If Fred Koch’s life was a noisy one, then the duck blind where he sat that Friday in November was pristinely silent. Maybe that’s why he traveled to the place, which was about a thousand miles from his home in Wichita. The duck blind was near the Bear River, just outside the small town of Ogden, Utah. The natural beauty of the place was overwhelming. When visitors turned and faced east, they saw a craggy wall of mountains rise up, the sharp and irregular peaks often painted white with snow. Turning to the west, a visitor could see where the land immediately flattened out into a hard plateau of ranchland and salt marshes. The Great Salt Lake was nearby, and the glittering marshes around it lured flocks of migrating ducks as they made their way south from Yellowstone Park and the forests of Idaho.
The ranchlands spoke to Fred Koch in a special way. He owned thousands of acres of pasture, land that he would pass on to his sons and that they would keep for decades, knowing how much it meant to their dad. A ranch was an unfettered place; a place of freedom. It was also a place of ceaseless work; a place where any enterprise, whether it be a family or a business, survived or failed based solely on the work ethic and competence of the people who ran it. Ranching was honest, and it happened in the most wide-open and most free countryside in America. Maybe Fred Koch went to Bear River to think—to make plans for his business and his life in a place where he could enjoy a little silence. His business empire was a complicated set of interlocking companies. He oversaw an oil refinery, oil pipelines, manufacturing plants, and, of course, his beloved ranches. Bear River would have been a good place to escape it all, to consider it from a distance. It was the kind of place where a man could think, where he could compose a game plan to enact when he went back home. Considering Fred Koch’s life, it seems highly likely that he was considering those things as he scanned the horizon, waiting for the V-shaped flocks of ducks to come into view and start circling, looking for a place to land.
Fred Koch sat in the duck blind with a field guide who helped him handle his weapon and other provisions. According to Koch family lore, Fred Koch aimed his weapon at the sky, took a shot, and then marveled at his marksmanship when a duck came wheeling down.
Then, Fred Koch slumped over. He was unconscious, and he was very far from the nearest hospital. The gun loader must have tried to figure out what to do, but there was nothing to be done. Fred Koch died there at the foot of the mountain range, overlooking the salt marshes and ranchland.
Whatever plans he might have been considering disappeared with him in that instant. His company and his family would never hear another word of guidance from him. It would be entirely up to them to figure out how to go forward.
In one moment, the great patriarch was gone.
Fred Koch’s sudden death was not the end of a story, but the beginning of one. It was the first surge of volatility in an era that would be defined by volatility for Fred Koch’s family. It was only the first time that stability would disappear in an instant and leave everyone scrambling to figure out what to do. And these waves of volatility would crash primarily onto the shoulders of one person. One person, more than anyone, would have to figure out how to negotiate this era and, ultimately, how to profit from it. That person was Fred Koch’s second-oldest son, Charles.
* * *
One of Charles Koch’s earliest memories is of sitting in a public school classroom in Wichita, watching the teacher write math problems on the chalkboard. He was in the third grade. He would always remember how the other students were asking questions, and how the teacher kept trying to explain to them the mechanical interactions between the big white numerals and symbols.
This was puzzling to Charles Koch. He didn’t understand why the other children should be confused. “I can remember that clearly. Most things back then, I can’t remember at all. But I remember that clearly,” he later said in an interview. “All the other kids, or most of them, were struggling. . . . Why? I asked myself,” he recalled, and then he laughed. “The answers are obvious!”
This was when he realized that he had a gift for math and the mind of an engineer. He could clearly see a set of rules, the language of numbers. And this was a set of rules that existed perfectly within its own realm, whether people understood it or not. Math didn’t change just because a person struggled with it. Math was perfect. And Charles Koch understood it.
* * *
Charles Koch was not completely surprised when his father died. Fred Koch had been ailing for many years. The end was sudden, but not unexpected.
When that terrible moment came, Charles Koch had a plan. He had been constructing this plan for years.
During the summers of his childhood, Charles Koch’s family belonged to the Wichita Country Club. There was the pool and the clubhouse and the Elysian green hills of the golf course, all of it contained in a tiny oasis hidden away from the rest of the city. The Koch family’s house was close enough to the country club that the Koch boys, when they were teenagers, could hear kids playing at the pool during the long summer days. This was a place where the rich kids in town whiled away their summers and charged meals to their parents’ accounts. In the evenings, a teenaged Charles Koch would have been able to sneak liquor with friends at the clubhouse or organize card games in private rooms where the walls were paneled with tasteful, burnished hardwood.
But Charles Koch was denied that kind of summer while he was growing up. It was understood that he would stay away from the country club, as close as it might be to his backyard. Fred Koch felt that too much leisure time would corrupt the boy’s character. So he sent Charles out west to the ranch country that Fred loved so much. As a teenager, Charles Koch learned to ride horses, which might sound nice, or even romantic. But it wasn’t. For Charles Koch, learning to ride a horse was more like learning how to drive a forklift. His job was to ride on horseback for monotonous hours on end, inspecting the fence lines that kept the cattle from wandering off into the wilderness. At night, during those summers, he slept in a log cabin with other ranch hands, who had names like “Bitterroot Bob”—men who had likely never set foot in a country club.
This was the rhythm of Charles’s childhood. Work, and school, and back to work again. It was the rhythm prescribed by his father. And Charles Koch rebelled against it. He got into trouble as a teenager and was sent to a military-style prep school in Indiana. He didn’t straighten out until he graduated high school, when he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving an engineering degree in 1957, just as his father had done before him.
But even then, Charles Koch rebelled. He wasn’t satisfied to follow in his dad’s footsteps. He didn’t return to Wichita but stayed out east in Boston and got a job on his own. Fred implored Charles to come home and join the family business. The business was a complicated thing, and Fred wanted a capable son who could help him run it. The business units included Rock Island Oil and Refining Co., which held a refinery and pipelines; the Matador Cattle Company, which ran the vast expanses of ranchland; and Koch Engineering Co., which made specialized equipment for the oil refineries and chemical plants. Fred Koch wanted to pass this group of companies on to someone who could manage it well, and he made it clear that Charles was the person for the job.
But Charles resisted. He was happy making his way in the wider world. Fred Koch had been a domineering father, a forceful personality who had an unmovable set of beliefs about how the world worked and how a man should conduct himself. Charles had carved out his own life in Boston, getting a job as a management consultant with the prestigious firm Arthur D. Little. He knew that if he went back home, he’d be living in his father’s shadow, always subject to his father’s authority.