Water Resources People and Issues
And Abel had the facility of making it all come alive the same way that Captain
Kilboume made English literature come alive for me. For example, I had to do
a paper on metropolitan area governments and I floundered around. I
interviewed the chief engineer of the Baltimore County metropolitan area
government and I read all kinds of things and I wrote the worst mishmash of
stuff you can imagine. And showed it to Abel, which we had to do before we
presented it. This was a seminar course. Each week somebody did a seminar,
and this was one of my subjects. He took my draft and he read it and he asked
me two or three questions, and all of a sudden, I understood what it was all
about, and I went back and revised the paper and it was a reasonably good
paper.
But he didn't tell me anything. He just asked me a couple of questions and it
made it all come together, and he did that with me on several occasions. He
was that kind of a teacher. But I really only had him in that one course. Of
course, I also had him as a boss because I was his student assistant, but he
never got me to really help him with any of his work. It was mostly sorting out
all those publications and asking where to put them. Of course, he would talk
about what was going on in Washington and tell me about his meetings as he
was almost commuting daily to Washington in those days, to the meetings of
the Water Resources Committee of the National Resources Committee at that
time. It was before they called it the NRPB [National Resources Planning
Board].
So I got to know about the alphabet agencies as they called them-and, of
course, Abel also was very much involved in either the PWA [Public Works
Administration] or the WPA [Works Progress Administration]. I can't
remember now. He was Maryland director or something like that, because he
was a very, very competent administrator. He really handled his staff the same
way he handled me when I showed him a mishmash of a paper, and by asking
two or three questions, he showed me how to fix it up. This is the sign of a
good administrator. You get your staff to develop and do all the work by
asking them questions, getting them to think.
It's hard to say whether my exposure to Abel Wolman is what got me into
water resources or not, because of some other things happening.
In my senior year, I was editor of the college yearbook, the
it was
called. I gave up working for Abel because I just couldn't see my way clear to
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