The 20-Million-Dollar Man

It’s just a little bit of real estate, but Addison Wheelock Warner ’21 of Weatherford, Tex., would not sell it for a million dollars. What he owns is unique in the United States: a piece of the Grand Canyon of the Animas River. His Elbert Creek Ranch lies for half a mile on both sides of the famous Durango-to- Silverton narrow-gauge railroad (which has a right of way).

The elevation at track level is about 7,000 feet, and the mountains to the east rise to 12,000. It’s too big for a man of Mr. War- ner’s height to jump across. He is five-foot- three and weighs 145 pounds but he was big enough to play football at Stanford. “It would take a helicopter to get to the other side,” he remarks. “I’ve never been there. It’s scary enough to see it through the window of the train.” And so he squints down hundreds of feet to gaze in fascination at the furious green waters of the Animas as they rush through the narrow gorge.

Watching the Animas is not his only ac- tivity, of course. Warner has been an oil producer, an oil well drilling contractor, a banker, a stock broker, an investment expert, a Journal of Commerce writer, and the author of a syndicated column, “Money at Work,” that appeared in 80 newspapers. He attended oil and gas accounting seminars at Southern Methodist University twice a year and spent much time in its library reading about bankruptcy and receivership.

Though Add Warner belongs to too many prestigious clubs to list here, the ones he likes best are those concerned with exploration, adventure, and dogs. He felt so deeply that Texan dogs were not being intelligently fed that in 1967 he bought the Independent Mill- ing Company and founded Imco, a dog-feed business. He would load up his private plane and make personal deliveries.

In the Petroleum Club he got kidded a lot about his insistence that his two dogs always fly with him, one as co-pilot and the other as navigator. His Chicago and New York Clubs were amused, too, at his dislike of black-tie dinners. (Just to be prepared, though, he kept one tuxedo in his hotel rooms and another at home.) Once during a heavy sjiow storm in New York, he refused to conform completely and wore hunting boots, Texas style, below his dinner jacket. “The fellow I was going with was so embarrassed that he refused to sit with me," Warner recalls, adding that he had a hard time finding a table where he would be welcome. Warner grins, “1 like to think that I was the only one with dry feet.”

On his two-acre Texas estate, he had built specially for his dogs an Olympic-sized swim- ming pool, for he believes that dogs as well as human beings should exercise properly and keep in shape. And, of course, eat properly. He himself breakfasts on sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, celery juice, and fruit juice laced with brewer’s yeast.

Warner is an aviator of considerable prestige. He was graduated from the old JN- -5D “Jenny” of World War I to a Beechcraft Bonanza with a 285 horsepower turbo-charged engine, and he flew with human and canine elation for more than 50 years over his and other people’s oil wells. In 1965 his engine conked out at 8500 feet. “It looked as if I could make an emergency landing on the highway, but cars came by, so I crashed in an open field.” The plane was destroyed, but Warner and the dogs walked away. Next year he bought another plane, bigger and better. Because he got involved in World War I as an aviator, Warner spent only six months in Hanover as a member of the Class of 1921. Nonetheless, his roots are deeper in Dart- mouth history than those of many graduates. His great-great-great grandfather was Eleazar Wheelock, and he is a direct descendant of George Ticknor, Class of 1807, Harvard professor of the French and Spanish languages and belles-lettres and a founder of the Boston Public Library. Warner has proudly named his son Addison Wheelock Warner Jr. and his daughter Ann Wheelock Warner.

Though Warner would not sell his piece of the Grand Canyon of the Animas for a million dollars to any ordinary man, he is openminded about Arabs. Let one from the Near East offer him $2O million. Seeing green. Add would say, “O.K. It's a deal,” and Dartmouth College, to which Addison Wheelock Warner is so very loyal, would be $2O million richer.