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"No Money, Just Guts." On a Boise River project in 1908, Morrison heard that one of the contractors would make $100,000. "If that fellow can make $100,000," said Morrison, "I can make $1,000,000." With that, he marched up to a small contractor named Morris Knudsen, who owned a few horses and was building a road to the dam. Introducing himself, Morrison said: "I'd like to go into business with you."
Somewhat taken aback, Knudsen asked: "What do you have?"
"Plenty of guts."
"I mean how much money?"
"No money, just guts."
In March 1912, Morrison-Knudsen was formed as a partnership: Morrison, 23, had youth, ability, irrepressible ambition; Knudsen, 50, had maturity and know-how about horses, then the stand-by of all heavy construction.
MK's first capital consisted of $600 in cash, a dozen wheelbarrows, a few horses, some picks and shovels. The company's first job—a $14,000 subcontract to build a pumping station on the Snake River—brought only a tiny profit. The prime contractor and the promoter got into a court fight, and M-K was caught in the middle. Morrison ruefully recalls: "You can't make money out of lawsuits."
Crawling & Walking. For the next few years, M-K crawled, and after that, says Morrison, "it walked." In 1914, M-K made $14,000 on a $120,000 contract for Three-Mile Falls Dam on Oregon's Umatilla River. "Up to then," says Morrison, "I really had no idea that you could make money on a dam. But when we came out with more than 10%—what a lift!" The other great event of that year was his marriage to Anna Daly, who lived next door to Morrison's sister in Boise.
Since then, Harry and Ann Morrison have been a team, traveling the world together. In all that time, she has never missed a trip, has whirled over the Canadian mountains in helicopters, jounced over Afghan trails on a Bactrian camel. Ann Morrison was one of the last women to leave Wake Island before the Japanese attack (MK had been building an airfield). She has ordered supplies for camps, kept accounts, filled in at the cookhouse when the cook was drunk.
At the work sites, Mrs. Morrison talks to the wives of MK's men, asks after their babies, gives them news of the latest fashions and whatever else she thinks they want to hear about life back home. Each night, she works at her diary, which is later printed in the EM-Kayan, the company magazine; it sounds like a letter to a family of 5,000 children spread around the world. A typical entry: "Wellington, New Zealand. Sept. 13: arose 5:30, breakfast 6 a.m. Departed for the airport 6:30 a.m.. where we took a chartered four-motored plane ... to the Wai-taki Project . . . We were met by cars and driven to the Waitaki hydroelectric project, [where] the ladies were served coffee and cakes. Very sumptuous, but I'm afraid will not whet our appetites for the big luncheon at the mess hall."
Today, Ann Morrison would not trade her life for any other. But at first, she wondered "why any girl would cast her lot with the big, romantic outdoor type." Her first home was a dirt-floor tent in the Utah wilderness. The mess hall was crawling with ants, and to top it off, M-K lost $17,000 on the job.