Theodore
But we had a little fellow as our administrative assistant in the Branch of
Project Planning. His name was Cleo F. Layton. And he was one of these
people who knew how to get things done. He wrote up the papers, and because
I had not been in grade for a year he had to get the approval of the Civil
Service Commission. This was probably a promotion from P-6 to P-7 and I
hadn't been a P-6 very long. You were supposed to be a year in grade before
you were given a grade promotion.
Cleo Layton knew everybody, and so, in two hours he walked the papers
through the Department of the Interior and the next morning he walked the
papers through the Civil Service Commission-which wasn't right next door
to the Department of the Interior at the time; it was another building. I used to
do a lot of walking papers through the department too. That's one way I got
things done. I don't think anybody does it any more. That's why it takes so
long to get things done.
And so by the next afternoon, Mike Strauss wrote a blistering memo back to
Bill Warne saying that he wasn't going to release me, and that there wasn't any
advantage in me going, and then he blistered him for not going through
channels. Mike was better at writing memos than I was. Eventually, however,
Bill got another person from the Bureau, Morgan
to take that job and
handle the coordination of the department's views on Federal Power
Commission applications.
And really, when you get down to it, there's no reason the Bureau should have
been doing that, but it had done that way only because the commissioner was
the representative on the FIREBRICK.
But I still was having a lot of fun doing other things. We tangled with the
Corps on Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River. I was sent out to Boise on a
rush job to get the Hells Canyon report in before the Corps got its 308 review
report completed. The planning had been finished by regional staff but I was
kind of the facilitator to speed up the completion of the report. We also worked
all night one time to get our Columbia basin report up to the Congress ahead
of the Corps' report. It was at the time of the big flood, the
Flood?
That must have been about 1948, wasn't it? Do you remember
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