During the war the Navy had a tough job that it wanted done fast. It needed 20 underground bombproof oil storage tanks built on the Hawaiian Islands, each one as large as a 30-story building. Idaho’s Builder Harry Winford Morrison got the contract and finished the job with such dispatch that a top-ranking Navy officer said: “He’s one of the greatest builders the world has ever seen.”
Even today, white-thatched, hustling Harry Morrison, a modest man who gets his pleasure out of work, would certainly think that was too high-flown a description, though his Morrison-Knudsen Co. has built about $2 billion in dams, railroads and highways, and is the biggest competitive bidder in its field.
Up to last week his company wasn’t as great as he thought it should be. After he had finished building such basic projects as hydroelectric plants, he had had no choice but to move out while industrial engineering companies came in to put up the smaller network of plants. Harry Morrison thought that he should have a company all ready to move in for the industrial work. Last week, he put through a deal that gave him the company he wanted.
For “several million dollars,” he bought control (more than 80% of the stock) of Cleveland’s H. K. Ferguson Co., famed industrial engineers who helped build Oak Ridge and have put up such eye-openers as Corn Products Refining Co.’s open-air, wall-less plant at Corpus Christi (TIME, Nov. 7). Now, when Morrison-Knudsen moves out after a job, Harry Morrison figures that Ferguson can move in.
Dams & Dollars. Harry Morrison got his start at 17 as a water boy for a Chicago builder. The job took him to Idaho, where he joined the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and learned surveying. By working nights he earned an engineering degree from the International Correspondence Schools. With the late Morris Knudsen, a few draft horses and a pocketful of silver dollars, Morrison-Knudsen soon began taking on small road and excavation jobs. In ten years his firm was big enough to underbid a larger company which had had a virtual monopoly on all the Union Pacific’s construction work. Morrison-Knudsen now does most of the U.P.’s big jobs.
When the Government asked for bids on Hoover Dam, Morrison realized that the job was too much for any single contractor. He rounded up five others and in 1931 helped form Six Companies, Inc., the outfit that landed the $49 million job (an organizing task for which Henry Kaiser has often been given most of the credit). After that, with the other five and on his own hook, Morrison spread out fast on such jobs as Bonneville Dam, part of Grand Coulee Dam and of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Idaho’s Anderson Ranch Dam, the tallest (456 ft.) earthen dam in the world, and a ski lift at Sun Valley.
Bombs & Bases. When war came, Morrison caught one of the last planes out of Wake Island (hundreds of his men working on the naval air base were captured by the Japanese). Later he built air bases and other installations around the world. Since war’s end, he has embarked on his own private Point Four program, bringing U.S. know-how, dams and hydroelectric power to the jungles of Ceylon (a $12 million contract) and the dusty reaches of Afghanistan ($38 million).
A crack organizer, Morrison gets his jobs done fast by knowing just which companies to invite in with him on a contract, keeps them working smoothly together. Few earth-moving tasks are too specialized for him. Sometimes when Morrison earth-moving equipment is idle between road contracts, it is put to work at strip mining for a coal company. When transportation difficulties were slowing down the construction of air bases in Alaska, he bought a fleet of 17 planes and sent the materials in by his private airlift.
Morrison-Knudsen started 1950 with a backlog of $87 million in contracts, some of them shared with other companies. Among its current jobs: the building of a railroad to Brazil’s Itabira iron mine (TIME, April 5, 1948), hydroelectric plants for the Colorado-Big Thompson irrigation project that will bring water east under the Continental Divide, and Montana’s Hungry Horse Dam. Harry Morrison figures that his $5.6 million net in 1949 will be considerably improved this year by the addition of the Ferguson Co. One of the things that Harry Morrison likes best about his new acquisition is the saying of Ferguson employees: “Rome wasn’t built in a day because Ferguson didn’t have the contract.”
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