Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
land. I was the irrigator, and I kept thinking, "Oh, there must be a better way. We had
a big, ten-horsepower gasoline motor engine with a belt, and a
pump down at the
well. The engine turned the things that pumped a
pipe full of cold, clear water,
which was enough to irrigate 40 acres. We kept rotating by mowing one cutting of alfalfa
every four weeks, and after getting the hay off, irrigating again. But I got the idea then,
there must be a better way to irrigate than the way I was irrigating. I had to dig ditches
by shovel to get the water to where it needed to be. When I got to my senior year in high
school, I'd read enough about the Bureau of Reclamation projects right there in the Central
Valley of California to know that they had better ways of irrigating. I decided my first
effort would have to be to go to a university and get an engineering education.
So your interests in engineering, civil engineering specifically, came from your irrigation
work on your own farm?
Right.
Did you have any science or math teachers in high school who were particularly influential
on you?
Well, I guess another thing that influenced me is that I liked science and math. I could get
A's in all of those courses, and I hated English. [Laughs] I did well to get a one time.
In fact, before enrolling at the University of California, during my last month in high
school, I still had to take a test to determine how well I knew the English language. It was
called the "bonehead" English test. If I'd had straight A's in English, I still would have
had to take the test. In about two months, the test results came back stating that I didn't
pass it and had to take this English course the first semester of my freshman year. I said,
"Well, that' s bonehead English.
So when I enrolled at the University of California, I signed up for physics and chemistry
and math, and said, "Well, here, this piece of paper says I have to take this English
course. I was told I had to take the English course without credit until I passed the
"bonehead" English test.
So I took the course, but I hated it. We went through the same stuff I'd gone through
about three times before in high school. I must have paid a little better attention to the
course because I passed the test after completing the course. English has always been my
weakness. I could express my engineering thoughts quite well, but I was seldom satisfied
with my English.
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