Water Resources
and Issues
Buzz was in the Project Planning Division, and he made it sound pretty good.
Sure enough, when I got back to Seattle, there was a telegram offering me a
job and a promotion to go back. Now, remember, this was right after the war.
I always felt that the government employees financed that war by the low
salaries they were paid in comparison to those paid in the war industries. I was
still just a P-3. The salary had finally been raised to about ,500, and if I
took this job as a P-4 I'd go up to ,300. Little did I know how much more
it was going to cost to live in Washington.
My wife didn't want to come, but I remember telling her, "Well, if we go back
there, your family's getting old, mine's getting old, we'll be able to visit
them," and that was the argument I used to convince her to give up what she
thought was Heaven and come back to Washington-for two years. Much later
she said that what happened was I got Potomac fever and I wouldn't go back,
but what did happen is every time I was given an opportunity to go back, the
Bureau would figure out some way to promote me or give me something more
interesting to do here.
Project Planning Division, Bureau of Reclamation
So, we came to Washington in May 1946, to work for the Bureau of
Reclamation in the Project Planning Division-we called it a branch then, the
Branch of Project Planning-and I was given the job of liaison with the Corps
of Engineers. Under the Flood Control Act of 1944 and the Rivers and Harbors
Act of 1945, the Secretary of the Interior had to comment on every Corps of
Engineers report, and vice versa. The Corps, or rather the Secretary of the
Army-he was still called Secretary of War then-had to comment on all of the
Bureau's reports. This was all coordinated through the Federal Inter-Agency
River Basin Commission-we used to call it FIREBRICK-and I became the
special assistant to Michael Strauss, the Commissioner of Reclamation, who
was the department's representative on the FIREBRICK. He had been Under
Secretary of the Interior and he brought the FIREBRICK function with him when
he became Commissioner of Reclamation.
So here Michael Strauss was representing the Fish and Wildlife Service and the
Park Service and all the other agencies of the department, because he was the
departmental representative, and I served as kind of as his executive secretary
for this function preparing him for meetings and going to the meetings. Of
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