Water Resources People and Issues
But we went ahead, and we published the agency studies as we went along.
During the same time, the committee held 23 public hearings in 21 different
states. The way we decided where to have hearings was whenever a senator
asked us to have a hearing, we would agree to have a hearing. For that reason,
the hearings were almost all held in states where we had members, and we kind
of left the Southeast out of it. We didn't leave New England out of it, however,
because Senator Edmund Muskie asked us to have a hearing in Maine and
Senator John Kennedy asked us to have a hearing in Massachusetts. And Hugh
Scott, of course, was a member of the committee, so we had one in
Philadelphia. So we had three hearings in the Northeast, but we didn't have
any in the Southeast, although we did get to New Orleans.
We had this series of hearings during the fall and winter of 1959-60 and that
pretty well occupied my time while the agencies were working on the
background studies. We used a military air transport plane which was assigned
to us, and we flew all over the country. During those trips I found Senator Kerr
to be a very interesting and stimulating person to work with.
One of the things that happened is that my father had died just before I started
working for the committee, and this kind of leaves a gap in one's life. So
Senator Kerr became a very fatherly figure to me. He had one faculty that my
father had. My father could look at a column of numbers and add them up in
his head. I'm talking about a column of numbers with four digits or something
like that. He could just somehow add them up in his head. He never could
understand why people had trouble adding each column of numbers and
carrying the tens over to the next column and all that business that they teach
you in grade school, because he seemed to be able to add columns of numbers
by inspection. And Senator Kerr could do the same thing.
Senator Kerr used to take the staff to lunch sometimes and we'd have maybe
10 or people with many different entrees. When the waiter would bring in
the check Senator Kerr might take one look at it, and he didn't look and see
who had what or anything like that, but he'd look at the total, and he'd hand
it back to the waiter and say, "There's a mistake here." And the waiter would
take the check and add it up again, and he would come back and say, "I'm
sorry, Senator, the cashier made a mistake." And there had been a mistake of
a dollar or so in adding up a check which came up to or . And Kerr
would pay it, and maybe give the waiter a bill for a tip. He always paid
cash; I never saw him use a credit card.
132
Previous Page
