Coordinating the shovels, his manpower and his horse-drawn freight wagons, he proved himself a natural engineer and skillful manager.
“‘Beck’ was always what I thought an engineer should be,” his mentor A. J. Barkley recalled years later. “A man who understands what has to be done, knows how to do it, and finishes the job economically. “2
By 1903, Bechtel’s abilities had brought him to the attention of Silas Palmer, an inspector for E. B. and A. L. Stone, an Oakland, California-based construction company. Impressed by Bechtel’s grasp of detail and his experience employing heavy equipment, Palmer urged him to come to California, where the Stone company was building the Richmond Belt Railroad and extending the Santa Fe line into Oakland, both projects badly in need of seasoned managerial help.
W ith Clara pregnant again-she would give birth to a third son, Kenneth, in July 1904-Bechtel accepted, and they arrived in a region poised for explosive growth. Already, the San Francisco-Oakland area had a population of 342,000, and there were many who were predicting it would soon become the fastestgrowing community in the country. In San Francisco, William Randolph Hearst had just hired Ambrose Bierce as the “Prattle” columnist for his upstart Examiner, and his acidic attacks on politicians and other pooh-bahs were the talk of the town. In North Beach, Jack London was in the midst of an extraordinarily prolific phase-he would write four books in the next two years, among them The Sea Wolf and The Call of the Wild.
Downtown, the 7 50-room Palace Hotel, with its teak and rosewood furniture and its sumptuous French carpeting, was the showplace of San Francisco, and the even more opulent Fairmont was scheduled to open in May 1906.
After years on the road, Warren was eager to put down roots. He moved his family into a modest house in a middle-class area of Oakland and for the next few years, limited his work to Northern California, completing railroad projects for Stone and taking on landfill and road-grading jobs of his own. He was far from getting rich-at one point, his funds were so low that a business associate had to guarantee his account with a wholesale grocer-but at least his family had a home.
However, not for long. Shortly thereafter, the Bechtels took up tern-21
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
porary quarters in Placerville, 60 miles east of San Francisco, where Warren briefly ran a slate quarry. On the evening of April 18, Warren, as was his custom, was taking his two eldest sons on a postprandial stroll. They climbed a hill near the quarry and saw to the west that the entire sky was aglow. That morning, San Francisco had been devastated by an earthquake. The glow they were witnessing was from the fire that would burn the next three days and nights, ravaging block after city block. By the time it was extinguished, four square miles of the city would be destroyed and nearly seven hundred people would lie dead.
The Great San Francisco Earthquake marked a turning point in many lives, including Bechtel’s. Returning to Oakland later that year, he quit his job with Stone, and after quickly amassing a small stake building yet another railroad and digging an irrigation canal in the Sacramento Valley, purchased a steam shovel-one of the big Model 20 Marions, originally developed to dig the Panama Canal. Ignoring the
