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Frank Crowe hates carelessness. As a result Shasta has killed only twelve men. Once he bellowed at a worker: "Watch what the hell you're doing or you'll fall and break your neck." Retorted the worker: "Well, it's my neck." "Yes, it's your neck now," Crowe shot back, "but as soon as you break it, it's mine."
Despite the fact that he has built more dams than any other man in history, Frank Crowe is scarcely known outside his field. But in place of publicity, Crowe has made big money, which is rare for an engineer. The Boulder job paid him a salary of $18,000 a year plus 2½% of the profits (Crowe's take: $300,000).
What makes Frank Crowe a master builder is his audacity of invention. He pioneered in using horizontal cables strung across river canyons to carry concrete from mixer to chutes into the dam. Without them, Boulder would have been almost impossible to build.
The Sacramento's banks were too low to use Crowe's cross-canyon cable device. So he built the world's tallest headtower (465 ft.), and poured every 16-ton bucket of concrete from cables in a semicircle above.
The tower cost $600,000, but, said Crowe, "it was a half-million dollars cheaper than any scheme anybody else thought of." Shasta also used the world's longest conveyor belt (ten and a half miles) to carry gravel and sand to the damsite. The two bold innovations have drawn international engineering attention.
Frank Crowe is rabidly against the Administration which gave him so many dams to build, is scornful of the "socialistic" cheap power they will produce. His satisfaction comes in believing that his works will stand as monuments to human progress. "Look at that Shasta Dam. That will stand there forever, holding back the river. And the powerhouse will keep right on turning out juice until somebody discovers how to make power out of sunlight."
When Shasta is dedicated, Frank Crowe's speech will probably be the same two sentences he spoke at Boulder and Parker: "If you gentlemen want to see the fellow who really built this dam, go over to the mess hall. He wears a tin hat, his average age is thirty-one and he can do things."