Water Resources People and Issues
for my salary and the secretaries' salary, but not enough to do very much else.
The other reason was that I was getting tired and wanted to have some
relaxation in the summer. A third reason, which I hate to mention because it
sounds crass, is that there was going to be a cost-of-living adjustment in the
federal annuities on July and if I were to get on the retirement rolls before
then, I would get an increase in my annuity. This was at a time when inflation
was increasing and I had two children of college age.
In order to meet my schedule, I had to short cut the Government Printing
Office. We had all of the report on computers, so it was going to be possible
to print it direct from the tapes. This was in the early stages of computerized
printing, but I had investigated and found a commercial service that could use
our tapes and go right into typeface. So I went ahead and put the review drafts
of the report into the single-spaced form they would have when finally printed.
This resulted in reviewers making fewer changes than if you have a
spaced draft on which it is easy to interlineate and write in changes. So I
worked from galley proofs from about the middle of April on.
At that time, you were not supposed to do that. You were supposed to give a
copy to the Government Printing Office, and they would prepare the galley
proofs. But I had talked to people that I knew on the staff of the Joint
Committee on Printing and in the Government Printing Office and made sure
that what I did was not going to be wasted. So we prepared the final
commission report on galley proofs. Every member of the commission read
every page of that galley through several iterations.
It was a big report, over 500 pages, and there are actually 238
recommendations spread through it. I was the only one left, except for Bob
Baker and a couple of secretaries, working to get the transcripts of the hearings
in shape and organizing the files containing 7,000 or 8,000 letters of comment
about the draft report. We had put out a draft in October 1972, and this was in
the spring of `73 that I was finishing the report.
I remember getting those galleys back from the commissioners and sitting at the
big conference room table with seven galleys spread out before me, with one
clean set that I was marking on. I would go over all of the commissioners'
changes and incorporate them in the clean copy. There were places where I had
to resolve differences in language changes proposed by different
commissioners, and then send out another set of galleys when it was on a
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