In The Grove, where Shultz was waiting for him, Steve Bechtel could begin readying his defense. In The Grove, surrounded by old friends and allies, there would be quiet and respite, time to reflect on the past and prepare for an uncertain future.
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CHAPTER
2
DAD
W hen they
knew
spoke
him and of him
the
in
men later
who years, his
worked
sons,
for him the people
would
who
describe
Warren A. Bechtel as a bear of a man, brash, bold, booming-voiced.
“An American original,” they would call him; a self-made, rougharound-the-edges figure who did big things because he dreamed big dreams. There were few like him, they would say, in tones of awe, respect and not a little fear, and when it came to building, none at all.
He was born September 12, 1872, in Freep(>rt, Illinois, the first of six children. Both his parents, Elizabeth and John Moyer Bechtel, were descendants of German immigrants who’d originally settled in Pennsylvania. They migrated west after their marriage, settling first in Illinois and then in 1884, when Warren was 12, moving to Peabody, Kansas. There John Bechtel, a former county road commissioner, acquired a farm and a grocery store.
As a youth, Warren was a restless sort, bustling, energetic, bored There is a town of Bechtelsville located in Berks County in the southwest comer of
the state.
18
DAD
with school-which he attended sporadically when his various farm chores allowed-seemingly anxious to outgrow adolescence and get on with life. The one thing that could hold him was the slide trombone, which he played incessantly, both at home and at neighboring ranches, where he earned pocket money tending cattle and mending fences.
Out on the open range, miles from the nearest farmhouse or fellow human, he’d play his beloved trombone for hours as, in the distance, coyotes yelped in accompaniment.
At the age of 19, Warren graduated from high school and, to the chagrin of his strict Methodist parents, joined up with a largely female dance band. The “Ladies Band,” as it was dubbed, toured through the Midwest, though without much success. After less than a year on the road, the band broke up, leaving Warren stranded and almost penniless in downstate Illinois. Wired train fare home by his father, he returned to Kansas chastened and embarrassed, and determined, or so he promised his parents, to remain on the family farm.
For five years, Warren made good on his pledge. Then, in 1897, he met a woman-a slim, handsome 20-year-old from Aurora, Indiana, named Clara Alice West. In the company of her parents, Clara had come to Kansas to visit relatives. It was Warren, though, who caught her eye. The two began seeing each other, and after a brief courtship, Warren proposed marriage-a prospect that did not sit well with Clara’s parents, her father especially. A prosperous merchant back in Indiana, he worried about this improbable young man, so long on ideas, so short on cash. How, he bluntly asked, did Warren intend to support his bride?
Warren, who had been giving the subject a lot of thought, had a ready answer: cattle. Cattle from Arizona, he explained, were shipped north to the stockyards of Wichita for marketing. But before they could be sold, they had to be fattened. With ambition and some borrowed cash, a man could buy a farm, grow corn, feed
