The Man Who Always Hurried

More in awe than anger, a competitor once declared that Henry John Kaiser was successful because he was ignorant--"he never knew what he couldn't do." Kaiser put it another way: "If I don't dream I'll make it, I won't even get close." Whatever the reason for his success, Henry Kaiser, who died last week at 85 while asleep at his home in Hawaii, put together a remarkable complex of companies that turn out 300 kinds of products in 180 plants in 41 countries and have assets of nearly $3 billion.

Kaiser's achievements were famous. Until World War II he had mainly been a road, bridge and dam builder. But he decided to make ships because the U.S. needed vessels in a hurry. "I'm a builder," Kaiser explained, "and if you call yourself a builder, you ought to be able to build anything." Using prefabricated parts and assembly-line techniques in an industry that had never known either, Kaiser's seven shipyards built 1,490 cargo ships and 50 baby aircraft carriers before the war was over. This amounted to one-third of all U.S. ships that were launched during the war. Kaiser's principal rule was speed ("There's no money in a slow job"), and one freighter was actually finished four days and 15 hours after the keel was laid.

Grand Scale. When Kaiser needed more cement for his prewar construction projects, he founded a cement company and one to supply sand and gravel. As an industrialist he followed this idea on a grander scale. Because steel shipments were slow, he organized Kaiser Steel at Fontana, Calif., with a $123 million Reconstruction Finance Corp. loan that brought considerable criticism from Congress and Wall Street alike. He dabbled in airplanes, and with Howard Hughes conceived the idea of a ten-engine cargo plane that never got off the drafting board. Later he founded Kaiser Aluminum.

Expanding his employee health service, he set up the Kaiser Foundation that today provides medical services in 18 hospitals and 40 clinics for 1,500,000 West Coast members. One of his most notable projects--and notable failures --was making automobiles. He and Joseph W. Frazer bought a surplus bomber plant in 1945 with a Government loan of $44 million, began turning out Kaisers, Frazers and, later, Henry Js. They sold well until postwar supplies of new cars caught up with demand: then, competition from Detroit's Big Three put Kaiser-Frazer out of the auto business. Kaiser repaid his loan, as always, but lost $52 million in seven years. He did better building Jeeps, having bought out Willys-Overland. Kaiser Industries still produces Jeeps in the U.S. and 32 other countries.

Kaiser was quietly proud that he was successful in spite of being a high-school dropout. He left school in upstate New York at 13 to help support the family. Henry worked his way West, signed on with a paving contractor, established his own company at 32, and lined up his first contract--for two miles of street in Vancouver. Because speed was worth money, he always made it a point to finish jobs ahead of time; on a California paving contract he laid a mile a week instead of the usual two miles a month, was constantly visited by state officials who suspected him of not following specifications.

Grand Coulee. In Cuba, on the contract that Kaiser always maintained had established his future, his company laid 200 miles of road and built 500 bridges in 41 years instead of the scheduled seven. Later, in what was then a novel concept, Kaiser teamed with five other contracting companies to build Hoover Dam in four years instead of six. The syndicate moved on to work on Bonneville, Shasta and Grand Coulee dams and the piers for the San Francisco Bay Bridge. By the time World War II came and Kaiser went into shipbuilding, he could look back on nearly $400 million worth of projects including pipelines and Mississippi River levees, dams and bridges.

In 1954, with few new worlds to conquer, Henry Kaiser turned over his companies to Son Edgar (another son, Henry Jr., died in 1961) and moved to Hawaii. Even in retirement he was more active than other men in their prime. He conceived Hawaii Kai, a $350 million model community on 6,000 acres that will eventually house 50,000 people. Before long, the then septuagenarian had cleared land and built the 1,100-room Hawaiian Village Hotel (which he sold to Conrad Hilton for $21.5 million), started a cement company, bought a radio and TV station, and established a Jeep-rental agency that provided pink Jeeps (Kaiser's favorite color).

A tireless traveler and telephoner who at his peak managed 75,000 air miles a year and $300,000 worth of telephone bills, he also kept in almost daily contact with Edgar in California, made trips to the mainland to keep an eye on his holdings. He returned ill from his last trip in June, was taken off the airplane in an ambulance, died of what was described as circulatory ailments. He fell short by 15 years of a final ambition to live to 100.

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