Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

Chappel, who is now under the care of a physician.

The accident happened at Moss and Broadway, after the Chappels had stepped off a streetcar and were crossing Broadway to the sidewalk.

Young Bechtel’s car skidded 136 feet after the collision. The machine was filled with University students going to a dance at the Claremont Country Club.

According to the evidence in the hands of the police, young Bechtel was driving over the 20-mile speed limit at Moss and Broadway. He admitted to going from 30 to 3 5 miles per hour.

Whatever spared Bechtel from prosecution-lack of evidence, the grief of Dr. Chappel or Dad Bechtel’s influential intercession-Steve was shortly to drop out of Berkeley and join his father in business.

Soon after, in September 1923, he married his college sweetheart, a handsome young woman from an old and well-respected California family named Laura Adaline Peart. On May 10, 1925, they had a son, Stephen Davison, Jr., and not long after, their second child, a daughter, Barbara, was born.

Initially, Steve was saddled with administrative chores, the nuts-andbolts-fitting-together of the various elements that make a project work.

His real love, though, was for developing new areas of business, and he was especially enthusiastic about pipelining and increasing Bechtel’s involvement in the still fledgling but rapidly growing oil industry. With the approval of his father, a believer in giving his boys all the responsibility they could handle, Steve played increasingly larger roles in Bechtel’s pipelining projects, and by the time he was into his mid-20s, was managing them on his own-so effectively so that by 1930 he became the functional corporate head of Bechtel-Kaiser Enterprises.

It was Boulder, however, that served as Steve’s graduate school.

What he hadn’t picked up from working at Dad’s side for twenty years 48

STEVE

he learned at Black Canyon, whether from watching Frank Crowe move men and materials, or listening as Felix Kahn explained the nuances of structuring a contract, or observing as Charlie Shea commanded armies of workers, or hearing Harry Morrison expound on the use and abuse of heavy equipment. More than anything else, though, Boulder opened Steve’s eyes to the potential for large-scale, multidisciplinary construction projects-projects that in later years would dwarf even Boulder.

His job at Boulder was chief of administration-a title that put him in charge of, among other things, purchasing, assembling and transporting Boulder’s vast store of materials. In terms of responsibility, the job was second only to Crowe’s, and he went at it with zeal. Though he could be affable when he chose, Steve could also be tough-too tough for some tastes, including Crowe’s. The two men had a fractious relationship, and more than once Crowe could be heard muttering that young Bechtel was “terribly ambitious.”

Dad Bechtel had been ambitious as well in his youth, but Steve harbored even greater plans. Because of his wartime service, he was more sophisticated and worldly than his father, who, for all his success, was, at bottom, a knockabout earth-mover who threw up dams and gouged out mountains to make way for the roads and railways, never thinking much further ahead than the next job. Steve Bechtel did think ahead: beyond Boulder; beyond earth moving, railroads and road building. His vision set him apart from his father, and made him even more effective at selling than his father had been. “Dad did it [sold]

simply and sincerely-with a lot of persuasion, but he didn’t seem to be selling at all.” Steve’s brother Warren explained. “Steve had the same knack and the advantage of