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    At lunchtime, top Enron executives, who worked on the richly paneled fiftieth floor of the company’s headquarters tower in downtown Houston, routinely dispatched their assistants to fetch lunch so they could eat at their desks. Most ate their sandwiches on deli paper. Not Ken Lay. When his meal arrived, his staff carefully unwrapped it, placed the food on fine china, and served him lunch on a covered silver platter.
     • • • 
    There was no fine china in Kenneth Lee Lay’s early life. He grew up dirt-poor. Indeed, the Enron chairman’s history is a classic Horatio Alger story. He was born in 1942 in Tyrone, Missouri, an agricultural dot on the map in the Ozarks. Before Lay became a business celebrity, the region’s most famous former resident was Emmett Kelly, the circus clown known as Weary Willie.
    Lay portrays his childhood, spent largely in tiny farm towns with outhouses and dirt roads, in Norman Rockwellesque terms. But the Lays were always struggling—until he was 11 years old, Ken Lay had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing—and at a young age, he set his mind on finding his fortune.
    His parents, Omer and Ruth Lay, had three children; he was the middle child, after Bonnie and before Sharon. For a time, the Lays owned a feed store. Then disaster wiped them out: the Lays’ deliveryman crashed a truck, slaughtering a load of chickens. Omer had to take to the road as a traveling stove salesman; the family followed from town to town, until they were finally forced to move in with in-laws on a farm in central Missouri. Omer, a Baptist lay preacher who held a succession of day jobs to feed the family, started selling farm equipment. Acutely conscious of the family circumstances, young Ken always worked: running paper routes, raising chickens, baling hay. “It’s hard for me not to think Ken was an adult when he was a child,” his sister Sharon said years later. The hardship honed Lay’s ambition. He later spoke of spending hours on a tractor, daydreaming about the world of commerce, “so different from the world in which I was living.”
    Lay’s parents never made it past high school, but college transformed his life. The family eventually resettled in Columbia, Missouri, where all three children attended the University of Missouri. Omer worked as parts manager in a Buick dealership then as a security guard at the university library while preaching at a small Baptist church. Ken painted houses, earned scholarships, and took out loans to pay his way through school.
    Lay was a devoted and stellar student, serious beyond his years, with a natural intellectual bent. He’d entered college planning to become a lawyer but became enraptured by the study of economics during an introductory class taught by a popular professor named Pinkney Walker. He discovered that theory and fresh ideas fascinated him. But his passion always had a pragmatic side. He cared about politics and public policy, how government could shape markets. “Ken was one of these 4.0 guys who had some street sense,” says Phil Prather, a Missouri classmate and lifelong friend. “Most 4.0 guys I know are a bunch of savants.”
    Although Lay stood out for his brains, he was never the stereotypical egghead who spent every waking moment in the library. Though slight, low-key, and quiet—he struggled for years to overcome a mild stammer—he was popular as well. At Missouri he won election as president of Beta Theta Pi, the university’s largest and most successful fraternity. (Among Lay’s predecessors in the Missouri frat house: Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.) Lay became an inveterate collector of relationships. At each major stop in his early life, he forged bonds that lasted for decades. These weren’t only personal acquaintances. Time and again, he would tap his growing network: for a job, for a favor, or to surround himself with those he trusted. This skill propelled his