Without the water supplied by Crowe's dams, many American landmarks--Hollywood, Disneyland and Silicon Valley - would not be possible. His ingenuity, charisma and stubbornness turned the deserts of the U.S. West into an agricultural Eden. Yet few people - even few engineers outside of Maine - know him by name.

The man is Francis T. Crowe, the construction engineer who was responsible for 19 dams that changed America's landscape - among them Arrowrock, Tieton, Shasta, and his crowning opus: the Hoover Dam. He was well respected by virtually all that knew him, including the hundreds of "construction stiffs" who followed him from project to project from 1911 to 1945.

Despite the considerable attention he enjoyed during the heyday of the West's Reclamation, Crowe was a shy man who explained his success this way: "I was born at the right time, and I went to the right school."

That school was the University of Maine, class of 1905. Crowe also spent part of his boyhood in Kezar Falls, where he liked to play tag over the log jams on the Ossippe River.