Franklin F. Snyder
a thesis, why, one of the instructors in hydraulics, a professor by the name of Ralph
Powell, suggested that I do a thesis on rainfall and runoff. I had a partner, William
Collins. The two of us did it together. He worked for the Muskingum Conservancy
District, which the Corps of Engineers was involved in, and he eventually worked
in our office here in Washington. He died at a relatively early age while he was still
employed in our Civil Works' office.
We did this thesis on rainfall and runoff. We worked out all of the correlations
using Least Squares, which at that time wasn't new or anything, but our professor
in concrete was an expert on that sort of thing. So we ground out hours' and hours
of Least Square solutions correlating the rainfall and runoff data. In that day, we
worked with monthly data rather than daily, or shorter term data. That got me,
that's what partly led to my getting away from structural engineering because I
graduated in 1932 near the bottom of the Depression.
In 1930, when I had only been at Ohio State for a short time, I went to the Ohio
State-Michigan football game. When I came back to my room, I started having a
severe pain in my stomach. I had just been pledged to a fraternity so I went to the
fraternity to eat. By the time I got there, the pain was terrible. The brother of one
of the current members of the fraternity was a surgeon, but they couldn't get him
right away. They got another doctor. By that time my stomach was just like a
brick.
The doctor came in and said that if I wasn't so young, that he would say it was a
ruptured ulcer in the stomach. But since I was so young, it must be appendix. But
it was a ruptured ulcer. They took me to the hospital and the surgeon that they had
been trying to get was available. My mother was still in Toledo doing her usual
work, and they couldn't get hold of her. They brought me to long enough to get
permission to operate. By that time I told them I didn't care. They could operate
or hit me in the head with an ax, it didn't matter.
I was very fortunate because at that time, there was no medicine for peritonitis, and
that's what you get when you have a rupture in your abdomen. It kills you rather
quickly. Doctor McCready said he had all of my insides laid out on the. table,
washing them off.
I was very fortunate, but I missed a quarter of school as a result of that. But there
was a black woman, who was the cook at the fraternity house, who took care of me.
So I stayed at the fraternity house during my recovery. With a ruptured ulcer, you
have to eat soft foods, so she saw that I got the right things to eat and everything.
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