Introduction
Diana Bennett tells a character-revealing story about her father, Bill, from when he was a boy growing up in Glendale, Arizona.
As a slowly emerging but still rural suburb of Phoenix, Glendale in the 1930s had a full-time population of just five thousand and didn’t offer a lot in the way of youthful recreation. But there was a series of irrigation canals running through the farmlands, and it didn’t take long for country kids with fertile imaginations to devise a method of hooking a ski rope to the back of a pickup truck and driving like moonshiners along the canal banks with a water-skier in tow.
Most of the kids in the neighborhood were older than Bill, and they quickly got proficient at the daredevil maneuvers, but they weren’t about to share their strategies with the younger ones. No one had told Bill, just thirteen at the time, that along the canal route were occasional low bridges, and that a skier had to let go of the tow-rope handle well in advance of a bridge to avoid being decapitated.
When the first low bridge appeared, young Bill let go too late, spun out to duck under it, and was carried miles down the rapid waters of the canal before he made his way to the bank. The older kids laughed and poked fun as they urged him to ride back with them in the pickup, but he was so angry he walked the entire eighteen miles home.
Bill Bennett had to learn that lesson on his own, the hard way, which would establish a consistent pattern in his later life as a businessman. Young Bennett didn’t have a role model in his home or neighborhood, nor did he have a particularly sophisticated education in the Glendale school system. He was one of those rare youths who was too smart for public school studies. It bored him. But he did have a strong work ethic, one that would set a high bar for the thousands of men and women who would come to work under his direction.
In his many stop-offs on the way to the Forbes magazine list of the 400 Wealthiest Americans, Bennett would make his share of mistakes, but he would seldom if ever repeat those mistakes. As importantly, he studied strategies in each business endeavor he tackled that would help him overcome his deficiencies and fill in his gaps. With an innate intelligence that showed up in every challenge he undertook, and a steely determination to prove he was better than his middle-class upbringing, Bennett would become one of the dozen most influential men in the evolution of Las Vegas from a mid-sized quirky town to a place Time magazine called “the last great western American city.”