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drink a little carton of milk. I thought it was because he had ulcers or
something. Later somebody told me that he did it to save money.
Now this is far removed from a career item, but I have to tell you about what
happened that fall when we had a golf tournament at the Bureau of
Reclamation. Everybody was paired by lot, and my first match was with D. C.
MacConaghy, my big boss.
I had played a lot of golf in Baltimore, and after we got out of college and
started working, we usually took caddies. I'd only played golf in Denver once,
out at the Case Course, so I'd never been on the city park course. I got there
first, before Mac arrived, and the first thing I did was engage a caddy.
Because, I didn't know the course, and, I just thought, "Well, gosh, the big
boss of the whole Spillway Section-I had a couple of squad bosses in between
me and him-would certainly use a caddy." He was at least a P-6 in the
government hierarchy. But when MacConaghy got there I saw that he had what
we used to call a Sunday bag, a light-weight canvas bag that you carried
yourself. We went out to the first tee and he looked at the caddy and he looked
at me, and he was obviously quite shocked. I felt a little queer and said, "Well,
you know, I don't know my way around this course," and I was hoping that
there would be an earthquake and the ground would open up and swallow me.
But it didn't. So we teed off. used to hit a fairly long ball, and the course
there is flat and hard in the fall. I was hitting these drives about 250 yards and
old Mac would come in, and he'd hit a ball that would go straight down the
fairway about
yards. Then he'd take his second shot and he'd be up to me.
To make the situation worse, I started winning. And we got up to about to the
14th hole or the-1 think it was either the 13th or the 14th hole and I was ahead
by something like-1 guess it was on the 14th hole and it was five and four, and
Mac said, "Well, that's it," picks up his bag and (Laughter) started to walk
back to the car. Of course, I had to go with him. I felt that it really put me off
on a bad foot with MacConaghy, and I felt that I would never make it with
him. But it turned out that he was pretty rough with everybody. Later, one of
the other fellows that had been working in the Spillway Section as a junior
engineer for six or eight years, Boyd Brown, and he really was a mature
person-at least compared to me-told me that Mac never recommended
anyone for a promotion. About that time the
Act went through, and
I'll never forget Boyd Brown saying, "Well, it takes an act of Congress to get
me a 0 raise.
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