Bill Keeler, Portrait of a San Francisco Office Client;

              Portrait of a San Francisco Office Client:
William Keeler, new-style scientific rancher
and multi-purpose land developer, was
trained in chemistry at Amherst College and
in geology at Stanford University. In 1963
he switched careers, bought more than
60,000 acres near Red Bluff in northern
California and organized Dye Creek Cattle
Company. WK brand, one of several that
mark Bill's 4,000-head breeding herd and a
like number of feeder cattle, adorns his
belt buckle.
24
who uses science and
modern business
methods "to do the old things
the right way" at his
Dye Creek Cattle Company
No one illustrates more clearly than
William Keeler, President of Dye
Creek Cattle Company, the dynamism
of the country and people served by
the San Francisco Office of Haskins &
Sells. Bill, just touching 40, is a hard
man to keep up with, and impossible
to categorize quickly.
Owner of the 37,000-acre Dye
Creek Ranch near Red Bluff, Califor­nia,
and of the Tuscan Ranch nearby
(another 25,000 acres), Bill has turned
his land to multiple use as a recrea­tional
hunting preserve and as winter
range for his 4,000 head of cattle. As
a cattle raiser he keeps up with the
latest in modern veterinary medicine,
reads technical journals with the thor­oughness
of a university professor, and
employs advanced techniques of cross­breeding
and testing so as to promote
maximum productivity of his herd. He
markets more than 3,500 calves a year,
plus about 800 mature animals. For
summer range the cattle are trans­ported
to more productive grazing
land, of which Bill's company owns
3,000 acres and rents another 150,000
acres. He has developed a highly effi­cient,
vertically integrated cattle oper­ation
from breeding herd through feed
lots and slaughterhouse to retail stores.
As a recreational area developer, Bill
recognizes the appeal that his large,
undeveloped acreage holds for outdoor
sportsmen, with its rolling hills, can­yons,
streams, ponds and woodlands
sloping upward from the Sacramento
River Valley to the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada. His property abounded
with wildfowl, deer and wild pigs
when he bought it in 1963, and since
then he has managed and developed
the wildlife by preserving natural cover
and breeding places, stocking streams
and building ponds for ducks and
geese. A novelty at Dye Creek is Bill's
program of cross-breeding local pigs
with European wild boar. As a result,
Bill's paying guest-hunters sometimes
return home with tales of a fierce
charge and a narrow escape from a
slashing by a 250-pound wild boar.
And they show a pair of tusks to prove
the story.
City-dwelling sportsmen can fly into
Red Bluff airport, where they are met
by Wayne Long, Bill Keeler's recrea­tional
manager, and airlifted in one of
Bill's helicopters to a hunting and fish­ing
lodge a dozen or more miles back
in the hill country. Flying in is more
economical of time, labor and money
than keeping a road open, and the
volcanic stones scattered about make
much of the Dye Creek land treacher­ous
for jeeps. So Bill's upland property
is dotted with landing strips for light
planes and helicopter pads. As an out-doorsman
he believes there's no better
way to get back to nature. And as a
businessman, he is making formerly
unproductive land pay.
Like many professional and business
men in the West who must get around
without wasting time, Bill is his own
airplane pilot. He has turned his inter­est
in flying into a business enterprise,
organized under the name Keeairco,
Inc., with a dozen planes and helicop­ters
based at Red Bluff. In addition to
servicing sportsmen who visit the hunt-ting
preserve, Bill uses the aircraft to
spray orchards, to check on herds out
on the range, to rescue strayed calves
and to spot marauders. Paul Anderson
of the H&S San Francisco Office, who
has worked on the Dye Creek Cattle
Company engagement for several
years, has gone up in a helicopter to
take inventory of cattle on the hoof.
Keeairco rents out planes, offers flight
services, and uses its helicopters to pro­vide
neighboring ranches with spray­ing
and other agricultural aerial appli­cations.
Rancher, outdoorsman, entrepre­neur,
business manager, applied scien­tist—
Bill Keeler is all of these. Although
he is constantly on the go and works
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