A Rosie "Remarkable Nebraskans" Profile for America250

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How often have you heard somebody described as a mover
and shaker? Thank goodness for him. This country was literally
built by movers and shakers, from the men who gathered
to write our Declaration of Independence to the framers of
our sacred Constitution. As we celebrate our nation's two hundred
and fiftieth birthday, we should take a minute to marvel

(00:21):
at their smarts and guts and vision, but most of all,
faith in themselves, the future, and the value of hard work.
They would shake loose a vast, untamed frontier that stretches
thousands of miles and move the earth, some of it
with their bare hands, to birth the modern day technological, cultural, industrial,

(00:43):
financial behemoth that the world envies as the United States.
One of the twentieth centuries truemovers and shakers did so
started his work right here in Omaha. His father of
the same name arrived from Iowa at age sixteen. He'd
learned to make bricks from his father, who learned from
his They were of Dutch derivation, immigrating from the Hague

(01:06):
to the US after our Civil War opened their father
and son masonry plant on nineteenth and Pier Streets. The
family name remains on the Marquee to this day. Nicknamed
Pete our Icon, was the third of three sons, A
good student, top of his class at Central High School,
but restless after just one year at Dartmouth College in

(01:28):
the Ivy League. His head full of grand dreams for
his small family business, so he eagerly joined his father
and two brothers in the office or at a work
site every day. But in his early twenties he was
stricken with phlebitis. Doctors worried of complications of blood clots,
so they ordered him home, bed ridden, or confined to

(01:50):
a hospital bed. That was torture for Pete, who declared,
if I'm going to die, I'll do it on the job.
He convinced his brothers to expand, and not just lay bricks,
but build things. Their first big job was the livestock
Exchange building in South Omaha, still stands today, and then
the train station in Lincoln and the Capitol Building tower,

(02:13):
at which Nebraska's still cast loving eyes nearly one hundred
years later. All of Pete's work lasts even today. Most
are sturdier than buildings one third their age. He did
museums and skyscrapers, expanded into tunnels and bridges, military bases, highways,
irrigation canals. His company dredges, rivers and lakes, digs coal mines, builds,

(02:38):
air bases, pipelines, military hangars, even Major League Baseball stadiums
from Omaha to the world over, but never a project
too small. In one year in the nineteen fifties, Pete's
company paved three county roads in Nebraska for fifteen hundred
dollars each, while simultaneously building a billion dollar nuke plant

(03:01):
in southern Ohio. Like any fear less American, he whipped
the depression expanded while others pulled in. He shrewdly figured
public works would explode under Franklin Roosevelt's new deal, and
when they did, his was the only company with employees
and equipment on hand. By nineteen thirty eight, his Omaha

(03:21):
company had six million dollars in contracts worth twenty times
that today, building highways and subways in major American cities.
By the end of World War II, Pete's was the
first billion dollar construction firm in the world. Now Never
unmindful of his humble beginnings, when Pete bought the company

(03:42):
from his two brothers, he backed up the backslaps on
his employees by sponsoring one of the first ever employee
owned corporations in the country. To this day, they remain
its primary owners. He personally inspected most every project, tooling
around in a DEAC three airplane fitted with extra gas tanks,

(04:03):
ensuring that he could make it across Ocean's NonStop upon
his arrival. It was not uncommon for the unpretentious executive
to walk the site in a gray suit and work boots,
subtly conveying to his job foreman, I'm pleased, but not
satisfied and anthem his competitors have been chasing for over

(04:23):
one hundred years. Today, Pete the Brickmaker is firmly in
the fortune five hundred of America's largest companies, does revenues
of eighteen billion a year with thirty five thousand employee
owners worldwide. Pete may well have been the twentieth century's
biggest mover and shaker, and each day, as we pass

(04:46):
by a giant crane over a big new building with
his name and lights, we remember the great heights reached
by Peter Keewitt.