Margaret S. Petersen
Interview with
Margaret S. Petersen
The Early Years
I'm going to begin by asking you to discuss your family background and childhood.
I'm the oldest of three children, and I was born in 1920 in Rock Island, Illinois, on the
A:
Mississippi River. I became aware of the river at a very early age. We used to visit my great
aunt, who had a farm on the Mississippi. It flooded every spring, and it was a very
interesting thing for a child to observe. My brother, who was two years younger than I,
became involved in aircraft design during World War II. My youngest brother, who is six
years younger than I am, is a mechanical engineer.
I grew up, really, during the Depression. I can remember the day the stock market crashed.
I was nine. Rock Island was a small town, a manufacturing town. It was a very depressed
area, I suppose, until World War II, at which time all of the manufacturing--Case,
International Harvester, companies like that--converted to war production and expanded, and
the town became more prosperous. There was a lot more going on.
District and the Panama
Rock
I graduated from high school in 1938, and I attended Augustana College in Rock Island,
Illinois, for one year full-time and then I began working in an architect's office. I continued
part-time in evening school until January 1943. I started working for the Corps in June of
1942, as a draftsman, in the Rock Island District. At that time, Rock Island was doing almost
all military work. The locks and dams had been finished in the '30's. I remember watching,
going down to some of the construction sites, when I was quite small with my father.
The Rock Island District was involved in the Third Locks Project for the Panama Canal. A
good many of the engineers in the Special Engineering Division of the Panama Canal had
come out of the Rock Island District because of the experience they had on the locks on the
Upper Mississippi. Whenever the Special Engineering Division in Panama needed extra
staff, Rock Island was requested to loan them people.
In the winter of `42-`43, the Corps reorganized military work among Districts, and Rock
Island lost a lot of it. At that time the Special Engineering Division of the Canal requested
a loan of ten people; and I was one of the group that went to Panama then. here were four
T
Previous Page
