THE SANTA MONICA FREEWAY: OPEN AGAIN : The Man Who Put the Pedal to the Metal : Construction: Clinton Myers is a bootstrap millionaire who speeded up the job by never taking no for an answer. “No one will ever touch what we have done,” he says.

When the railroads told contractor Clinton Myers that it would take three weeks to deliver steel beams needed for rebuilding the Santa Monica Freeway, Myers spent $119,000 to rent his own trains to carry supplies from Arkansas and Texas.

When the ironworkers said they were tired from working 10-hour days, seven days a week, Myers, a bootstrap millionaire, hired more.

Day and night, Myers pushed, prodded and urged the workers. A man in constant motion, he stopped only when the freeway opened. Then he gazed at the structures, which still have wood framing attached, and pronounced: “No one will ever touch what we have done, no one will ever come close.”

And then, he added: “But I could do it in 10 days less if I were to design and build it.”

Even before he started on Feb. 5, the day he won the contract to rebuild the Santa Monica Freeway, Myers planned on accelerating construction. Caltrans gave him 140 days to reconstruct quake-damaged sections, at La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, and Myers figured that he would do the job in less than 100 days--like the feat he accomplished when he was assigned to rebuild two Watsonville bridges that collapsed after the Loma Prieta quake. There, he took 45 days to complete a project allotted 100 days.

The Santa Monica was bigger and more complicated. It also took the confidence of an experienced bridge boss and the savvy of a gambler: While Myers stood to win $200,000 for each day he finished early, he also faced a penalty of the same amount for every late day.

On the Santa Monica Freeway, Myers immediately made sure all the crews and subcontractors knew his goal. He demanded every boss’s home number and he was not shy about calling day or night.

“When he first told me his plans to finish mid-April, I thought he was trying to light a fire under me. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, right, finish in April,’ ” said Dean Bubion, president of Tri-City Reinforcing Corp., the subcontractor that handled the steelwork.

But as Bubion quickly learned, Myers meant it.

“When you want something bad enough, you’ve got to go for it,” said Myers, 56.

Myers grew up in a family of 13 children raised on a farm in the San Bernardino County community of Highland. But farming never held his interest. He dropped out of 10th grade and ran away from his father’s home. With all his belongings packed in a small carton, he headed to his mother’s trailer in Long Beach. There, he slept under the awning at night and worked as a carpenter’s apprentice by day.

He worked his way up, a tale that most of his crews have heard. He was once just like them, they say, maybe a little bit tougher, maybe a little bit more ambitious.

“You can’t be a wimp and be as big as he is,” said Lester Jennings, 52, a carpenter foreman.

While the Santa Monica Freeway was under construction, Myers was constantly on the prowl. He strode across plank bridges and climbed the scaffolding ladders in his black cowboy boots. Constantly in motion, he juggled the mundane and the serious with equal care.

Last week, when he saw a driver loading his flatbed truck, Myers shouted: “Is that all you are putting on there? Move those pallets so you can fill that up. That’s ridiculous.”

But even before the driver could sputter a response, Myers had refocused his sights. Spotting a worker getting out of a white company pickup, Myers abruptly changed his course.

“What happened to my truck?” He growled as he corralled the hapless man, who stumblingly told Myers that he had had a traffic accident the previous week.

“That doesn’t make me too happy,” said Myers, glaring.

Even as he reprimanded the driver, Myers was, in fact, quite content. He knew he had done what most would consider impossible. He had delivered the Santa Monica 2 1/2 months ahead of schedule.

“What we achieved,” he said, “was no surprise to us whatsoever.”