Oh, I didn't ask. Sorry to hear that.
But she managed all right, and I did do a fair amount of traveling. An interesting
corhmentary, about that time they began to authorize travel by air. So when I was
with the Weather Bureau, I had a mixture of train and air. But when I moved to the
Corps of Engineers, you couldn't fly. You had to go by train.
Q ..
Is that right?
A ..
For awhile, not very long.
Q ..
That must have made your traveling very hard.
A ..
But about that time Gail Hathaway arrived on the scene. Well, he was already in
Washington before I was. But I mean in my picture, he arrived on the scene. He
convinced the powers-that-be in the Corps that the spillway capacity for the dams
were not being adequately studied. I think the first one he sold was for Dennison
Dam in Texas. He convinced them--and I don't remember the name of the general
that backed him up--that they should have a meteorological study made as to what
the potential rainfall might be for the emergency situations. With that as a start
then, I don't know where he was before he came, well, I know in private practice
he was out in Oregon, but whether he was in a field office of the Corps before he
came to Washington or not, I don't remember.
Q ..
I thought he was in Omaha.
..
A.
He might well have been.
Q ..
So many of those people came out of Omaha, right.
A
Started in Omaha, yes. He was in Washington. So he started the idea of having a
Maximum Probable Flood (later changed to Probable Maximum Flood) for the
design of dams. As part of that, he sold the Corps on putting into their
appropriation money for a nationwide recording rain gauge program, which was sort
of, well, I guess it sort of followed the effort that Pennsylvania had done by itself.
But that idea took hold and so the Corps got the appropriations and transferred the
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