________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Campbell. So, evidently she liked me enough and she fixed me up with Cousin Ann when
she came over.
Q:
Where's your wife from originally?
A:
From Waukegan, Illinois.
Q:
Illinois?
A:
Paula Campbell was from Spring Valley and their mothers were sisters, spent a lot of time
together during their youth.
Q:
So, they had married student housing at the University of Illinois?
A:
No. We bought our first house. We thought it was grossly expensive at, I think it was ,000.
A car costs more than that now. In fact, we were so worried about the price that we got a
guaranteed buy-back so we could sell it back to the builder-developer when we left two years
later.
Q:
Wouldn't be stuck with that heavy financial burden?
A:
I wouldn't be stuck with that burden.
Q:
Any other things about that almost--well, a little over a year and a half that you were at civil
school?
A:
No, it was a nice change from the rigors of troops, but it was also very rigorous. At that time
we were accepted for full graduate work out of the Military Academy except for two courses
taken the first summer, two undergraduate courses. One of those was in concrete and the
other one, I believe, was in advanced calculus.
Other than that, we went straight into graduate work, and it was very rigorous and, in fact, I
really wasn't prepared for it. The military officers there, the engineer officers, knew how to
approach the task, but in fact our background at West Point at the time was not strong in civil
engineering, and that's what I was taking. So, most of our civil colleagues were well ahead of
us, some of them in industry architect/engineer firms, towns, communities, and were well
ahead of us at the start. However, by the end of the period we Army engineers were making
grades as good as or even beyond them, primarily because of our work habits and motivation
and ability to go in and do the homework to catch up. At the start it was very difficult.
Q:
You did a thesis?
A:
No. They no longer required a thesis.
Q:
Okay.
A:
I should say one other thing, and that was I dropped out of the physics minor while I was
there. That also was most difficult, and it was well beyond any preparation I had. The other
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