Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (3 page)

Fortunes were being made in Wichita. Known as “The Magic City,” it had become a magnet for risk takers, entrepreneurs, and fortune seekers of all stripes. The Texas gas-lamp salesman W. C. Coleman had established a thriving business there. So had Walter Beech and Clyde Cessna, the airplane manufacturers who would help to establish the city as America’s “Air Capital.”

Though they grew up on an estate, Fred went out of his way to make sure his children did not feel wealthy. “Their father was quite tight with his resources,” recalled Jay Chapple, an elementary
and middle school friend of the Koch twins, who spent time in the family’s home. “He did not shower them with toys and that kind of thing.” Until well into the 1950s, Chapple said, Fred refused to buy a television. “Every family was getting a TV set that could possibly afford one, but Fred Sr. just said no.”

The brothers received no allowances, though they were paid for chores they completed around the house. Still, Fred kept such a tight rein on his wallet that even cobbling together the pocket change to see a movie could be a struggle: “If we wanted to go to the movies, we’d have to go beg him for money,” David told an interviewer. In the local public school, where the wealthy Koch twins began their educations alongside the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers from the Cessna and Beech factories, it was their classmates who often seemed like the rich ones, he remembered: “I felt very much of a pauper compared to any of them.”

To his sons and their friends, Fred came across as a larger-than-life figure, whose gruff mien and rugged ways evoked comparisons to Western gunslingers. “He was like John Wayne,” David has said. “Just like John Wayne.” Fred even “kind of looked like John Wayne with glasses,” recalled longtime Koch family friend Nestor Weigand. “He was a tough, tough guy.” He described Fred’s style as “my way or the highway.”

Fred rarely displayed affection toward his sons, as if doing so might breed weakness in them. “Fred was just a very stiff, calculated businessman,” said Chapple. “I don’t mean this in a critical way, but his interest was not in the kids, other than the fact that he wanted them well educated.” He was not the kind of dad who played catch with his boys; rather, he was the type of father, one Koch relative said, who taught his children to swim by throwing them into a pool and walking away. “The old man didn’t put up with any—” Sterling Varner, who went to work for Fred Koch in the 1940s and later became president of Koch Industries, once said. “He was papa, and that was that.”

Or as the Koch relative put it, “He ruled that house with an iron fist.”

The Koch patriarch was determined to instill in his sons the voracious work ethic that he attributed to his own success in business. He ensured his boys’ hands knew calluses, and their muscles experienced the ache of a long day of manual labor. He put them to work milking cows, bailing hay, digging ditches, mowing lawns, and whatever else he could think of. The never-ending routine of chores was especially torturous during the summer months, when other local kids from Wichita’s upper crust whiled away the afternoons at the country club, the sounds of their delight literally wafting across 13th Street to the Kochs’ property. “It used to be so hot there in the summertime,” David remembered. “My best friend came from a wealthy family in Eastborough. He used to spend every day at the swimming pool of the country club. The wind would blow from the south and carry the noise across the street, and I’d hear him laughing, splashing in the pool, and I would be out there working and feeling sorry for myself.”

Periodically during the summers, David and Bill spent a few weeks in Quanah with their cousins, where they made the most of their freedom from their father’s strict household, spending their days shooting tin cans, swimming, and generally goofing off with no chores or expectations hanging over their heads. “I think Uncle Fred kept them reined in pretty good,” said Carol Margaret Allen, the daughter of Fred’s older brother, John Anton, who had remained in Quanah to work at the family’s newspaper, the
Quanah Tribune-Chief
. “They lived out in the country. There was nothing around them much. I don’t think they did a whole lot of things except stay out there and do chores. So I think when they got away, they had a little fun.”

In Quanah, the twins loved visiting the local drugstore, where they could sprawl out on the floor with comic books and order chocolate milk or ice cream from the soda fountain, charging their
purchases to their uncle’s expense account. They found the concept of a charge account almost as thrilling as the latest
Superman
comic. Because of their rigid upbringing—and Fred’s deep aversion to debt—they had no idea such a thing as credit even existed.

Fred traveled frequently on business, but when he was home, the Koch household took on an air of Victorian formality. After work, Fred often retreated to his wood-paneled library, its shelves filled with tomes on politics and economics, emerging promptly at 6:00 p.m., still in coat and tie, for dinner in the formal dining room. “He just controlled the atmosphere,” Chapple recalled. “There was no horseplay at the table.” Fred would occasionally use family dinners to impart advice to his sons or to lecture them on government and politics. “My father was quite a student of history, so we got a lot of history lessons at the dinner table,” Charles remembered.

In the Koch brothers’ early childhood, Fred’s stern demeanor was not improved by the fact that he spent much of the time in great physical pain. Doctors treated a cancerous tumor on his palate with radiation and surgery, but the treatment itself left behind a quarter-sized hole in the roof of his mouth. It made it difficult for him to eat and hindered his speech. The nature of his business forced him to interact regularly with clients and potential customers. As this became increasingly difficult, he began to reflect on his career and considered retreating to a quieter, simpler life.

Fred came from ranching country, growing up around such legendary spreads as the Matador, the Swenson, and the Pitchfork. Collectively, these historic ranches sprawled across more than a million acres, expansive monuments to Texas’s proud cowboy and frontier heritage. The ranching life always appealed to Fred. Ranchers were the men of status and wealth during his childhood. During a particularly bleak stretch in Quanah’s history, when wheat crops failed and a local bank went under, Fred’s dad had managed to tread water in the newspaper business by convincing
ranchers—the only local businessmen still prospering—to advertise their cattle brands in his paper.

In 1941, Fred purchased Spring Creek Ranch in the majestic Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, where the state’s otherwise flat, homogenous landscape suddenly gives way to a gently undulating terrain of shimmering bluestem tall grass, peppered with ponds and woven with veins of gurgling creeks. Fred added to its acreage over time until the ranch grew to 10,000 acres.

It was not just a business, but also a frequent spot for family getaways. On weekends, Fred enjoyed piling his clan in their wood-paneled station wagon and setting out for Spring Creek, located about 60 miles east of Wichita. The property featured a small white cottage with a screen porch. Down a slope was a pond, with a raft in the middle and a dock with a diving board, from which the Koch boys—when they weren’t mucking stalls, or performing any number of other chores—leapt into the crisp water. (A few decades later, when Bill made one of his first major art purchases, he selected Claude Monet’s
Field of Oats and Poppies
, because it reminded him of a favorite family picnic spot on the ranch.)

A plastic surgeon eventually cured Fred’s palate condition. He maintained a foothold in the oil business, but his focus turned increasingly to ranching. He sold a refinery in Illinois and offloaded oil leases in northwestern New Mexico, channeling some of the proceeds into the December 1950 purchase of the 257,000-acre Beaverhead Ranch in southern Montana on the edge of the Continental Divide. The Beaverhead became the crown jewel of Fred’s burgeoning ranching empire. In 1952, he formed the Matador Cattle Company to oversee his ranch holdings, and in early 1953, he purchased three parcels of the historic Matador Ranch, founded in 1882 and located 70 miles west of Quanah in Motley County, Texas. Fred did not just buy choice acreage known for its “fat cattle and nutritious grass,” in the words of the Matador
Cattle Company’s onetime president John Lincoln; he acquired approximately 105,000 acres of Texas history.

The ranches were a fixture of the Koch boys’ childhood, and during the summers Fred and his sons spent at least a month at Beaverhead, driving there by a different route each time in order to take in new sights as they made the 1,300-mile journey from Wichita. Trips to the family ranches were not vacations; they were yet another opportunity for Fred to break his children of any privileged tendencies through long days of labor.

The boys drove tractors, dug fence posts and irrigation ditches, rode herd, cleaned stalls, and performed other assorted jobs. On the ranches, the multimillionaire’s sons were treated no differently than lowly cowhands, and they lived alongside Fred’s employees in no-frills bunkhouses. One summer Charles bunked in a log cabin nestled in Montana’s Centennial Valley alongside a colorful cowboy named “Bitterroot Bob,” who was known to take potshots at flies as he lay in bed at night cradling his pistol. On his way back to prep school at the end of the summer, Charles and one of Fred’s employees stopped for lunch in Dillon, Montana. Charles glanced around the divey restaurant. “It sure is clean here,” he said.

Charles and his younger brothers endured their summers working on the ranches—and later even came to appreciate the character-building experience of it—but the eldest Koch brother rebelled against Fred’s reign. Every dictatorship has its dissident, and Frederick played this part within the Koch family’s rigid power structure.

Frederick was the outlier among his rough-and-tumble, ultracompetitive brothers. While the three younger boys took after their father, he gravitated toward his mother’s interests. Mary helped to nourish Frederick’s artistic side, and when he grew up, mother and son would enjoy spending time together taking in plays and
attending performing arts festivals. Artsy and effete, Fred was a student of literature and a lover of drama, who liked to sing and act. He wasn’t athletic, displayed no interest in business, and loathed the work-camp-like environment fostered by his father, with whom he shared little in common, beyond a love of opera.

Fred bonded with his sons through manly pursuits, especially father-son hunting expeditions to far-off places, such as the Arctic and Africa. Frederick had no interest in such primeval excursions. Unlike his brothers, “Freddie didn’t want to learn” to shoot, Mary recalled. He was in “another world.”

The more Fred glimpsed signs of effeminacy in his son, the more he tried to toughen him up—and the more Frederick resisted. Finally, Frederick had a nervous breakdown, according to Charles, during a summer of forced labor on one of the family’s ranches. (“I have never had a ‘nervous breakdown,’ ” Frederick said. He added that after one summer of work at Spring Creek, he had subsequent summer jobs at a music store and a handful of banks in Wichita.)

“Father wanted to make all his boys into men and Freddie couldn’t relate to that regime,” Charles explained. “Dad didn’t understand and so he was hard on Freddie. He didn’t understand that Freddie wasn’t a lazy kid—he was just different.”

By the late 1950s, when Frederick was in his twenties, it was an open secret among the family’s circle of friends in Wichita that he was gay. “We all knew Freddie was gay,” said someone who spent time with the family and their friends in the 1950s and 1960s. “You know, those things—especially in an environment like Wichita—were almost whispered. It was common knowledge.”

Frederick could do little to relate to his father or win his approval. “Freddie was a sophisticate and a man of the world in addition to the fact that he was gay,” said Koch family friend Nestor Weigand. “It wasn’t something that was easily accepted in those days.” (According to Frederick, he is not gay.)

For eighth grade, Frederick’s parents sent him off to boarding school at Pembroke Country Day in Kansas City. He attended high school at Hackley, an elite private school located in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was the class valedictorian. “My parents,” he explained, “were concerned that I needed to attend a prep school that would raise my academic level so that I could get into an Ivy League university. My father had gone to MIT, and my mother had gone to Wellesley, and they wanted their sons to go to [an] Ivy League university. They weren’t going to decide which one.”

Once he left home, Frederick’s lifeline to the family was largely through his mother, who remained close with her oldest son. “Freddie sort of segregated himself from the family very early on,” said family friend and Wichita real estate developer George Ablah. “And I think everyone was more comfortable with that.” According to Bill, “Freddie wanted no part of the family and did his own thing.”

“Unlike my brothers,” Frederick said, “I was interested in music, art, and literature. This did not mean I wanted ‘no part of the family.’ I always took an interest in the activities of my parents and my brothers.”

During their childhood, mention of Frederick caused noticeable discomfort among his brothers. “They just didn’t want Freddie’s name brought up,” said one family friend. “They knew there was something different about him. You didn’t hear much about Freddie at all.… It was almost like he wasn’t part of the family.”

In the 1960s, mention of Frederick even vanished from one of his father’s bios: “He and Mrs. Koch have three sons,” it read, “Charles, William, and David.”

Fred’s disappointment in his eldest son caused him to double-down on Charles, piling him with chores and responsibilities by the age of nine. “I think Fred Koch went through this kind of thing that I must have been too affectionate; I must have been too
loving, too kind to Freddie and that’s why he turned out to be so effeminate,” said John Damgard, who went to high school with David and remains close with David and Charles. “When Charles came along, the old man wasn’t going to make that mistake. So he was really, really tough on Charles. He taught him the work ethic; he was tougher than nails.” David and Bill had it slightly easier, Damgard added. “I think Mary did a lot to protect the twins from the hard-driving father.”