Jacob H. Douma
was very close to him.
Q ..
They did a lot of early work there at Denver on modeling and hydraulic modeling.
That's right. And design. They did all the design right there in the Denver office, too.
They didn't have field offices that did design like the Corps' district offices. They had
field offices that did the surveys and, when construction started, managed the construction.
The Denver office did all of the design.
We were talking about the Bureau's design work at the Denver office. They apparently
were pretty good and pretty far advanced from what you say?
Yes, they were. They were known the world over as being the leading dam designers.
So actually, your work in the Bureau was like a post-graduate course in dam design?
Right. That's right.
Do you ascribe a lot of your later success to that experience?
Yes, I do. After I left the Bureau, in 1938, I went back to the Corps of Engineers, Los
Angeles District Office. I remember many times when we discussed a design problem,
I'd say, "The Bureau does it this way, and I think that's the way it ought to be.
The
Corps people recognized that the Bureau knew what it was doing.
How much interaction was there between the Bureau and civilian hydraulics professors,
not consulting engineers?
I had significant contact with Professors Rouse, Straub, and Ippen, who headed the Iowa,
Saint Anthony Falls, and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] hydraulic
laboratories, respectively. They were on a number of Corps of Engineers' consulting
boards. I took a course from a professor at Colorado State. It was a good course, closely
related to model testing.
So, it was more theoretical or practical?
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