Water Resources People and Issues
No, no. We dealt with Agriculture and, at that time, it was a fellow named
Ernie Weicking and he was what they called land use coordinator, and Howard
Cook was on his
Right.
A: And Nat Back was with him.
Right.
A: Of course, these people all were in the group we dealt with in Agriculture,
along with Dick Hertzler who eventually became special assistant to the
Assistant Secretary of the Army. We threw bricks back and forth at each other
in the form of letters. Michael Strauss was a very strong character. He really
was one of the most unforgettable people I ever worked with. At one time,
when the House of Representatives was controlled by the Republicans, the
Congress passed a law that said, "No part of this appropriation for the Bureau
of Reclamation shall be used to pay any commissioner or any regional director
who is not a registered engineer or a professional engineer. And this had the
effect of terminating Michael Strauss' salary and Richard Boke's salary. Boke
was the director of the Bureau's Region 2 in Sacramento. And that, I think,
was done pretty much by Senator [William F.]
of California, who
was furious with the Bureau because it was trying to get reimbursement for the
irrigation allocation of the Pine Flat project. The Corps had built Pine Flat and
the Bureau insisted, under the 1944 Flood Control Act, that the sale of
irrigation water had to be handled by the Secretary of the Interior, or the
Bureau of Reclamation.
And so that fight was brewing, and Senator
wrote a book called
Rule the
excoriating the Bureau of Reclamation. He
thought it was a grab of power, and so this was the response agreed to by the
chairman of the House Appropriations Committee that year. And Mike just
laughed and kept on working, and eventually became chairman of
Of course, that gave me an awful lot more exposure to all of the agency people
because I was his secretary and wrote the minutes, and handled other functions
like that.
64
Previous Page
