Vernon
anybody was willing to admit they didn't have anything new that they should be funded
or they would run out of money. But almost everybody would come up with something
to research. As long as they had a program, they would try to maintain it, of course.
Sometimes they would lose money and then go down and battle them for more.
But they'd still lose money because they had, in engineering, a group of the researchers
that would all get together. They would try to decide from an engineering standpoint what
were the most important things. Then there would be engineering versus planning. They
would trade off to see which things needed the most research and argue about why theirs
Usually, the most articulate guy was the one
was more important than the other guy
who won out.
Q ..
We've talked about this before.
A
If you're a good speaker, why you have a lot better chance than the other guy.
Q
So by and large, though, the creation of the Research and Development Office was a
positive step, you think?
A ..
Oh, I think so. It gave you, as a research monitor or program manager or whatever, you
have somebody to go to. You go to them and say, "Hey, we've got something new, and
we'd like to get it done." They would then start carrying the ball. They'd say, "Well,
we'll see, we'll start talking with people and see what we can do about doing something."
Otherwise, you had a tough time on new things.
Or if you didn't like something, the way something was being done, you had somebody
to talk to. You had somebody who would listen to both sides and then would try to
mediate or do whatever needed to be done. For example, there was research going on in
hydrology and hydraulics down in WES that wasn't being funded by the Corps, yet the
people in WES were doing it. It was being funded by another element of the Army or
even some other agency was paying WES to do it. Our experts down there, who were
supposed to be reporting to us, were doing this without even telling us about it. It used
to really aggravate me when I'd hear about some hydrology research going on in
I hadn't even been questioned about what they needed to do or how we could help them
or anything like that.
Maybe I mentioned it to you before about the one time that I got called by Bob Clark from
the Weather Service who asked me about this research conference going on in WES about
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