TIME LIFE PICTURES Stephen D. Bechtel and his son, left, at the International Industrial Development Conference

Monday, Dec. 7, 1998
At a California Club lunch in Los Angeles late in 1949, construction executive Stephen Bechtel found himself seated next to Robert Minckler, president of a West Coast subsidiary of Socony Mobil Oil. Minckler said he would like to build a refinery "up North" to process crude from wells in Alberta — if the oil could be piped across the Canadian Rockies.

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In the conventional wisdom of the time, Minckler might as well have speculated about running a pipeline to the moon. But Steve Bechtel was, and remained throughout his nearly 70-year career, a visionary whose imagination was fired by grandiose projects — the more seemingly impossible the better. Three years after the lunch, a consortium organized by the family construction company, Bechtel Corp., began work. The construction gangs had to string pipe up slide-prone cliffs, some 3,600 ft. high, down into rock-walled canyons and across cascading rivers — 72 rivers and streams in all. By 1955, though, 80,000 bbl. of crude a day were flowing to Vancouver on the Canadian Pacific Coast, touching off a boom in the formerly energy-short Northwest.

It was perhaps Bechtel's most characteristic coup. His motto, endlessly repeated, was, "We'll build anything for anybody, no matter what the location, type or size." He and his company did build not just pipelines and refineries but also airports, ships, power plants, dams, factories, bridges, hotels, transit systems and even an entire city (Jubail, Saudi Arabia) in 140 countries on six continents. It has been said, hyperbolically perhaps, that Bechtel engineers changed the physical contours of the planet more than any other humans.

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. He valued the title "builder" more than any other, 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.

He was always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a pre-set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project completed 35 years later, five years after his death.

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