Editor’s note: This is an installment of Elbert’s Backstories, a recurring feature in dsm magazine’s dsmWeekly newsletter written by longtime columnist Dave Elbert. To read more of Elbert’s Backstories, visit dsmMagazine.com. 

My favorite Bill Knapp quote was recorded in 1990 when Ken Pins and I were writing about the local power structure for the Des Moines Register, where Knapp was the most powerful of the 25 individuals we profiled. 

“There are a lot of people who have a lot of money, but they couldn’t get a traffic ticket fixed,” Knapp told Pins. “They don’t know how to use it. So what good are they to the community?”

Knapp was a real estate wizard who died Saturday at the age of 99. He knew how to use power, and he used it often to reshape the landscape but also to benefit the less fortunate.

“Bill is, frankly, just a very soft touch. I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to print that but it’s true,” Roxanne Conlin told Pins.

Rather than a soft touch, Knapp preferred for much of his career to be thought of as a fierce competitor, like he was one night in 1957 when he got into a fist fight outside the Commodore Hotel with a fellow real estate agent, whom he later hired.

In our 1990 Powers That Be article, Pins asked Iowa Resources Chairman Mark Putney to compare Knapp with John Ruan, Des Moines’s legendary business leader who had topped the Register’s 1976 most powerful list and still came in No. 2 behind Knapp 14 years later.  

“Both are very bright and very tenacious,” Putney responded. Knapp, he added, was more likely than Ruan to try charm, but “also more likely to threaten a politician or government bureaucrat.”

“Knapp wears his heart on his sleeve,” as well as his anger, banker John Chrystal said.

Born in 1926, Knapp grew up in southern Iowa on a farm that his parents nearly lost more than once during the Great Depression.

Days before his 18th birthday in 1944, young Bill joined the Navy, where he wound up piloting a landing craft during the invasion of Okinawa. More than 60 years later, Knapp told his biographer Bill Friedricks that he still remembered “how heavy the bodies were as he lifted them into his boat.”

Friedricks wrote two books about Knapp, “The Real Deal: The Life of Bill Knapp” in 2013, and “The Making of Bill Knapp” in 2021. The latter work captures Knapp’s evolution from two-fisted entrepreneur to community asset.

Looking back from his 95th year, Knapp offered advice in chapters with titles like “Do What You Want and It Will Never Be Work,” “You Can’t Do It All by Yourself,” “Buy and Hold Land,” “Close Deals Quickly, and Aim for a Win-Win,” “Don’t Hold Grudges,” “Be Prepared for Bad Times” and my favorite “Court the Media.”

I arrived in Des Moines as a reporter in 1975 and soon learned that Knapp was on a first-name basis with nearly all the significant print and television reporters and editors.

I tried to maintain a professional distance from Knapp, but I must confess he helped sponsor a retirement party for me when I left the Register in 2012. It was hard not to like him.

We occasionally met for lunch, where the Democratic Party was always a topic of conversation. Since the 1960s when Democrat Harold Hughes was governor, Knapp had been the party’s leading moneyman in Iowa.

A few months after Democrat Tom Vilsack was elected governor in 1998, ending 30 years of Republican control of the office, I had lunch with Knapp.

“Congratulations,” I told him. “You finally got your Democratic governor.”

“But wait,” I added, “Vilsack isn’t your governor. You backed the other guy [Supreme Court Justice Mark McCormick] in the nasty Democratic primary and he lost.”

Knapp mumbled something you couldn’t print in a family newspaper.

Then, he smiled broadly, and we moved on to his golf game.

Knapp has always been a great athlete, but for most of his career he thought golf was a waste of time. He was in his 80s when he finally took up the game, which made it easier to shoot his age, which he did.

A few years back, I played a round of golf with him on a simulator in his party barn, which is just south of the Iowa Veterans Cemetery near Van Meter where he will be buried. And yes, the 90-something real estate guy beat the 60-something journalist.