Water Resources
and Issues
Corps hand for many, many years-he was fairly good at drafting, and he was
hired in a sub-professional position in the Baltimore District before he
graduated.
And so I guess there were no connotations that you only took a job with the
government when you couldn't get one somewhere else. They were good jobs.
I don't remember any controversy about the Corps in Baltimore.
My particular class of civil engineers thought it was just great to work for the
Corps of Engineers because I had the highest salary of anybody in our class.
Of course, we only had seven civil engineers in the class of 1939. One of them
went to Glen L. Martin, detailing for stress analysis on airplane construction
at 75 cents an hour, which comes out to a week. Another one was a
timekeeper on an engineering project at a week. The guy who was the best
draftsman got the first job, but he was only an SP-3 or something, because
they were hiring draftsmen at
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,620 a year. And he thought that the Corps
was just great, paying
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,800; that was a good salary in 1939.
Four of our class of seven went to work for the government. Two of them with
the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and one with the Coast and
Geodetic Survey. Another one went to Dupont and another went to the gas and
electric company. But I was the only one that went to work for the Corps.
Graduate Work, Johns Hopkins University
I've already summarized the work that I did that first year. Around September,
John Starr came to me and said, "Some of us are thinking about registering for
graduate work at Hopkins. Would you be interested in working toward a
master's degree? We would have to go out and be on campus for one course
during the day, and we could take another course at night. Hopkins required
you to be enrolled in the day school if you wanted to get a master's degree.
We were working a five-and-a-half day, 39-hour week at the time with lots of
unpaid overtime, which was recorded as
time," so there was no
problem getting off for an afternoon class, especially since the boss was also
enrolled in the course. So I agreed to do it, along with John Starr and two
others from the Baltimore District, Philip
who was working in the
hydrology section at that time, and Gordon Williams, who later went with
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