John W. Morris
After I came to Washington in 1972, I visited many of our projects. The one that sticks in my
mind is Bonneville, where we had a beautiful visitors center right next to a-well, I should
back up a bit.
When I was in Tulsa, and also up in Omaha, I made sure we had good visitors centers, not as
a matter of us popping out our chests so much as getting the visitors organized so they didn't
get lost, injured, or do something dumb out of ignorance while they were on our property. So
each project had a visitors information center and included an exhibit to say a little about the
project and maybe about the Corps.
As a new director of Civil Works, I visited several projects including Bonneville, which is
adjacent to a very lovely Department of the Interior fish hatchery. As you enter the project
area you are greeted by an attractive sign that says,"You are now entering the Department of
the Interior fish hatchery. Visitors welcome," et cetera. At our visitors center I began to ask
visiting people, "Where are you They'd say, "Oh, we're at the Department of the Interior's
fish hatchery." I thought, "This isn't too good."
We weren't doing a good job. I quickly required every dam or other public use facility to have
a castle on it; also, that every project's visitors area include something about the history. Out
of that we came up with the visitors center program in which every project had a visitors
center, and a selected number of locations would contain regional visitors centers to tell the
regional story and the history of the Corps.
So that kind of outgoing, best-foot-forward type of promotion was a little bit self-serving.
There's no question about that. In fact, I got an article in Jack Anderson's column accusing
me of beating the drum, tub-thumping. I wrote him back and said, "You're right. I'm the
biggest tub-thumper they've got, and if I didn't do it, who would?" So he sent me an
autographed picture to his favorite "tub-thumper," which was kind of neat.
The point was that I felt we needed to get the Corps out telling its story. Also, the district
history program was moving along well, and just by accident, the Tulsa District's history was
published while I was director of Civil Works. I began to read these histories and encouraged
district histories be prepared.
As far as the Chiefs' and senior civilians' oral histories, like you're doing with me, is
concerned, my only concern there was that we didn't miss somebody like General W.K.
Wilson, who was senior-I wanted to make sure we got the older people in before it was too
late
Out of that, I developed a little book called Corps Vignettes, which may not have gotten much
attention, but to me it was very nice. With the help of the historical folks, we accumulated 20
or 30, maybe 40 little stories, as you've seen. We published those in a nice cover which I gave
to visitors. I must have given out hundreds of them. They made nice mementos, but the
important value was that as people read them, they learned a little something about the
Corps-the human side, not so much the technical stuff.
I think if you ask the people around, they will tell you that I was fairlyaggressive in my efforts
to improve the Corps' self-promotion.
Q..
Then the Historical Foundation?
A
Oh, that's another. I always felt that there should be an organization, somehow or another, to
do for the Corps what the Ordnance Association and what the Association of the United States
Army, and so forth, do for the Army and for the other branches. We didn't have anything like
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