John W. Morris
organizations. I always felt some engineer officer should be good enough to be on the exec
committee of
That's never happened to my knowledge. They make the Chief of
Engineers an honorary member, and I think that's so he can't have a voice on the exec
committee. They also make some other people honorary members. On the other hand, the
Corps has always been very well represented through our family of outstanding civilians.
We've had several who ended up as the president of USCOLD-Lloyd Duscha and Dick
Armstrong recently. I always felt that there was in the Corps of Engineers at least one officer
of some rank who was technically qualified to be nominated for and make it to the exec
committee, but it hasn't happened to date.
I became chairman of the Environmental Effects Committee of USCOLD and was responsible
for the environmental program at the ICOLD conference in San Francisco in 1986. The
previous International Committee on Large Dams' meeting in Europe was harassed greatly by
the environmental group, "the Greens,"they call them. We didn't want that to happen in San
Francisco, especially since there was an environmental group meeting at the same time at
Berkeley on the rain forest problem in South America. Several of us went to their meeting,
which included some interesting presentations. The author of Cadillac Desert was a principal.
Q ..
Mark Reissner?
A ..
Yes, Mark Reissner. I had not seen him since his book was published. While the book was
very critical of a lot of things and a lot of people, it was not critical of me personally. I wanted
to let him know I was present because I was interested in having some of those present at his
meeting attend a joint workshop at the ICOLD meetings.
The joint meeting at ICOLD was a little stormy, but still it was managed-and came off pretty
well. Unfortunately, shortly after the congress, I had to ask to be replaced as chairman of the
Environmental Effects Committee because of personal problems-well, not problems. Gerry
had a hip replacement, and I just didn't feel that I could doall the running around at the time,
so I asked Lloyd Timblin of the Bureau of Reclamation to take over. He has done a great job
since then.
Having been a past national president and having recommended and financed the annual
sustaining member award, the Society of American Military Engineers [SAME] still attracts
much of my time. It deserves it. I try to go to all the annual meetings. Both Gerry and I enjoy
seeing so many friends. I take some pride in the results of energizing the sustained
membership in 1976. SAME climbed from 250-300 sustaining members to about 3,000, and
that's really been the injection of talent, knowledge, and leadership that's made the SAME so
much more attractive to the young engineers, civilians as well as military.
I don't know how to say enough for Walt Bachus's leadership and good work. He changed
SAME from mostly a social outfit with a rented downtown office into an organization that's
quite active in the technical field and owns its own fully paid-for building in Alexandria.
SAME puts on a great annual meeting. I've been urging them to have annual meetings in
Washington so the sustaining members can get direct input from the Congress and the leaders
of the country. In return, our engineering talent needs to be seen and heard more. That goes
back to the idea of having better engineers in leadership positions. I think SAME can be a
factor. Having the annual meeting in Washington will cause improvement in that field.
Actually, the annual meeting should be in Washington-it's a national meeting-if not each
year, then every third or fourth year.
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