CONSTRUCTION: The Earth Mover

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What man in history has done most to change the face of the earth? Politicians might name Augustus Caesar or Adolf Hitler. Military men might name Napoleon Bonaparte, or perhaps General “Tooey” Spaatz, whose U.S. bomber fleets leveled Nazi cities in World War II. But among builders, there is no disagreement. The man who has done more than anyone else to change the face of the earth lives in a one-story frame house at an elevation of 2,695 ft. in Boise, Idaho (long. 116° 11 min. W., lat. 43° 34 min. N.). He is Harry Winford Morrison, 69, white-haired boss of Morrison-Knudsen Co., the world’s biggest heavy construction firm.

In his 50 years as a builder, Harry Morrison and his men have moved mountains, tamed rivers, built scores of dams, tunnels, power plants, railroads, highways, bridges and airfields around the world. Morrison was the driving force behind Hoover Dam; he was part of the combine that built the string of Navy airfields across the Pacific during World War II. Like many Americans, he thinks of nothing but work, and he has a simple adage to explain his passionate absorption. “A man’s worth,” he says, “is counted in the things he creates for the betterment of his fellow men.”

Last week, for the betterment of his fellow men and to keep an eye on his projects abroad, Builder Morrison took off on a five-week, world-girdling trip. His itinerary: Casablanca, to look over work on the North African air bases; Iraq, to bid on a dam project; Italy, to check on a tunnel through the Italian Alps. Many of Morrison’s other jobs are in primitive, undeveloped countries, where MK’s giant power shovels and 18-ton bulldozers are as much a source of wonder as the iron horse was to the Indians a century ago. In these countries, M-K has caused roses to grow in deserts, electric power and wealth to flow from forbidding mountain streams, new skills to enrich poverty-stricken natives. In all his endeavors, Harry Morrison does not forget that he is a hardheaded American businessman working to make a profit. But that is not his only objective.

“We’re not missionaries,” he says. “We’re represented abroad by some of the ruggedest, two-fisted construction men in the business. But from the dams and roads and canals that we build come new hopes. What we do is often taken to be representative of what all America does. We like to think we leave the impression around the world that all America is interested, earnestly and hopefully, in economic and social progress for all men.”

Bulldozers & Draglines. Through the skills of Harry Morrison and other U.S. builders, economic progress has been given a mighty push. U.S. earth movers have shown the world that man need not be a prisoner of his surroundings, starving in desert lands or drowned by torrential floods. He can change much of the unproductive land to suit his needs— Part of this change is due to the new machinery: the clanking bulldozers that knock down forests, the great draglines that claw house-sized holes at a single scoop, the cranes, jumbos, earth movers, power shovels, trenchers and dozens of other mechanical giants that lay pipelines, tunnel through mountains, and pour concrete for dams with the ease of a man putting down a sidewalk. But the biggest part of the change is the revolution in construction thinking; today, there is almost no project too big to tackle, no reasonable limit to reshaping the earth to make it more productive. Only 70 years ago, a project such as Brooklyn Bridge was considered a construction marvel. Today, Harry Morrison and the other builders consider far greater marvels just routine jobs.

Last week in New Zealand, an M-K crew broke through the last rock barrier 14 months ahead of schedule to finish a great, 5½-mile railroad tunnel in the rugged Rimutaka Mountains. By M-K standards, it was a small-scale operation, costing only about $7,000,000. But on the record, it was one of the world’s longest railroad tunnels and one of the greatest construction feats in New Zealand history.

About 8,000 miles away, in British Columbia, another M-K construction crew was finishing a far bigger job, a $173 million hydroelectric installation. It was MK’s share of the $500 million Nechako-Kitimat project of the Aluminum Co. of Canada, probably the biggest construction job ever attempted by private capital. To supply power for a new aluminum smelter, M-K had dammed a river to form a 120-mile-long reservoir, hollowed out a mountain to enclose a huge powerhouse five city blocks long, and drilled a ten-mile tunnel to carry the water to the turbines. At ultimate capacity, Alcan’s powerhouse would be able to produce 1,671,000 kw., 34% more than Hoover Dam, enough electricity to match the combined output of such U.S. giants as Shasta, Bonneville and Wilson Dams.

“We Can Learn, Too.” Overseas, Morrison-Knudsen is as much teacher as builder. When M-K first went into Afghanistan seven years ago to erect two dams to control floods and bring water to 400,000 desert acres, it brought in a large crew of Americans. There were even high-school graduates to work on surveying teams. M-K found, as it had in South America, that it could train natives for many of the jobs. Now it generally operates with only one American specialist to scores of natives on each job. M-K sometimes has as many as 400,000 local men on its payroll. It leaves a cadre of native engineers to take over completely when U.S. foremen go home.

No one insists that workers must learn to do everything the American way if they can work out a good method of their own. “The fact is,” says one M-K executive, “there’s a lot we can learn from them.” By patient explanation and endless demonstration, tribesmen are coaxed off camels and onto roaring cats, and ancient peoples are taught a thousand undreamed of modern skills.

Some jobs on which M-K and foreign workers were cooperating last week:

¶ In Turkey, 48 Americans and 1,200 Turkish laborers bulldozed the first earth-fill dam on a $14 million river-diversion project to control floods, irrigate 350,000 acres, and produce power.

¶In Australia, a handful of M-K supervisors hurried work on a $24 million irrigation project to widen the irrigation system channel north of Melbourne.

¶ In Colombia, a crew of villagers were using power shovels and scrapers to hack out an all-weather, 54-mile road to the sea through a mountainous area drenched by 300 in. of rainfall each year.

¶ In Mexico’s Sonora valley, a dozen M-K foremen and engineers with a force of 800 Mexicans were building a dam to tame the erratic Mayo River, thus save 60,000 acres of rich farmland from periodic drought. The project will cost Mexico $5,600,000 but the government figures that MK’s labors will result in new crops whose value each year will be more than the entire cost of the project.

All told, M-K last week was working on a grand total of 35 projects in twelve foreign countries, a construction effort of more than $498 million. It had 192 more jobs worth $412 million under way in the U.S. and its territories, including such projects as a $12 million air base at Portsmouth, N.H. and Boston’s $12 million water tunnel under the Charles River.

“Spread the Risk.” In MK’s one-story Boise headquarters, Harry Morrison likes to point his finger at a wall map studded with pins marking MK’s current jobs. “On that map,” he says, “is summarized part of our basic philosophy. It’s the philosophy of spread the risk. If you’re losing on one job, take your loss, finish it on schedule and make it up on others, making damn sure you have others.”

Harry Morrison always makes sure he has others. Besides his high devotion to his job, he has the ruggedness of a football tackle (an attack of Bell’s palsy has not slowed him down) and the restlessness of a gypsy (he flies 150,000 miles a year). He also has the knack of handling men. “Guys walk into his office swearing they’ll never go back to Brazil or Afghanistan,” says an old M-K hand. “They come out treading air and acting as if they wouldn’t trade places with God Almighty.”

Morrison-Knudsen earned $5,761,000 last year, but Morrison seems to care little for personal wealth. Though he and his wife Ann own 22% of MK’s stock (974,419 shares outstanding), he draws a salary of only $24,500 a year. The Morrisons, who have no children, have little social life. Once in a while, among friends, Morrison will take a sociable bourbon and ginger ale or plunk a guitar. When one friend remarked that he had “never heard Harry Morrison crack a joke,” another friend added: “And I’ve never heard anybody crack a joke about Harry Morrison.”

Morrison runs his company like a football coach with a four-platoon team. He has gathered together a staff of 5,000 men who know the business inside out, can operate efficiently 10,000 miles away from the Boise headquarters. He has bought entire companies to get a few top hands, pays them well (average $18,000 a year for a project supervisor), and tacks on bonuses for jobs well done.

Morrison’s one commandment is to get the job done on time, even at the expense of the 10% profit that he tries to make on big jobs. When his estimators make a mistake, Morrison never tries to squirm out from under. When the boss of a job wants help, he does not go to Boise; Morrison or one of his lieutenants hotfoots it out to the job. Otherwise, Morrison gives his project managers all the elbow room they need.

“We’ve Got a Job.” The mammoth Alcan project is a prime example of the Morrison method. When the preliminary survey work was done in February 1951, MK’s No. 2 man, Jack Bonny, called a big, hearty Swede named Ole Strandberg who was vacationing in Honolulu. “Come on back,” said Bonny. “We have a job for you—some dams and tunnels—the kind of stuff you like.” Some “dams and tunnels,” recalls Strandberg, turned out to be “a ten-mile tunnel, a 50-mile transmission line, the biggest underground powerhouse ever built.”

Project Manager Strandberg was responsible for ordering $25 million worth of heavy equipment on his own say-so. He built a network of 26 radio stations to link 25 work camps with shelters for 6,500 men, set up a mile-long aerial tramway to haul 20-ton loads to inaccessible work sites, established what was then the world’s biggest helicopter supply fleet outside the U.S. military. When he had manpower and equipment troubles, a phone call to Boise straightened them out. “My top tunnel man,” says Strandberg, “was shifted from a job in Afghanistan to my team. If you can’t make it after something like that, it’s your own fault.”

MK’s part of the Alcan project was originally conceived as a $100 million job, with MK’s fee pegged at $2,200,000—subject to a 50% cut if costs went beyond a certain limit. Costs have soared, and M-K may make less than $1,000,000 for its more than three, years’ work in subzero temperatures and blinding blizzards that often buried camps under many feet of snow. The men are well aware that heavy construction is one of the most dangerous of all industries. To date, 48 men have been killed on the Alcan project, 33 in tunnel and mountain accidents, 15 in plane crashes. But no time has been lost. Three of the eight big generators are now being set in place. By July, the first power will surge over transmission cables. Wrote Morrison to Strandberg: “The gang is indeed to be congratulated.”

Water Boy. Harry Morrison was born in central Illinois near Kenney (pop. 409). When he was four, and still wearing dresses, his mother died. After that, Morrison remembers his early life “as one of those things where the children get passed around among the various relatives.”

Harry Morrison’s father worked in a gristmill in Kenney. Harry was shy, thrifty, and determined to make good. When he was 14, he got a vacation job as water boy for the Chicago construction firm of Bates & Rogers. Five years later, after two years of high school and a business-school course, he went to work full-time for Bates & Rogers in Idaho, building a dam and powerhouse on the Snake River. Iron-grey already streaked his sandy hair, but he hustled so hard that other men called him “that damned kid.”

“No Money, Just Guts.” On a Boise River project in 1908, Morrison heard that one of the contractors would make $100,000. “If that fellow can make $100,000,” said Morrison, “I can make $1,000,000.” With that, he marched up to a small contractor named Morris Knudsen, who owned a few horses and was building a road to the dam. Introducing himself, Morrison said: “I’d like to go into business with you.”

Somewhat taken aback, Knudsen asked: “What do you have?”

“Plenty of guts.”

“I mean how much money?”

“No money, just guts.”

In March 1912, Morrison-Knudsen was formed as a partnership: Morrison, 23, had youth, ability, irrepressible ambition; Knudsen, 50, had maturity and know-how about horses, then the stand-by of all heavy construction.

MK’s first capital consisted of $600 in cash, a dozen wheelbarrows, a few horses, some picks and shovels. The company’s first job—a $14,000 subcontract to build a pumping station on the Snake River—brought only a tiny profit. The prime contractor and the promoter got into a court fight, and M-K was caught in the middle. Morrison ruefully recalls: “You can’t make money out of lawsuits.”

Crawling & Walking. For the next few years, M-K crawled, and after that, says Morrison, “it walked.” In 1914, M-K made $14,000 on a $120,000 contract for Three-Mile Falls Dam on Oregon’s Umatilla River. “Up to then,” says Morrison, “I really had no idea that you could make money on a dam. But when we came out with more than 10%—what a lift!” The other great event of that year was his marriage to Anna Daly, who lived next door to Morrison’s sister in Boise.

Since then, Harry and Ann Morrison have been a team, traveling the world together. In all that time, she has never missed a trip, has whirled over the Canadian mountains in helicopters, jounced over Afghan trails on a Bactrian camel. Ann Morrison was one of the last women to leave Wake Island before the Japanese attack (MK had been building an airfield). She has ordered supplies for camps, kept accounts, filled in at the cookhouse when the cook was drunk.

At the work sites, Mrs. Morrison talks to the wives of MK’s men, asks after their babies, gives them news of the latest fashions and whatever else she thinks they want to hear about life back home. Each night, she works at her diary, which is later printed in the EM-Kayan, the company magazine; it sounds like a letter to a family of 5,000 children spread around the world. A typical entry: “Wellington, New Zealand. Sept. 13: arose 5:30, breakfast 6 a.m. Departed for the airport 6:30 a.m.. where we took a chartered four-motored plane … to the Wai-taki Project . . . We were met by cars and driven to the Waitaki hydroelectric project, [where] the ladies were served coffee and cakes. Very sumptuous, but I’m afraid will not whet our appetites for the big luncheon at the mess hall.”

Today, Ann Morrison would not trade her life for any other. But at first, she wondered “why any girl would cast her lot with the big, romantic outdoor type.” Her first home was a dirt-floor tent in the Utah wilderness. The mess hall was crawling with ants, and to top it off, M-K lost $17,000 on the job.

What made it worse was that few banks were anxious to risk money on a young, untried company. (Today, Morrison borrows as much as $200 million a year from banks and insurance companies spread across the U.S.. is so highly regarded that the Bank of America once wanted to handle all MK’s business.) It took years of saving before M-K got its first big steam shovel.

Guernsey & Beyond. For young Harry Morrison, the machines opened up a new era. As the coughing, spitting machinery took over, the horses gradually disappeared. In 1939, Knudsen, tired and lost in the new technology, turned over M-K to Morrison. Four years later, he died.

With his shiny new equipment, Morrison joined the big Utah Construction Co. in 1925 on a joint bid for the $2,300,000 Guernsey Dam in Wyoming, followed it up with another for Deadwood Dam in the mountains of central Idaho. The experience gave M-K the know-how to tackle the biggest of them all in 1931—the Arizona-Nevada giant Hoover Dam that was to rise 726 ft. above the Colorado River, generate power at the rate of 4 billion kw. a year. On Deadwood, M-K used some of the first bulldozers, began testing diesel trucks, gas-powered revolving shovels, learned to haul equipment over mountains as high as 7,400 ft. on log roads. Even more important, MK’s idea for joint ventures was a solution to the dam builders’ growing financial problem: projects were so huge that few companies had the means or courage to tackle them since a single mistake might wipe them out. But in joint ventures, with many companies sharing costs and profits (or losses), construction men could aim at the moon.

For Hoover Dam, Harry Morrison put together the famed Six Companies, Inc.,—and contributed $500,000 as his share of the $5,000,000 capital. Looking back, he cannot help thinking that every dam since Hoover has been an anticlimax. “It’s the glamour dam,” he says wistfully. “I still can’t go down in the elevator and step out on the intake and look up without being inspired.” M-K introduced bulldozers to its partners at Hoover, wound up using 60 huge monsters. There, too, M-K showed off a new tunnel-driving technique using drill jumbos, great scaffolds on which men with 40 drills could hammer away at the same time, thus cutting costs drastically. Hoover was finished in five years, and MK’s share of the $10.4 million profit was about $1,000,000.

Across the Pacific. Through the ’30s, M-K worked on big dams: Bonneville (on the Washington-Oregon line), Imperial. Grand Coulee (Washington), a total construction effort of more than $300 million. M-K built the San Francisco side of the 4,620-ft. Bay Bridge, upped its railroad work to a steady $10 million a year. Despite the Depression, M-K showed a profit in every year except 1932 and 1937.

The company’s gross shot from just under $9,000,000 in 1939 to a whopping $87 million in 1943. With seven other firms. M-K helped build the Navy’s Pacific air-base program, spread runways and revetments in 28 different locations on a $1,160,000,000 contract, the biggest by any Government up to that time.

“Get Out & Compete.” Today, Harry Morrison runs an empire of 36 subsidiaries, eleven other companies, has more than 3,660 pieces of heavy equipment. MK’s 1953 gross totaled $287 million, its profits a record $5,761,000, an impressive figure in an industry where competitive bids often shave profits paper-thin. Besides heavy basic construction, M-K is now expanding into factories and laboratories. In 1950, M-K bought 98% of Cleveland’s H. K. Ferguson Co., one of the top U.S. constructors of industrial buildings, for $2,650,000, has put it to work on Pittsburgh’s $2,800,000 Mellon Square underground garage.

Under the M-K banner, Ferguson has shifted from a conservative fixed-fee (cost plus a set profit) operation to a more competitive unit-cost (one price for the job) contract. Says Morrison: “A business isn’t worth a damn unless you get out and compete.” In the first year under Morrison, Ferguson’s gross climbed from $27.8 million to $73 million (net: more than $1,000,000), and its backlog jumped from $20 million to $85 million.

But Harry Morrison’s real love is the heavy, earth-moving work of basic construction. The industry is booming and construction men hope happily that they will never quite catch up with mankind’s pressing needs.

Like Morrison, dozens of other U.S. builders are working around the globe. From the West Coast, Alhambra, Calif.’s C. F. Braun & Co. has gone to Australia to build a $25 million refinery for Standard-Vacuum Refining Co.; the Ralph M. Parsons Co. of Los Angeles has five projects abuilding in Japan, three in India, three more in Turkey and Iran, others in Sweden, England, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and Colombia. San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. has been in Venezuela building the Cerro Bolivar iron-ore development (TIME, June 1) for U.S. Steel, is now on the other side of the world building a 100,000-bbl.-a-day oil refinery in Aden for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.

Such big Eastern firms as Ebasco, Raymond Concrete Pile, Merritt-Chapman & Scott, Stone & Webster are building air bases in France and Spain, powerhouses in Greece, a dam in Japan, electric plants in Bombay, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, oil refineries in England, Italy, and Australia, paper mills for Israel, roads through the Belgian Congo, and a new harbor at Auckland, N.Z.

Ambassadors at Work. Morrison-Knudsen leads them all. Last week an M-K crew was in the Brazilian jungle expanding the Cubatao hydroelectric project to give the city of São Paulo 400,000 more kilowatts of electric power. On the $20 million job, M-K men were boring a 3,500-ft. river-diversion tunnel, blasting a huge underground powerhouse from the bowels of a mountain. The air was blue with humidity; the sides of the cavern dripped water; every so often, a chunk of rock broke loose, came crashing down like a thunderbolt in a closet. The men knew that they might catch amoebic dysentery, malaria, or many another crippling tropical disease, that it would rain every day, that they would not see their families for months.

But the sense of accomplishment seemed to be bigger than all the troubles. M-K finds that it can get good men to work overseas for little more than they make at home, partly because they usually pay no income taxes. But they also seem to get satisfaction out of helping backward peoples help themselves.

In the work of Harry Morrison and other U.S. construction men—America’s ambassadors with bulldozers—the world sees the U.S. at its best. They leave behind far more than they take home in dollars, and what they build is long remembered as an example of U.S. brains, energy and good will.

* Actually eight: MK, Henry J. Kaiser Co. (Oakland, Calif.), W. A. Bechtel (San Francisco), Utah Construction Co., MacDonald & Kahn Inc. (San Francisco), J. F. Shea Co.. Inc. (Los Angeles), Pacific Bridge Co. (Portland, Ore.) and General Construction Co. (Seattle).