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Survey Party, Constructing Quartermaster,
Arsenal, Maryland
About May or June of 1940 the marks on the civil service exam that I had
taken when I was in college came through. You found out only when you were
offered a job-at least, that's what I remember, because I didn't know anything
about it until I got an offer of a position as senior engineering aide from the
Constructing Quartermaster at Camp Holabird in east Baltimore.
You remember, this was between the two wars. The Corps was not involved
in military construction. The Corps was solely involved in civil functions at the
time. And the Constructing Quartermaster was doing military construction
work, and they were just starting to work on the chemical warfare depot at
Arsenal. The offer I got was an invitation to interview for a job as
senior engineering aide at Edgewood.
So I went down to Camp Holabird for the interview. I had to borrow my
mother's car because mine had been wrecked in the accident. I didn't have a
car. I don't remember who interviewed me, but they offered me the position
as chief of a survey party, SP-6, on the spot. It was what I wanted to do,
working outdoors, so they hired me and I gave notice to the Corps of Engineers
that I was leaving in two weeks.
And John said, "Golly, Ted, we could have gotten an SP-6 rating for you if
we'd known you were on that register. We could have given you a senior
engineering aide position. You certainly deserve it. You've been here a year.
He was very effusive about it. And I had to say, "Well, you didn't tell me that,
and I've already accepted this other job. The other thing, I was going to be
surveying, and I was chafing at being in the office, especially in the
summertime.
And so I think it was probably around July 1940, I started to work at
Arsenal for the Constructing Quartermaster, surveying for the
chemical warfare depot down in a new area that was opening up. We surveyed
for railroad lines and sidings and located phosphorus storage places and other
facilities and eventually surveyed all the way down that long peninsula that
goes down, I think, between the Gunpowder and the Bush Rivers. I think it was
called the Santo Domingo area-land that they had bought up years earlier.
There were old decaying farmhouses and dirt roads, and I had to survey some
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