Water Resources
and Issues
you bought margarine you had to mix it up with a little packet of yellow dye
if you wanted it to look like butter. And for butter, the price was just
unbelievably high so that nobody could afford it.
So the Bureau had this Food for Victory program and that's what we were
working on with the Green-Puyallup project, which would have been an easy
and quick project to build, because they didn't need storage since those rivers
flowed all summer there, right out of the Cascades. We surveyed up and down
that valley locating irrigable land. We had a hard time getting a survey crew
together, and I broke every rule in the book to get the job done. I hired a
year-old man and I hired a
boy as
The old man walked so
slowly-he was carrying a big
stadia rod-that you had to look at him
twice to see whether he was moving or on station, because he always walked
with the rod, holding it up over his shoulder because it was too hard to lift it
up if he ever let it get down. I got my knuckles wrapped for hiring the
old boy because you weren't supposed to hire anybody for the government
unless they were 16 years old, but we got out of that all right.
One of the aspects of this was that I was working with the Army engineers in
Seattle on the flood control benefits on Green-Puyallup as well as earlier on the
Crooked River with staff of the Portland District. One of the things I noticed
was here I was, a junior engineer-by that time, my
raise had
pushed me all the way up to ,100. And I noticed I was working with Army
engineers who were at the P-2 or P-3 level, and it just struck me as unfair that
I was working with these people at a much lower salary. Also I was very
dubious as to the importance of the Food for Victory program.
Specifications Section, Seattle District
Earlier, I had tried to get in the Army Specialist Corps as an officer because
they would take people in who had physical impairments. I still walked with
a limp because of my right leg being shorter. I had made an application, but
nothing came of it. When I just asked somebody casually at the Seattle District
if there were any openings, I was asked to send in a resume. That led
immediately to an offer of a position doing war work in the Specifications
Section. This didn't sound very interesting to me, but the personnel officer
said, "We need you. We need you. We're doing war work. We need you."
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