Theodore
do the 40 hours a month on the NYA job, and I borrowed the money for the
last year's tuition. My scholarship, was cut off after the third year and the
university loaned me the money. They said that was the way they'd do it. They
wanted to make the money for the trustees' scholarships available to people that
couldn't otherwise go. But I had a good enough record that the college was just
willing to just take my note for
which at that time was 0. In those
days that was high tuition. It was the same as Princeton-I think MIT had gone
up to 0 and was the highest. My sister had graduated from college in
tuition was only 0 a year at Western Maryland College.
I was going to ask you, I'm interested in what kind of subjects Wolman
probably covered in a course on social and legal aspects of engineering. Would
he have covered things like multipurpose river development, for instance?
Oh, definitely, -and he covered all of the things that the National Resources
Committee was doing, and that's where I first learned about the Corps of
Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation, and you remember, this is at the time
when the Corps was building Bonneville and the Bureau of Reclamation was
building Hoover Dam, the Central Valley project, Grand Coulee, and all of
those Depression Era projects. Each person was assigned a topic-one would
cover irrigation and one would cover flood control, and so that's where we did
start our research-but we were looking more at the underlying-the underlying
reasons for all these programs.
But it was much more than just water resources because the course was also
dealing with what we now call infrastructure-highways and other public
works-but with a heavy emphasis on municipal water supply and sewerage,
which was his field.
Of course, at the same time, I was taking sanitary engineering under Dr. John
Geyer and I was taking bridge engineering under Professor [Thomas] Comber.
At that time, Johns Hopkins was putting out graduates who could leave their
desks, or their academic environment and go to work for a consulting
engineering firm and design a bridge or design a structure. We designed plate
girders. We designed concrete arches. We designed all kinds of bridge trusses,
to the extent of actually drawing them and detailing the number of rivets and
designing every part of the structure, and so that's why the course was so
rigorous. We were probably spending 40 hours in classes and laboratories, and
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