Theodore M.
ink and the specifications for a railing along the levee in Wilkes-Barre. I was
proud of that. That was my biggest job. I did the whole thing from A to
including getting it ready for bids and lettering in my own name in the title
block, where it said "Prepared by..
Well, the
Creek pressure conduit was built around 1940 or `41 but the
first flood that came down out of
Creek went into a hydraulic jump in the
impounding basin. The water overtopped and washed out the earth levees and
flooded down the stream depositing the earth and fragments of the structure
down on the streets of Kingston and Edwardsville. This is written up in the
News Record, but I can't remember if it was 1942 or `43 or when
that flood came. And somebody just hadn't realized that this little stream
coming down there and suddenly coming out into a pond would go into a
hydraulic jump.
That's why I say the Corps would probably just as soon forget about the
project-I'm probably one of the few people that remembers what happened,
but John Starr would remember it, and I'm sure some others around the
Baltimore District would.
Now, this was just a very little project. wasn't a separate project. It was part
of the Kingston-Edwardsville project which had levees and other components.
I'm sure they fixed it up, but by that time, I was long gone from the district.
Could you tell me something about the reputation of the Corps of Engineers
among young engineers at this particular time? Was the Corps of Engineers a
place where young engineers just out of engineering school would want to go?
Was it a place where you would go if you couldn't find jobs with an
independent consultant or an independent engineer? You know, it was a
controversial agency, even at that time.
This was at a time, near the end of the Depression of 1930s. Some of the war
work had picked up but there was still a lot of unemployment. People wanted
to get on a payroll. They didn't care where. And the general feeling was that
government payrolls were good payrolls. They encouraged us at Hopkins-in
our junior and senior years-to take civil service exams. And so I had taken the
exams-everybody in our civil engineering class had-for draftsmen and for
engineering aide and for junior engineer. And one of our college classmates
who had had to drop out after the junior year-Bob Linthicum, who was a
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