Margaret S. Petersen
Mostly you learned from on the job experience, actually working.
Yes.
A:
In looking at old papers that might interest you, I found this 1947 letter from WES saying
they have a vacancy, signed by Joe Tiffany. This is a letter from the St. Paul District. I
didn't realize who signed it until today, when I looked at it. I knew him later [Walter
Wilson] when he was Chief of Engineers, but I didn't associate him back to this.
I think he wasn't there very long before he went to Mobile District. But if you had any
exposure to him, you'll notice that a lot of his teaching points were by example, stories of
personal examples.
Oh, really? I knew him mostly through PIANC [Permanent International Association of
A:
Navigation Congresses] and ASCE [American Society of Civil Engineers] meetings.
Waterways Experiment Station
After the University of Iowa, both Irene and you went to work at the Waterways Experiment
Station at Vicksburg.
We didn't have the faintest idea where Vicksburg was. We couldn't find it on the maps we
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had. WES had planned to assign one of us to Vicksburg and one to Jackson [Clinton,
Mississippi] where they were building the Mississippi Basin Model (MBM), and we said,
well, we really wanted to live together, and so they assigned both of us to Jackson. The
MBM was constructed on what had been a prisoner of war camp where
had been interned. Actual work on the model was begun in August 1943 with German
prisoner-of-war labor. They rough-graded the
model site and constructed some
85,000 feet of storm drains underlying the site. That work was completed in the fall of 1946,
about when the prisoners were repatriated, and the first concrete paving on the Arkansas
River reach was placed in August 1947, about when we arrived. The MBM was a model of
the 1.25 million square mile watershed of the Mississippi River constructed at a horizontal
scale of
and a vertical scale of 1: 100. The streams and flood plains were molded in
concrete and the overall area was rough-graded and sodded.
I worked on research projects most of the time and Irene operated the Arkansas and Missouri
reaches of the model sections. It didn't take long before we knew that a bachelors degree just
wasn't adequate for what we wanted to do. We went back to the University of Iowa in `52
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