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After the job was done, he was sent to a fort in Montana, later was ordered to the Point as an instructor. But life there was too dull. Work was about to start on the Panama Canal, and Wood, scenting excitement and opportunity, got himself shifted to the job. A week after he arrived, yellow fever downed most of the Canal Commission's top men. Lieut. Wood, then 26, who had "no idea of letting myself come down with yellow fever," was put in charge of several hundred men to build barracks for 10,000 laborers.
First Ideas. When General George Washington Goethals was put in charge of the canal project in 1907, he made Wood a captain and boss of all recruiting, housing, and distribution of labor. Later Goethals gave him the job of requisition & purchase of supplies. He had to make good. "The day we run out of cement," growled General Goethals, "you're fired." Wood drove his men as hard as himself, and got a reputation for never speaking to a man except to fire him. He worked such long hours that "everything I've done since has seemed easy." He also learned a lot. "The commissaries," says he, "were actually a chain of small department stores. My first ideas of the nature and problems of mass purchasing came from that experience."
Wood took time off to hustle to Manhattan and marry Mary Butler Hardwick, a Southern belle who had shocked her family by moving north to become a nurse. "I took her straight from the rectory of St. Thomas," says Wood, "to a jungle-edge birdcage house at Culebra."
When the canal was finished, Major Wood—and other canal officers—were rewarded by Congress; they were permitted to retire at three-quarter pay. Wood got a job with Du Pont at $6,000 a year, and within five months was making $9,000. But he quit then anyway, explaining to Pierre du Pont that "there are so many of you able people around at the top, it will be too long before there's room for me."
"Profound Contempt." When the U.S. entered World War I, Wood signed up, sailed with the Rainbow Division under Douglas MacArthur, who was chief of staff and is still a close friend. Before long, Wood was ordered from France to Washington as acting quartermaster general, and promoted to brigadier general. In a short time, he reorganized the chaotic Army procurement. At war's end, Julius Thorne, a Wood aide who in civilian life was president of Montgomery Ward, took the general back there with him.
As general merchandise manager for Ward, Wood spent the first few months merely asking questions. "It was an uncomfortably long time," he says, "before I ran into a young man who could answer straightaway, just like that, and with figures to support his answers." The young man was 24-year-old Theodore Houser, a merchandise controller; Wood made him his assistant. As a team, Wood and Houser concentrated on the tire division. In five years, sales increased tenfold, to twice as many tires as Sears, their archcompetitor.