John W. Morris
I had applied for an electrical engineering degree at Rensselaer and two other universities. Iowa
A
was not one of them; however, in its wisdom, the Army selected Iowa, which turned out to be
precisely the right place to send me.
While the master's degree was in civil engineering, the course was oriented towards water
resources-sewage, water supply, hydraulics, hydrology, and similar courses which involved the
work in the Corps' civil works program. We had a very good structural course that evaluated the
design of dams, but to do that we had to know how to determine the reservoir capacity, runoff,
and all those things. So Iowa turned out to be-from my standpoint-an excellent choice. I would
use my studies at Iowa over and over again in the years ahead.
Did most of your classmates and most of the engineers of your level, if not all of them, go back
for a master's degree? Was that pretty common?
A
Yes. The policy in the Corps of Engineers then was for those regular officers who would remain
in the Army after World War II to have graduate-level education. That policy became quite clear
to me later when General [Emerson] Itschner was Chief of Engineers and I was assigned to the
personnel assignment business. His idea was that every regular Army officer would have a
graduate-level degree. It would be in a basic engineering field unless he had a strong bachelor's
degree in engineering, and then he could take another subject, such as industrial engineering, but
he would get a graduate degree, master's degree.
Q.. That's a policy that begins to change a little bit by the
A ..
Yes, we can get into this later because, as mentioned, one of my later assignments I served in the
Career Management Division. In those days the officers belonged to the Chief of Engineers.
Q .. Right.
A.. When that changed, the Army policy was considerably softer than thatwhich the
of
Engineers had managed under its own assignment centers, but we'll get to that.
Q .. You talked about the fact that you'd had a short course at West Point. Looking at your classmates
or civilians there, how well prepared do you think West Point had made you for this advanced
degree?
A
Well, that's
first off, you must keep in mind that our class and other classes who
went into the war out of West Point had a unique maturation period, which does not occur in
peacetime. We all came back from the war having decided not to leave the Army, having decided
to make it a career, having gone through the war. Even though it'd only been five years since
we'd graduated, we as a group, I think, had had experiences that made us appreciate the
importance of preparing ourselves for a peacetime military life. I believe our attitude was a little
different than that of someone who had not had those experiences.
Our were all in the top 20 of the entire graduate college of engineering. Even if we weren't
necessarily the smartest or 20, our conscientiousness to do well was stronger.
Q .. So Iowa was a pretty busy
lots of studying and the new family.
A
Yes, it was a very busy year. It was a nice year, though, because our fellow students and families
remain today as our dearest friends. The engineers, of course, are a fairly close family anyhow,
and certainly our classmates were close. I mentioned a few earlier. Besides Gerry and me, the
class of June 1943 at Iowa included my roommate at West Point, Frank Dirkes, and wife June,
our best man and bachelor Dutch Ingwersen, and Jim Betts, who married Bonnie and named our
daughter Susan. In addition, Dwayne and Harriet Terry, Trev and Helen Sawyer, Howard and
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