Theodore M.
Earlier, I think I told you, the reason that we hadn't done this study in the
Environmental Studies Board was that the study of the water purification plant
and of the Washington water supply was considered to be technology, so it was
taken over by the Assembly of Engineering. So we started down the road
toward having two boards, which didn't make much sense to me. But it soon
turned into a bureaucratic struggle. Bob White had become chairman of the
CPSMR, and Guy Stever was the chairman of CETS. Neither one would give
an inch, and I just couldn't get them to agree on one board. Then letters started
coming in from people like Gilbert White and Tom Malone telling Frank Press
that there was no way to separate water science from water technology.
Finally, enough people complained about the idea of splitting water technology
from water science that Frank and his executive officer, Phil Smith, agreed that
we would have one board and it would report to both commissions.
I stayed on for another year or so as the CPSMR member of the Water
Sciences and Technology Board staff. We called it the
instead of the
Water Resources Board so we could call it
I stayed on, working
three days a week because there wasn't enough work to keep me busy more
than that, until I was 65 years old. I guess I felt as if I'd been kicked upstairs,
but I didn't really want to take on any new responsibilities.
Also, I had bought a sailboat a year earlier and had gotten a Coast Guard
captain's license so I could take paying passengers. My return to sailing really
went back to my memories of the 1973 trip to Mount
when my legs
had given out and a trip to Switzerland in 1977 with the Seattle Mountaineers
on which I had not been able to climb any of the high peaks because of the
deep snow. I do love to get to the top of high mountains. Life is so simple
when you get to the top of a mountain; there's only one thing to do and that's
to go down. And it's so easy to make that decision.
So I had decided to return to my teenage passion for sailing which I started in
a big way by buying two boats for chartering. This was facilitated by the
Reagan tax philosophy which permitted use of the accelerated cost recovery
system, so that it was financially advantageous to buy a boat rather than to keep
on chartering. It worked out so well for the first boat that I bought a second
boat and decided that sail boat chartering would be my new career. That's why
I'd gotten my Coast Guard captain's license so I could make it a business and
spend a lot more time sailing.
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