Theodore M.
My reply was that I was not interested and went home and eventually returned
to my home office in Salem. But the next thing I knew, my boss down at the
Bureau, who later became assistant commissioner of the Bureau of
Reclamation, called me into his office and told me, "The Corps of Engineers
wants you up in Seattle. They want to transfer you."
And I said, "Oh, I talked to them, but I told them I didn't want that job." He
said, "It doesn't look like you've got much choice. This is an official transfer,
a war service transfer, and he said, "I don't think you can get out of it."
Well, I looked, and the salary was ,600 a year, assistant engineer, P-2, so
I moved up to Seattle and took that job with the Seattle District.
At that time, the Seattle District was handling Alaska and our work extended
as far east as Cut Bank and Glasgow and all of the rest of Montana for the
military work, and we had a lot of HECP and HEDP, Harbor Entrance
Command Posts and Harbor Entrance Defense Posts along the Puget Sound and
out along the ocean. I was put in the Specifications Section more or less
unwillingly, but it was work that I could do. In many instances, however, we
were writing specifications after the projects had been built. And also, we had
to follow the guide specifications for military construction which were more or
less cut and dried. We also had all kinds of critical material lists that we had
to follow. Some of it didn't make much sense.
One of the materials that was very critical during World War II was two-inch
dimension lumber. They were using all the two-by-fours and two-by-sixes for
crating military equipment that was being shipped-well, both ways, to Europe
and to the Pacific theater of war. And so we wrote the specifications to prohibit
the use of two-inch dimension lumber, specifying alternatives that they use,
such as building barracks out of brick or stone or anything, but positively no
two-inch dimension lumber.
When we got out to a construction job once in a great while, we saw what the
contractors were doing. They didn't have any trouble with not using two-inch
dimension lumber. They just used four-by-fours and four-by-sixes instead of
two-by-fours and two-by-sixes.
That was one of the sorry aspects of the wartime economy. They would set
some uniform rule in Washington which just was not adaptable to the Pacific
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