Engineer Memoirs
President Lyndon Johnson dedicated the Eufaula Reservoir on September 25, 1964, while
Colonel John W. Morris was District Engineer of the Tulsa District.
Later, we prepared an SOP [standing operating procedure] on presidential dedications, and the
Chief's office used it as a guide for quite a while. That may have been the only SOP anybody had
written on how to handle a presidential dedication. Ours was very successful; we had 45,000
people.
That pretty much takes care of the first one and a half years, and the thread through all this,
though, was finishing the Arkansas project. The political consortium, which really was coalesced
by the efforts of Don McBride, was successful in getting President Johnson to increase the budget
on one project in the whole public works program, the Arkansas River project.
There wasn't a great deal of money added. It was like million or million, but it was
critical to staying on schedule. General Dunn required Charlie-Colonel Maynard, who was the
district engineer in Little Rock-and me to almost swear that we would use the money if we got
it. He was willing to go for the money but had to use it properly. I had the upper half and
Maynard had the lower half of this project. His portion was a couple of years ahead in
construction. Charlie and I had been to War College together so we knew each other well and
we'd taken our jobs at the same time. He was an excellent partner on this major project.
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