Warren sold his company to Gulf Oil Corporation in 1953 for $450 million, the largest such merger in the energy industry up to that time.
[2] A brief biography, published in 1987, when the Tulsa Historical Society inducted him into its hall of fame, indicates only that he struggled with poverty during those years, and that he had jobs as "... a newspaper carrier, a Western Union messenger, a peanut vendor in a baseball park, a drug store employee, a door-to-door salesman and even a dance hall instructor.
Warren caught a train to Sapulpa in February 1916, where he went to work briefly on a rail line serving the oil boom towns of Depew and Shamrock.
[4] Warren worked for a few years as assistant to Patrick J. Hurley, who was then vice president of Gilliland Oil Company.
[8] The Foundation also financed the first Warren Clinic facility in 1988 as part of the Saint Francis Health System with the goal of expanding the base of available primary care physicians.
Since then it has steadily grown to more than 70 locations and over 350 physicians who provide high quality health care to patients in northeastern Oklahoma.
In 2007, the Foundation funded the expansion of the Saint Francis Health System to include two new facilities: Saint Francis Hospital South, a 96-bed hospital to accommodate the growing population in the southern part of Tulsa; and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, a clinical neuroscience research institute dedicated to expanding the knowledge about the underlying pathogenetic features of mental disorders.
[12] Together, they had six daughters and one son: Dorothy, Natalie, Marilyn, Patricia, Elizabeth (Libby), Jean and William.
Their son, William K. Warren Jr., also a successful businessman and philanthropist who chaired the family foundation for years after his father's retirement, lives in Tulsa.