Theodore M.
A week or so later, I got a call from Conrad Taeuber, and he said something
like, "We have now reevaluated your request and decided that it would be a
very interesting study for us, and we will be able to do it just the way you
wanted it done." About a week or two later, the nomination of Louis Strauss
to be Secretary of Commerce was voted on in the Senate. Louis Strauss, as
chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was one of the architects of the
Dixon-Yates fiasco and was anti-public power; he certainly had nothing in
common with Senator Kerr who had been a public power man from way back.
And Kerr voted for his confirmation.
I don't know for sure whether there was any connection or not, but the vote
seemed unusual. Nobody expected Kerr to vote for confirmation. Of course,
Strauss was not confirmed, so it didn't make much difference.
Well, it's an interesting anecdote.
There were a lot of little incidents like that which I look back on with a lot of
interest because it was my first close association with political figures. Of
course, having been in Washington for 13 years I knew how they operated.
Getting back to the putting all of the federal agency contributions together in
the water supply/demand study, we hit a roadblock in the Public Health
said, "We just can't do it. You're making
Service. My friend Mel
some gross assumptions here that we can't substantiate." After a lot of
arguments they agreed to help us by paying George Reid, a professor at the
University of Oklahoma, to make the study that we needed. This was trying to
get from pollution loading to dissolved oxygen in each of the water resources
regions. There's a formula called the Streeter-Phelps formula which is used to
do that for a particular project. If you put the effluent from a sewage plant into
a river, immediately the BOD
oxygen demand] in the sewage uses
up oxygen in the river. The Streeter-Phelps formula is the one that tells you
how the river recovers as the pollution is assimilated in the flowing water.
George Reid was paid by the Public Health Service to help us with this, with
the understanding that the work would not be attributed to them. George Reid
was another of those people who were fearless in the face of bureaucracy, as
was Nathaniel Wollman.
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