Theodore M.
I didn't get involved with that program at all, and I suppose my first
involvement with it was when the book was published. I had several very close
friends who were involved in that. Maynard Hufschmidt, with whom I had
been associated in the Department of the Interior, was one of the people who
had quite a hand in that along with Blair Bower, who is another very good
friend of mine. There were some others, members of the Bureau of
Reclamation and the Corps' staff who were working on that, and Francis
Murphy who was an expert on flood control that I knew from my Corps of
Engineers days.
I may have talked to some of them about it earlier, but my first fixed
recollection was when Arthur Maass, who was one of my college classmates,
came to testify about it before-probably before Senator Anderson's committee
on Interior and Insular Affairs. I hadn't even read the book at the time and it's
not exactly the kind of report that you would read unless you were having
trouble sleeping, but it had some good concepts in it. I knew that just from
knowing a little bit about it and having heard what Arthur said about it. So,
when Arthur and I were having lunch after the hearing, I suggested that we
should try it out on a sample basin. I'm probably exaggerating a little, but my
recollection was that Arthur-I don't think he would like it if I called him by
the nickname we used to call him at Johns Hopkins, which was
How do you spell that?
I never had to spell it, but I guess it was O-T-T-S.
Why did you call him that?
I think it may have been a childhood nickname, but I don't think he liked to
remember it. Anyway, he seemed to recoil in horror and said something like,
"Ted, no, this is a theoretical analysis. This isn't ready to be applied yet." Of
course, my idea was to try to apply it in one basin and see if it worked. That
was my recollection of my first introduction to it, and eventually I referred to
it a lot and I used it in discussions, but it needed a lot of practical work to be
of value. If it had been available to the Select Committee, I would probably
picked it up and run with it, and probably stubbed my toe.
But about that time, the Water Resources Council, starting from the base of
Senate Document 97, started to prepare the principles and standards. They did
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