into a cluster of mobile homes.

This was mission control, and Wynne had paid for much of it.

He was one of the largest investors in Space Services Inc., a Houston firm with a bold plan to launch payloads into orbit for profit. Wynne provided cash and his remote island as a launch site.

“Space is our next horizon,” he said. “I think that those who get there first are to have the best opportunity.”

“Daddy felt the world was moving forward and he wanted to be a part of it,” recalled his daughter, Sissy Wynne.

The previous summer on Matagorda, 25 Space Services technicians crouched behind an 8-foot wall of sandbags as their first rocket, Percheron, exploded on the pad and ignited a brush fire in a pasture.

Wynne was undeterred.

“NASA had a whole lot more than one explosion before they were successful,” he said.