Margaret
Petersen
A:
That would have been `68. By that time, most of the employees were Panamanian, and the
old wooden buildings in Diablo Heights looked awful. Have you been in Panama?
No.
Q:
A:
There was a very elegant hotel over on the Caribbean side, the Washington Hotel. It had
been turned over to the Panamanians in the late ' 5 0 ' s I think. When we were there in 1968,
it had been stripped of the brass banisters; tiles and windows were cracked and broken; it was
in a terrible condition.
Undergraduate Study at the University of Iowa
So when you returned from Panama you enrolled in engineering at the University of Iowa at
Iowa City?
A:
We went to Iowa City for an appointment to see Dean
who was the Dean of the
College of Engineering at the University of Iowa. He was very cordial, but he really wasn't
very encouraging. However, he had a wonderful secretary by the name of Mary
(who died in 1995 at the age of 96). He and she both told us later that he had said to her
something to the effect of, "Tell them they can't do it. We're not interested in having them
here." Mary persuaded the Dean to accept us because she had applied for medical school and
was not admitted. So, we were accepted, and we moved to Iowa City in August of 1944.
We were lucky in that at that time the St. Paul District of the Corps had a sub-office at the
University of Iowa in the hydraulics laboratory. Martin Nelson was the head of the sub-
office in St. Paul. Bob Kriess was the chief in Iowa City, and he was followed by
Webster. We worked for both of them, about half-time while we were in school, full-time
during vacations. At that time, the university was running three semesters a year. We went
back to school in August of `44, and we finished in January of `47. We then worked
time at the laboratory for the Corps until the summer of `47, when we got jobs in Vicksburg
at the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) of the Corps in Mississippi.
Engineering Curriculum
At the University of Iowa, how many courses did you take in hydraulics in your civil
engineering curriculum Were there a lot of courses in hydraulics and hydrology or were
there just general engineering courses that may have touched on those subjects?
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