Atomic Builder

The news hit Paducah (pop. 32,430) like a double shot of bourbon. Said one excited Kentucky housewife: "It'll make the whole town go haywire." The news: the Atomic Energy Commission was going to build a $500 million plant to make uranium 235 on a 5,000-acre site 16 miles west of the city, and Paducah would soon be swarming with well-heeled construction workers, perhaps as many as 10,000 of them.

To do the enormous building job and install the complex production equipment, AEC picked F. H. McGraw & Co. of Hartford, Conn., gave it a contract for $350 million, biggest single Government contract ever handed a private construction firm. AEC thought that McGraw was just the outfit to handle the project. In 21 years of building all over the world, McGraw has put up nearly $500 million worth of steel mills, naval bases, ammunition plants, etc.

Piano in Cellophane. Boss of McGraw is tough, scrappy Clifford Strike, 48, a hard-handed man with a fullback's face and a fullback's (6 ft., 210 Ibs.) frame. He worked his way through the University of Illinois' mechanical engineering course, and put in six years on construction jobs before he joined McGraw in 1930 as assistant vice president.

The company, founded only a year be fore by veteran Builder Frank McGraw --who had $17 million in contracts the day he opened his office -- soon ran out of work in the depression. By 1932, says Strike, "the firm was whittled down to a half-dozen of us." But Frank McGraw had confidence in young Cliff Strike, let him run most of the construction jobs himself when business picked up again. Strike, in turn, gave his top supervisors a free hand and everything they asked for in the way of men and equipment. ("Even if you want a baby grand piano wrapped in Cellophane, you'll get it, but you'd damn well better need it.")

Tanks in Water. Cliff Strike also has a sharp engineer's eye for short cuts. When a flood swept away three oil tanks in Hartford, competing contractors estimated it would take six months and $65,000 to put them back in place again. McGraw & Co. took on the job for $13,000, did it in seven days by aping nature. Strike built a dike around the tanks, refloated them and easily put them back into position.

By 1941 McGraw, 70 years old, was taking a less active part in the company, and Strike was president. For his wartime job of building close to $175 million in war plants and bases, Engineer Strike became so well known that the War Depart ment sent him to Europe to supervise the rebuilding of German industry and the housing of some 4,000,000 homeless Germans. He did a bang-up job, and the Government sent him to Japan on a similar task. Later he became president of Overseas Consultants Inc., an eleven-firm, nonprofit combine which mapped out a $650 million development program for Iran (TIME, Oct. 24, 1949).

Last year, when a company plane in which he was traveling crashed and burned, doctors gave Cliff Strike no more than an hour to live (his wife was killed in the crash). But in two months he was back at his desk again, putting in a full day's work and hustling around the country by plane from job to job.

For the Paducah project, McGraw & Co. will use about half of its staff of 250 superintendents, construction engineers and foremen, hopes to finish the job within the scheduled 2 1/2 years. Last week, on a honeymoon in Jamaica with his second wife, Strike said: "It's the kind of job we've had a great deal of experience in."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.