Word: steve
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thinking big was Steve Bechtel's forte. He learned to appreciate scale as the primary manager in the building of Hoover Dam in the early '30s, then the largest public works project in U.S. history. The wartime shipyards Bechtel organized would build 560 vessels--up to 20 ships a month--between 1941 and 1945, an astounding output even in an era of production miracles...
Bechtel grew up on rugged construction sites where his father Warren, who started the company, punched rail lines and highways through the California wilderness. To the end of his long life--he died in 1989, six months short of his 89th birthday--Steve Bechtel enjoyed prowling around job sites, but he neither looked nor sounded like a construction boss. In his prime, in the 1950s, he was trim, well tailored and relatively soft voiced, with the ingratiating manner of a salesman...
...course of five years workers excavated 3.7 million cu. yds. of rock and poured 4.4 million cu. yds. of concrete; the main arch of the dam towers 70 stories high. Steve was first in charge of transportation, engineering and administration. When his father died suddenly in 1933, he became chief executive of the whole project, which transformed the economy of much of the West, as well as transforming the company...
...prove it. While the dam was still going up, he began building the 8.2-mile San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. During World War II, Bechtel, in addition to its shipyards, built bases and ran plants that modified bombers and rebuilt jeeps. At the same time Steve built a top-secret 1,600-mile pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska, under primitive conditions. The pace left him so fatigued that in 1946 he briefly retired. But he would not be on the shelf long...
None of that has prevented the company, now headed by Riley Bechtel, a grandson of Steve's, from flourishing mightily. When Steve Sr. took over, Bechtel had revenues of less than $20 million; a quarter-century later, when he officially retired, sales were $463 million. The company, still family controlled, had 1997 revenues of $11.3 billion; its projects range from a transit system in Athens to a semiconductor plant in China. These and others are fruits of Steve Bechtel's forward thinking--decades before the term global economy became a cliche...