Theodore M.
course, this got me into a lot more contacts with all of the federal agencies
from that time on, not just the Corps but the Department of Agriculture, the
Federal Power Commission and-what did they call it-the Federal Security
Administration that had the Water Pollution Control office of the Public Health
Service. They were never a member, but they were kind of an associate
member, and the Department of Commerce eventually became a member. And
the other job I had was collecting and collating the department's comments on
Federal Power Commission applications for hydroelectric power projects.
Now, when I say I had that job it was because-after a year or so-1 was made
chief of the section. I think they called it the Coordination of Plans Section, or
something like that, which was responsible for preparing the comments. Later,
we set up another section to deal with the environmental questions, and I had
that too, and had the pleasure of hiring John Starr, my old boss from the
Baltimore District, to come over and work with me on that, because he was
very much oriented toward environmental matters. In fact, after he retired from
the Corps, he's written environmental columns for the
paper in Baltimore.
Anyway, he was delighted to come to work with us-1 don't know how I
happened to get him to come, but it was right up his alley and I needed
somebody and he was a very conscientious and reliable person. He came over,
probably around 1949, to handle the environmental work because I really had
the two sections, the Coordination of Plans Section and the Environmental
Section. By that time we could see the environmental movement building up,
and also we already had to form to the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act and
were dealing with the Park Service all the time, so this was a special section set
up just for that, and John Starr was a natural for it.
As a matter of fact, we were able to give him a promotion to bring him over.
I'm really getting to the nitty-gritty, but that was one of the reasons he came.
We gave him a promotion. But John didn't stay long because the Korean War
started up, and the Baltimore District needed him, and I think they gave him
another promotion to come back. So it was really a good thing all around for
John Starr, and I did appreciate him-he was a wonderful person for a young
man to start working for. He lifted me out of that drafting business and got me
to design work; he started the program with the Johns Hopkins graduate
school. And so I always thought I owed an awful lot to John Starr, and he was
a wonderful person.
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