But in the years immediately ahead, there would be trouble for Warren Bechtel, brought on in large measure by his very contentment.
Satisfied that his business was running smoothly, and still fancying himself the wheeler-dealer of his youth, Bechtel allowed his attention to wander, and he indulged himself in several questionable enterprises.
The first was a placer gold mine outside Port Orford, Oregon. Invited to invest by the machine-gun-making Browning family of Ogden, Utah, Warren sank tens of thousands of dollars into the mine, only to have the local dairy farmers raise havoc over the silt and debris it was depositing into the nearby Sixes River. In what would be the first of many clashes the Bechtels would have with environmentalists, the farmers sued and eventually secured a permanent injunction which, to all intents and purposes, shut down the mine.
Embittered but undaunted, Warren invested several hundred thousand dollars more in the Sanifold Manufacturing Company of New York. The company had developed a toothbrush that claimed to be both sanitary-it came with a cap that covered the bristles-and handy-when folded, it fitted neatly into a vest pocket or purse. Warren, who had been brought up to know the value of personal hygiene and had spent half his life in camps where one cleansed one’s teeth with one’s finger if at all, thought that the product had the makings of a fortune. Excitedly, he announced to Clara, “Every camper and traveler in the country will want one of these toothbrushes. “7 They didn’t, and the company folded.
He had better luck financially with a copper mine he bought in Arizona; better still, with an insurance company called Industrial Indemnity he cofounded in 1920 in San Francisco and, best of all, with several large tracts of real estate he purchased in downtown Oakland and San Francisco. In time, all three ventures would account for a substantial portion of the Bechtel family fortune.
Now, however, Warren’s attention was turning back to building.
25
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
Thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T, Americans were embarked on a love affair with the automobile. Even Alice, who was barely big enough to see over the dashboard, was whining for a car of her own.
Cars, Warren realized, needed roads to travel on-hundreds and hundreds of miles of new ones. For the W A. Bechtel Company, this spelled fresh opportunity.
W ith Henry Hoey, a colleague from his days working for the Southern Pacific, Warren convinced the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads that with his wealth of related experience, he was eminently qualified as a road builder. Desperate to get under way, the Bureau, in 1919, awarded him the first federal public-road contract let in California: the building of the Klamath River Highway near the Oregon border. All went well with that project, and the following year, Bechtel and Hoey put down another federal highway, this one in Los Angeles County.
As his road-building work continued, Bechtel began to grasp the significance of the third factor in the automotive equation: oil. If more cars meant more new highways, they also meant
