Engineer Memoirs
He was wanting to see what we were going to say in our public meeting notice. We
inferred from his tone and his questions that he was concerned that we not disparage
the project in this announcement. We didn't intend to. We were trying to have what we
considered to be a balanced description.
The next thing that happened was a telephone call from an extremely irate woman. It
was not Kathy Fletcher. It was Kitty Schirmer, another woman that was working on
this project with her. She said that the notice for Richard B. Russell was a distortion,
that we had violated instructions, and that we should kill this notice. I said, "Well, I
don't think that's possible. I think it's in the post office right now--10,000 copies."
There was a debate about recovering the notice from the post office. I suggested that
the news media would have a field day with a story that we pulled 10,000 notices from
the post office, if the post office would even let us do it. Finally, she said, "All right.
But never again. You have violated orders." So it went out; that and the notices on all
the projects went out. Generally, the reaction in the hearings was overwhelmingly in
support of these projects, but not entirely.
Major General Graves with Representative Tom Bevill of Alabama in 1977.
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