Water Resources People and Issues
then there was homework. Being editor of the
also took quite a bit
of my time. I don't know how I did it all.
And I had a few other activities. I had been on the YMCA [Young Men's
Christian Association] cabinet and was editor of the YMCA handbook, was a
member of the student council, and various other things, which I don't
remember much now.
But anyway, I was really ready to go to work on a drafting table for Greiner
Engineering Company or Whitman, Requardt and Smith, or any of those
companies. It was 1939 when I graduated, and I started to pound the pavements
looking for a job.
Now, going back to the summers while I was at Johns Hopkins. The
requirements for a degree at the time were that you have at least six months of
some kind of practical engineering or subprofessional engineering work before
you get your degree. If you didn't have it, you'd get a roll of white paper at the
end if you otherwise had completed the course requirements, and you didn't get
your diploma-it was called "Bachelor of Engineering"-you didn't get that
until you had six months of experience. They didn't want to put out somebody
that didn't know which end was up as far as work was concerned. My summer
job after my sophomore and junior years was surveying for the REA [Rural
Electrification Association] power lines in southern Maryland. I worked for a
Colonel P. M. Anderson, whose office was in Washington.
Q: What were you doing?
A: He had contracts with the Rural Electrification Administration under which I
worked on the survey for the Southern Maryland Tri-County Electric Co-op in
the summer of 1937 and again in the summer of 1938.
I got the job from an ad in the newspaper: salary, a week plus car
expenses. I hitchhiked over to Washington for this job interview. Colonel
Anderson's office was in the Investment Building, 15th and Street, and I'll
never forget that hitchhiking. I went down to the Washington Boulevard in
Baltimore and a guy with a semitrailer stopped, picked me up, and when we
got out of town he said, "Say," he said, "I'm getting awful sleepy. Could you
drive this rig for me?" It was not an
It was a smaller
trailer-I guess you'd say a lo-wheeler or something like that. But it was a big
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