Today’s billionaires aren’t haunted by the dead bodies of factory workers, which soiled the legacy of Andrew Carnegie and his sometime partner Henry Clay Frick, the art collector and coal titan whose suppression of the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel-mill strike of 1892 left nine workers dead. Toward the end of his life, Frick famously said of Carnegie, “Tell him I’ll see him in hell, where we both are going.”

But many of today’s rich givers have been affected, if not sullied, by the subprime crisis and the subsequent fallout. Indeed, Koch’s newfound appeal could also stem in part from the fact that his fortune is a product of paper goods and oil—far from Wall Street.

Koch doesn’t use metrics to evaluate nonprofits. He meets personally with the heads of the groups and sizes up their management, with the exception of institutions that he already knows well, such as his alma mater Deerfield Academy or the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, for which he financed a permanent dinosaur wing.

Even before the State Theater gift, Koch was not reluctant to let his name be attached to much of his giving. But the benefits of naming gifts flow to the donees as well as the donors. Aside from the funds, receiving institutions get as much attention as the donor, bettering their chances of attracting other donors from the same social stratum, as Koch’s and Schwarzman’s dueling nine-figure gifts exemplify.

Some have resisted the naming mania. Michael Bloomberg’s donations to local cultural and social-service organizations via the Carnegie Corp. are the biggest open secret in New York, but he prefers that they remain nominally anonymous. And other donors like to keep a low profile. “I know my name,” sniffs Roger Hertog, the retired vice chairman of AllianceBernstein, when asked why his name isn’t displayed prominently at the Bronx Library Center, founded in part with his donations. That center replaces a Carnegie-funded library whose origins, while possibly enshrined on a plaque somewhere, were little known in the neighborhood when I lived there in the 1960s. (And given Carnegie’s record as a union buster, that may have been just as well.)

But should you get hit by a cab strolling from the David Koch theater to the Steven Schwarzman library, don’t worry—the ambulance can take you to the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, formerly the N.Y.U. Medical Center. The university is not shy about adding the name of Home Depot’s co-founder Ken Langone, who was also a New York Stock Exchange board director sued by Eliot Spitzer. In fact, N.Y.U. has advertised the center’s new name on bus kiosks. “We’re trying to get our brand out,” Langone says of the hospital.

Langone, whose N.Y.S.E. case was dismissed, points out that his $100 million gift to the medical center in 1999 was done quietly. “I had the same desire to be anonymous,” he says of his more recent gift, “but the new dean felt strongly that it would have a collateral effect on other people giving. And by the way, he’s right. Enormous gifts we’ve gotten since.”

While the benefits of donor name placements certainly flow both ways, Koch’s charitable efforts have definitely served him well. His gift to the theater received immense play in the New York Times arts section when it was first announced—the kind of advertising that it’s just not polite to buy. And it’s no small achievement for a rich Kansas farm boy whose father was an oilman.

The Koch family fortune was accumulated in a sepia-tone, rustic, old-fashioned American way. Its roots lie, naturally, in the Old West. Koch’s grandfather Harry began this John Ford saga in 1888 by sailing across the Atlantic from Holland at the age of 19. Like many European immigrants, he was lured by stories of cowboys and Indians. “He was fascinated with the American West,” his grandson recalls. He crossed the prairie and “went as far west as he could go, as he wanted to get as close to the Wild West and to the Indians as he could get.” Harry settled in the town of Quanah, Texas, and married a local girl. His second son, Fred, was born there in 1900.

Fred Koch, David’s father, attended Rice University and M.I.T., from which he graduated in 1922. He moved to the booming oil town of Wichita, Kansas, and worked in the industry as a chemical engineer. He eventually founded an oil-refining business, the nucleus of what was to become the Koch Industries empire. David was born in Wichita in 1940 and grew up there.

A 1986 New York Times Magazine profile of the family reported that Fred “gave his sons a boy’s storybook childhood,” with healthy outdoor work on the family’s ranches. But David makes it seem more like a chapter from Dickens. The young Kochs—David and his twin brother, Bill, are the youngest of four brothers—were put to work in the fields at an early age. David started at 11 years old and worked every summer until he got out of college. He went to Deerfield Academy and M.I.T. before striking out on his own, employed first at Arthur D. Little and then at a small engineering firm. “I got these jobs on my own, by the way,” he says.