Arkansas: Opportunity Regained

• Share

(6 of 9)

His first Santa Gertrudis bull—purchased from the King Ranch in Texas for $31,500—gave him not only a magnificent sire for his herd, but also half the spread's name. The Win in Winrock is for Winthrop, but the Rock is for Rock the bull, not Rockefeller. Then he put in six artificial lakes, rebuilt the original house as a stone-and-glass palazzo, pumped water 850 ft. up the side of Petit Jean for an irrigation system, built roads and an airfield. He owns four planes, including a ten-passenger jet, employs five pilots, and has flown more than 3,000,000 miles with his private air force. He has no hobbies apart from occasional tree-pruning excursions. His vocation and avocation have become the state and the State of Arkansas.

Quintuplets Wanted. His activities are frenetic. As Winrock Farms became an important stock supplier, Winrock Enterprises and its subsidiaries branched out into land development, home construction and manufacturing. Philanthropy, of course, was ingrained and the largesse began to flow through the reverse end of moneymaking Winrock, the Rockwin Fund. He endowed the school system in his home county, helped establish the Arkansas Arts Center, contributed to colleges and the mental-health program, subsidized incentives to keep college graduates from leaving the state. To date he has given away more than $8,000,000 in Arkansas, where, he muses, "there is no end to worthy causes."

Meanwhile, Rockefeller was conducting a long-distance courtship of Jeannette Edris, a hotel and theater heiress originally from Seattle, whom he had met in New York in 1951 after his separation from Bobo and Jeannette's from her third husband. The only thing Jeannette seemed to have in common with Bobo was blonde hair. She is tall, matronly and dignified behind thick glasses. It was a quiet romance, and they were married in a sedate ceremony in 1956 at Hayden Lake, Idaho.

The breadth and pace of his activities quickly made him one of Arkansas' first citizens, the "Big Rock of Little Rock," as a headline writer dubbed him. The year after Rockefeller arrived, Democratic Governor Francis Cherry said: "The people wish Winthrop Rockefeller had been quintuplets and that they had all come here."

Go-Gitters. When Orval Faubus took office as Governor in 1955, one of his first important acts was to establish the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission to lure manufacturing to the state. Win Rockefeller was the obvious choice to head it. Rockefeller was so determined to make the agency work that he personally padded the salaries of key staff members to induce them to stay with the commission. One of the commission's first big catches was a $57 million International Paper plant, completed in 1958. During Rockefeller's nine years as chairman, 600 new plants were built, providing 90,000 jobs and an annual payroll of $270 million. The number of workers employed in industry increased 47.5% compared with a national gain of less than 5%, and the wages generated by manufacturing went up 88%—compared with a national rise of 36%. Since 1959, population has grown by 1.8% a year,' slightly more than the national rate.