Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Q:
I don't think the North Central Division had maybe ever had much, if any, military
construction.
A:
Yes. When I was deputy district engineer as a captain in Chicago, we had military
construction.
Q:
Okay.
A:
We also had supply and procurement, a huge operation. That went to AMC.
Q:
We talked about some of the challenges of REARM and WrightPatterson. How about in the
tank area at Lima, Ohio, or in Detroit.
A:
Lima? We had some projects coming up there.
Q:
The Abrams tank was--
A:
Yes. It was in production.
Q:
Okay.
A:
At Lima, there was a .5 million expansion of the plant to add 330,000 square feet. There
were also projects for improvement of the existing plant in Detroit.
Q:
Organizationally, within the division office, the Military Construction Branch was in
Engineering with Carl Betterton the chief. That was a change, I guess, that resulted from
taking back the military construction responsibility.
A:
That branch was the one I set up in Engineering Division modeled after the the Missouri
River Division's approach. Once we did that, then we gave Jack Kiper's Construction
Division one or two more people to help out in construction management. That was about it,
I think, from the standpoint of division staffing increases.
Q:
How about military accounting? Maybe that was in finance and accounting.
A:
There might have been a requirement for four or five people. I don't remember. We had a
centralized finance and accounting, you see.
Q:
That was in the division?
A:
At the division level. We separated support when we talked about division. We would talk
about the 115 or so folks that were in the headquarters downtown in the division office. The
centralized support, like finance and accounting, would be accorded to the districts as if they
were districts. We would do the breakout of how we charged project support and put the
finance and accounting part on the districts, even though they were collocated at a site in
Cincinnati.
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