force but it does raise -- one of the ironies of the political system is the times you are most electable is not the time you are most ready to be president. jfk or even president obama, perhaps another four or six years in the senate might have done good but they realized clearly that additional time would not necessarily make a more politically viable so they had to decide this is my time and kennedy often said i wonder if i'm ready to be president but i look everyone else who is running and i am as qualified as they are so that is his assessment. >> go to bookstores here and tells them to get as many copies, order on amazon and my

publisher is paul gray macmillan. >> this is fascinating. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> maura mcenaney recounts the life of willard garvey who financed housing projects throughout the world and championed privatization and limited government. this is about half an hour. >> hi, everybody. thank you, harvey. thank you, dale. thanks to everybody for coming today. don't waive that finger at me. makes me a little crazy. it is enthusiastic and that is

good. i wanted to thank willard garvey. he was a reporter's dream. he was always available when i came to talk to him. he had a great memory and he told me he liked the book. i want to thank patty brown who helped put this together. this is the big show in wichita. you are going to rotary, the rotary. i am here at the big show and happy to be here. we have special guests today, mary and david thoreau come as party told you, publishing this book, i appreciate the hard work mary and david did to make this happen in the effort they made to be with us today so thank you guys and thanks to the plan in the front row. ever supportive, always supportive and told me i could do it even when it seemed i didn't want to do it anymore and

it came to be. i am happy to share some of it with you today and i bring greetings from massachusetts rotary, medford is five miles north of boston. population, 55,000. when i was writing this book i least 10 x 10 office space from a local architect who was a 1-term rotary president and now signing up for a second term. he told me before i came when i said i was coming to speak to the most prestigious and boldest and certainly friendliest rotaries in wichita, maybe bigger, he said he did short. these people are on their lunch break. i did hear a lot, glad you don't sign each other the way those groups did. willard garvey didn't know how to keep it short. i think some of you in toward that as well but he was a

faithful rotarian for 50 years and this was his club. he joined rotary in 1950 and you could usually find and without fail on monday. if he was out of town he made a point to visit with a rotary clubs like we have today and around different cities in the united states. the 14 love rotary and it came through all the speeches he had and i had two books, he gavegav >> at rotary luke want to get an idea why am dealing with. how many of you thought you knew willard garvey? okay. that is a good talk. i came to find out that he was many things to many people. the book tried to capture some of the many facets of his epic life as willard garvey was a man

with epic ideas, epic ambitions and he had epic achievements. when friends asked me to tell them the story. i am from back east and friends told me to tell the story about a man of his writing about i didn't know how to describe it quickly so i told them he was a sophisticated forest gump type of character who witnessed and experienced key moments in american and world history. because weathered has such a world the character and was so involved in so many facets of business and wi-fi needed to move him through history and i did that. in the book we learn about the pioneering spirit of willard garvey's and sisters, the aches of the great depression and the dirty 30s era known as the dust bowl, talks about the uncertainty of war on a family and its community and the communist scare of the 20th

century among other things. it is an american story. willard garvey came from pretty good stock. was the oldest son and a second of four children born to rant and olive garvey, the elevator mobil's kansas business hall of fame in topeka. his parents had no fascinating histories, i touch upon that in the book. willard started his life living eight years in colby, kan. which is 190 miles north of here, and his father lost wheat and farming business in 1928, mostly at the urging of olive, they brought the family to which a top. she thought children needed better schooling and more urban environment. so he came here in 1928, stayed here, raised his family and died here in 2002.

willard like to say that he loved wichita because it was the farthest he could get from both coasts. some of you might feel that way too. it was his love for this community and the impact he had here and elsewhere well beyond that. as head of carthy industries and subsidiaries, petroleum, got the international and nevada first to name a few, he won many hats but called himself a builder. if you look around town you can see he did just that. he began with those small world war ii brick homes you see around town for returning veterans, went on to bigger developments like commercial properties like parkway which was one of the first shopping plazas in wichita. in the late 1980s he had a vision or maybe was the only one

crazy enough to build downtown's tallest building with the hope that it would become a beacon for downtown revitalization. he lost the building and something like $5 million in the process two years after it was built but he never regretted building the project. in northern nevada where i first ran across him working in my first newspaper job out of college, that is another story. willard was a rancher who spoke out against the bureau of land management and he built the state's largest private dam and reservoir creating a valuable resource for his land in the process. a beautiful place. he dabbled in the newspaper and television business and a host of other investments and included something like a flower mill in trinidad. i wonder if you got an exchange from trinidad. when fiers of creeping communism became a global focus in the

1960s he launched a project called world holmes, an innovative housing project and the third world country like peru, india, mexico and bolivia and what he wanted to do, he felt that if you made people capitalist, you would help thwart communism, and he set out, the program's motto was to make every man capitalist, everyman homeowner. and outside on that wichita state university has an amazing collection of the documents, thousands of documents over there that are stored in the salt mine in hutchinson, kan.. and it is an amazing roxa kan..

through at the time has somewhat to the other way when they saw him coming. you know who you are. don't raise a finger against him. others saw him as a profiteering businessman who criticize government but welcomed federal money to programs that would support his project. what would he say in response to that? we operate under the program. we don't set it. newspaper readers may have cringed when they saw his toxic letters to the editor about socialist public schools.

he chose to support and wants two private schools in town. one with collegiate family and others and later the independent school with king beating away on that effort and his front yard, i was out there and they have a beautiful new football field getting closer to willard garvey's home, a beautiful thing, nice to see it going so well but he was never too busy for wichita. he headed up campaigns to stop bond issues for public projects like the new jail and he fought any and all new taxes, most news stories about his efforts began with the words millionaire willard garvey is opposing or proposing. to others willard garvey the demise of the spirit of kansas. he was a true entrepreneur who could spit out ideas rapid-fire. put a fish farm in grain elevators or tv program to teach

people to train dogs long before caesar came along, or even let's start our own country, our own country. bobwhite, an executive said to me willard had 10,000 more ideas in the time he had to put them into action and another story bob page told, had to introduce himself to a group of people, my job each month is to pick 30 or 31 ideas willard garvey has thrown out and get rid of 29 of them. this guy was like -- he wanted his best ideas to come back to wichita. you wanted to make a model city to be, quote, admired and imitated by communities elsewhere as the best place to work, raise a family and enjoy life. whether you love or hate him there was a war about willard garvey and i tried to provide a sampling of it in the book.

many people knew he was an avid swimmer. he was a great contributor to the ymca program and started the wichita swim club. he was a championship swimmer who swam competitively in london in world war ii and every day into the 80s. back to the forest gump analogy it would be slim, willard, swim. there were stories about bathing suits and briefcases, to pay as, squishy steps that crossed the floor at home, there was an exhaustive traveler with influential friends including knighted investment giant stirred john templeton and prominent families in town including the beaches and the layers of wichita, aviation fame. parents and friends of people in this very room. he liked to talk about people,

the exclusive bohemian club in california. he would run around talking with everybody, all new part of usa today and british actor david niven. love to brag about the people that he met. from the stories i have heard he was a downright hazardous driver. definitely a worse pilot. i thought about a title why stop at red? red lights and weathered didn't really agree. i am sure i will hear some stories after this. he was a fantastic dancer who once landed himself in a pool after one too many exuberant steps close to the edge. then he went home and changed into a new tuxedo prompting the other guests at the party to assume willard garvey was the only man in town with two talkses. i was not sure that was true.

one person tells you a story and you don't really know and then somebody said i got that party. she was at home when he came squishing in with that tux. there was a lot to remember about willard garvey at rotary. the fast-talking fellow in the back to give dozens of speeches and later stood under the guise of asking the speaker questions and going on and on and on and always about the same thing. he slinked down in his chair when weathered got up. here's a sample of a sound bite from one of his talks to the wichita club. should sound familiar to those who followed him.

>> never got so complex. [inaudible] >> something fresh to look, constructive. economically and -- [inaudible] >> sound familiar? here is the thing. that clip was from 1969. that was 44 years ago. willard like to say he was a voice in the wilderness from 50 or 60 years and it took the rest of the world that long to catch up. in order to write the story of a man i didn't know i had to start

in kansas. i found a romance that was different from what i found from the dusty desert where i first met him. when i came to know his daughter julie and all the members of the family. it was a romance with the flat land. i came to kansas again and again and again to talk to some of you and some have passed on, people have been here too, architects, prolific historian craig miner, willard garvey's sister in topeka and jean who left us ten months ago. i was so happy to get their voices down but with each trip i came to fall in love with that warm wind that blows incessantly on a hot summer night along with freight trains but not the back up before they built the

overpass and the site of a mile long grain elevator built by willard garvey. on one of those trips a friend of mine honored the collection of letters willard garvey had saved in the trunk somewhere and his males from world war ii and letters from his high school days. we found them in his home and it turned out to be an amazing resources, a glimpse not only of a young man pushed into adult world of war but a window into his parents''s pain and longing for a child at war in the city coping with an exodus of young men. i have a reading of that. by august of 1942 willard garvey was promoted to first lieutenant and adjutant general's school in maryland. you will go through ranks like eagle scout, i imagined his father wrote congratulating him on the promotions. you have the temperament,

ability and ambition to be a fine officer and soldier. they were not easy words even though he knew them to be true. it was easier to write about the business of 20 duplexes and 50 houses he was building that fall or the 20 fourflexes east of hydraulic street. with so much effort and material diverted to the war ray could feel the pinch on his own businesses. the labor problem is getting critical, he said. we have plenty of carpenter's battle between 3 or four laborers, materials and utilities, water lines are hard to get. the story on the farm was similar. it was more difficult all the time to get competent help since the war was taking young men too old or too young but departure overseas route near with the fading autumn light, ray swallowed hard before biting her, he mentioned once you what to make a will, he wrote.

i am sending a couple forms in which you wish to do it now. if you wish to send it home we will put it in the family safety deposit box. cheese signed off like he did so many letters, best wishes, sincerely, pop. there were so many examples of that, emotion coming out very slowly in the way that ray could do. the army was really the place where willard garvey got his first taste of bureaucracy and affected him for most of his life. glad you laughed at that. i had a lot of letters back to his mother and he wasn't content for long in the army, took a lot of tests and would be administrator and he would write you was unhappy and didn't like it so wrote to his parents about his discouragement with army bureaucracy and continued restlessness over his job. in the war he developed his animosity for once in government spending. i want to see someone in the

government will cut out 90% of the bureau and departments, those parasites are still generating. he was saying itelf generating. he was saying it in his 20s. after the war he got married and he called at his desk partner should ever. gene got fixed up with willard garvey on a blind date and saw him in his uniform. he was a major and he came up the stairs and her heart skipped a beat. they went out on a date and he was the most fantastic dancer she had ever seen and they started talking about marriage on the second date. in jean willard found the perfect partner. friends and family say she was the one who saw somebody of his rough edges, charm that his belligerence and patient to his fuhrer. she attended family business meetings and came to understand the inner workings of the successful willard garvey companies and got a host of

community projects and reflected her husband's energy enthusiasm every step of the way. it is gene, observers say, who made willard garvey more tolerable. you know who you are too. in willard garvey jean, the worldly, good-looking and athletic man who idolized his parents, valued his siblings and believed in american production and liberty and was reliable, ruffing got people in the office, floating out dozens of new ideas, barking out challenges over the cost of building materials and nodding to ever-changing but mandatory organizational procedures, weathered wood called jean every evening to ask if she needed him to to pick up anything away home. they would have dinner together every night. there's was a beautiful partnership in many ways. he made a lot of money but he wasn't always motivated by profit. his ability to overlook the bottom line was a small detail

that made his father and siblings a inquiry and we learned about that in the chapter about his single best idea. the love of the millions on the overseas housing project but took pride in having helped people have affordable housing in peru and places like that. in lima, peru is a plaque dedicated to willard garvey for providing housing to people in that community and jean when to see it and gave reception. sid platte who live fell in love with when i was interviewing him, i talked to him, willard garvey built because he had to build. in may have been an international businessman but wichita was where he chooses to make all the difference. one more. far away places like peru, the south pacific and the wilds of

nevada willard garvey did his most influential work along the kansas river. where you are is all the counts he once said. you cannot solve problems in the vicinity where you are not. if you solve problems where you are if each person will help their neighbors all the problems where he is all problems disappear because they are solved. he was famous for his anti-government stances. somebody asked how it will feel to look down on city hall and he said i can look down from the sidewalk. that is good. he also offered solutions, something we don't see today. here is a guy who was dissatisfied but came up with an alternative. he didn't want a bond issue to be billed to the new jail because he felt the proposal was too expensive and urged voters

to turn it down because he could build a different design from much less. do we hear of many business people taking time to do that in their communities today? here is another example of one of willard garvey's long standing ideas that many people may agree with today. >> at city hall. [inaudible] >> what he did, willard garvey would back up his arguments. let's do it again. he backed up his arguments with statistics and figures that

could turn your head around. i watched a video of his debate at the jail and it was sunday morning and he was throwing out numbers and this amount of money or that amount of money and i put it on real slow about ten times before i could hear what he was saying. from the speech we heard in 1969 to the long winded questions some of you endured, willard garvey never gave up his fight against the government. made fun of his efforts to do so. in 1999 jean and willard garvey went to the museum in washington d.c. and couldn't resist the chance to do a little sketch of their own. when offered a chance to play reporter in front of a white house backdrop.

♪ [inaudible] >> i have one question for you. why are you on the playground today? [inaudible] >> 60 years of continuing role in government.

[applause] >> they even cut him off. ready to go for another 20 minutes. that was a fun thing to find. he was hard-charging until year before he died. here we go. he launched the college president pool of law that first floated in 1960 so he launched the president college school of law, first had it in the 60s to give business people better understanding of the law. he started that palmer ran into financial trouble and after he passed the merged with friends's university which is the institute of law at friends university, while i was here earlier, so excited over there on this program. another's thing willard garvey put his mouth on. in a first of the building up to

his last days. so for some, it wasn't just what he was saying that is so important but that he took the time to say anything at all. seven term republican mayor bob knight shared ire with willard garvey as evidence in one of his last letters to the editor of volume of which could be win, why does wichita mayor bob knight as the person responsible for city hall confirmed again and again that city hall is a cheat, he wrote to the newspaper in march of 2001, bob told me we didn't agree on sentimental value this, he believes he and wichita lost something significant. willard garvey had enormous resources and could have taken an easier path noting that he chose to focus on the minutia of

local government. the former mayor can still recall his voice at countless meetings, and how he always always spoke about his mistrust of government and was a passionate defender of his freedom. that is something we need to take away. in wichita and name willard garvey is garnished on buildings and a host of educational facilities and programs. willard garvey took the motto self service to heart and whether you agree or disagree there is a lesson for all of us. thank you for the opportunity to speak and for your interest in this goal. [applause] >> does anybody have any questions?