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By 1935, this was a $3,000,000 business. With World War II, the Webb company moved into the big time, built most of the air stations and military installations in Arizona and Southern California. Among current projects, he is building with George A. Fuller Co. a $62 million Minuteman missile silo complex in Montana, and with Humble Oil Co. is working on an estimated $375-$500 million community, covering 15,000 acres southeast of Houston, which will house the employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's new center for manned spacecraft.
World War II also made another marked change in Webb's life. He was laid up with something the Army diagnosed as flu, and a doctor was routinely taking his personal history. As Webb tells it: "When I told him I drank from ten to 20 bourbons a day, he damn near dropped his teeth. He said I ought to cut down, but I told him I'd damn well quit. And I did. Not another drop of whisky has passed my lips since that day. All that time I spent drinking, I could now spend working."
Del Webb works even when he plays. The New York Yankees, which he bought with Dan Topping and Larry MacPhail for $2,800,000 in 1945 (he and Topping bought out MacPhail's interest for $2,000,000 in 1947), serve him well as a developer of new business via free passes, casual meetings in the ballpark, and just plain publicity. The golf course is another fertile source of new contracts and big deals; Webb belongs to no less than 14 golf clubs around the country, shoots in the high 70s.
No Smoking. Supervising his diversified $75 million empire, in which he stepped up recently from president to board chairman in a move to make more room at the top.* Webb logs between 50,000 and 125,000 miles of flying a year. Last week he flew out to Los Angeles, talked to Long Beach officials about building their 1966 World's Fair, then to Santa Monica, where his company is in charge of a $55 million redevelopment program. Then he was off to Manhattan for Old Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium. He has three fulltime hotel suites—in the Beverly Hilton (which he built), the Mountain Shadows Resort in Phoenix (which he also built), and Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria (which was built in 1930-31 when he wasn't looking). In each of them, he keeps complete wardrobes, as well as caches of clothes in half a dozen other hotels across the country. All told, he owns 150 suits, 90 pairs of shoes (plus 52 pairs of golf shoes), numberless outsize shirts (17¾ neck, 37 sleeve), snarls of 58-in. ties (normal length is 52 in.) and "a helluva lot of hats."